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The modest brick homes and landscaped lawns of Green Acres look like fine places to settle. Nestled within Bellefontaine Neighbors in north St. Louis County, the wooded subdivision is home to gays and straights, whites and blacks, executives and utility workers. Hardly seems the kind of neighborhood where police officers once paid almost daily visits.
The Bellefontaine Neighbors Police Department has spent the past three years refereeing a freakish feud between the neighbors at numbers four and five on Green Acres Road. The trouble began with a dispute over a driveway, then snowballed into a bizarre free-for-all involving everything from name-calling to stalking to cross-burning.
The fight continues. And it gets stranger by the day.
"They've been arrested, they've been fined, they've been talked to," sighs Mayor Marty Rudloff. "We've done everything we can within the legal realm of discipline. You do your best, but some problems just don't go away. It ends up that somebody moves, or files a lawsuit."
This week MacArthur Moten, a St. Louis attorney, will file a lawsuit in St. Louis County Circuit Court on behalf of Patricia McIntosh and her twelve-year-old daughter, Robyn. The suit charges the woman's next-door neighbors, Keith Dagenais and William Johnston, with assault and infliction of emotional distress. McIntosh is seeking $95,000 in damages.
The McIntoshes, who are black, claim that Dagenais and Johnston, both gay whites, erected and burned a six-foot-tall cross in their yard and hung a black doll with a noose around its neck in plain view of their home. The 42-year-old McIntosh and her attorney suggest that the cross and doll were used to cast an evil spell on Robyn, traumatizing the girl and causing an astonishing array of medical problems.
The extraordinary lawsuit -- seemingly drafted with the help of Roget's Thesaurus -- goes so far as to state that Robyn's "muscles, bones, cartilage, ligaments, tendons, tissues, nerves, blood vessels, membranes and all the parts and structures thereof were seriously bruised, contused, lacerated, cut, torn, swollen, aggravated, ruptured, mashed, wrenched, narrowed, compressed, subluxed
, abraded, dislocated, strained, sprained and rendered stiff, sore and painful."
So does McIntosh think the neighbors were practicing voodoo on her daughter?
"I'm not going to dispute that," she replies.
McIntosh says Robyn began acting oddly about two years ago. "She was afraid to go outside and play like a normal kid. She didn't want to sleep alone in her room anymore," McIntosh recalls.
She declined to address what medical care Robyn received but says several sessions with a psychiatrist and a year of academic tutoring have helped her daughter. "She still asks permission to go outside, and she's very watchful," McIntosh notes.
Robyn's problems aside, McIntosh alleges in the suit that Dagenais and Johnston "engaged in an intentional illegal campaign of terror" against her between July 2000 and July 2004 by placing a threatening note on her car, hurling racial slurs and threatening her with bodily harm.
"I find the petition preposterous," fumes James Dailey Wahl, the St. Louis attorney who represents Dagenais and Johnston. "I think the allegations and conclusions contained therein have no basis in fact."
http://riverfronttimes.com/Issues/2005-06-15/news/news_print.html
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