A woman in Florida was jailed after letting the grass in front of her home go brown during the hot weather, violating her homeowners association’s guidelines.
Irena Green was arrested and spent a week in jail after a battle with her homeowner’s association in Hillsborough County over browning grass in front of her home.
‘I think they have way too much power,’ Green told ABC News. ‘I’ve never heard of anything like this in my life.’
Green said her grass is often not green due to a large tree that’s planted near her sidewalk, as well as mandatory watering restrictions that were put in place last year following a drought.
She claimed, however, that her lawn was not the worst-looking in the Riverview Creek View subdivision.
‘If you drive around my neighbourhood, you’ll see there’s plenty of yards not up to par,’ she added.
The Trowbridge Company Inc., the HOA management company, began notifying her of the violations, which spanned a range of issues including her browning lawn and a dirty mailbox, Green said.
‘The grass had started turning brown. So they started sending notes, and it went from the grass being brown to there’s a dent in my garage.’
Green was also notified of violations, including owning a commercial cargo van, which is not the only in her neighbourhood, ABC reported.
However, as she failed to comply with the guidelines and reply to a request for mediation, the HOA filed a lawsuit against her, alleging that she violated community appearance rules.
Yet as she endeavoured to represent herself in court, she was told last July by the judge that she had around a month to fix the violations.
‘My grass had to be brought up to par. He said you can get seed, you can do something, but you’ve got 30 days to get it corrected. So I said fine. He said, If it’s not done in 30 days, you’re gonna go to jail,’ Green told the outlet.
Green said she did what she could to comply, even selling her van and cleaning her mailbox.
She purchased seed and watered her grass, but missed her next court date and declared she hadn’t been told to appear at the hearing last August.
‘I was supposed to receive documentation. Nothing was sent to my home,’ Green said.
‘And I reached out to the courthouse several times to try to find out when my court date was.’
However, a warrant for her arrest was issued when the judge declared her in contempt of court.
On May 23, as she drove home with her daughter, she was pulled over and requested to step out of her vehicle.
‘He asked me can I get out. When I got out, he said, “Ms. Green, did you know that you have a warrant for your arrest?”‘ Green said.
She was arrested and booked into the Orient Road Jail, according to ABC News.
However, she was put into custody without bond.
‘So I couldn’t even go home to my family. I sat in there for seven days. Seven days in the jailhouse like a criminal,’ she added.
Green described the procedure of being booked into the jail as ‘horrible.’
‘I work hard to buy this home for me and my kids in a better neighbourhood and environment, and to be taken to jail and to be treated like that for brown grass at my own home… that’s horrible,’ she said.
She even described being kept in jail with other detainees who queried why she was being held in custody.
‘One girl, she kind of came over and asked me like “Hey, what are you in here for?” And I told her it was like for my grass,’ Green said.
‘And she’s like ‘Oh, grass, they should make that stuff legal’. She’s thinking that I’m talking about weed, and I’m talking about my front yard grass.’
Green’s sister, a paralegal, filed a petition six days after she was booked into jail, which requested an emergency hearing.
‘I went to court, and I had to be shackled from my hands to my feet,’ Green said as she recalled being the only person in county civil court wearing a jail uniform.
In court, the HOA’s attorney even opposed her release, Green said: ‘He says, ‘Well, it hasn’t been re-seeded. The whole yard needs to be re-seeded.” And she’s like not from those pictures I see. She’s like “No. I want her released immediately.”
‘He wanted me to continue to sit in jail and not come home to my family,’ she added.
In a statement to the outlet, the Creek View HOA Board of Directors said: ‘Ms. Green received notices of violations. She disregarded them. Legal action was filed by the Association after she failed to accept the offer to mediate the matter, pre-suit, as is required before a lawsuit can be filed…’
‘After suit was filed and final judgment was entered against her, Ms. Green showed up for the court hearing on July 11, 2024… At the July 11 hearing, with Ms. Green present, another court date was set by the judge for August 19, 2024.
‘She was instructed to comply with the requirements of the final judgment by August 19 and to report to the judge what was accomplished on August 19. Ms. Green failed to show up in court on August 19.
‘Her failure to abide by the Court’s instruction led to the arrest warrant being issued…These steps were taken by the Court due to Ms. Green’s failure to comply with the Court’s instructions.’
While Green was released the next day following her hearing, she said: ‘I definitely wish I would have hired a lawyer.’
How on earth can someone be jailed for ‘brown lawn’, but they can, particularly if you live in a gated community, and of course, this is not the land of the free!
Murder your grass and you get time in jail – murder a human being and you get out on bond – what a complete farce.
And how will her being locked up in jail help the grass turn green? America appears to have some very out-of-date laws.
This had nothing to do with her ‘brown lawn’; this was more to do with her ‘brown skin’.
However, the simple answer is, don’t buy into anything that is governed by a pack of retired meddlers with nothing better to do than interfere in people’s lives.
These people are elected by the community and live in the community, and they employ a management company to enforce the rules.
There’s a ton of money to be made from the justice system in America, particularly when people are jailed for no reason at all, and the prison system in the US is a billion-dollar enterprise. The more they get, the more they make.
This woman should not have been in jail, but it’s kind of ironic that her surname is ‘Green.’
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