When Even Court Can’t Restrain a Neighbor

How do you get along with your neighbors? And what can you do about it if the answer is “terrible”?

What if you lived where you felt it necessary to file a restraining order against the fellow down the street, because you didn’t think he was, well, very neighborly?

Lots of neighbors have problems, but few go to court over it--and then on ahead to their city council. That’s what happened in Placentia last week. A group of neighbors on a street just east of the 57 Freeway showed up at the Placentia City Council meeting to seek protection from a single neighbor. They had already been to court and received restraining orders, but told the council that hadn’t solved the problem.

Their complaints: windows broken with rocks, harassing phone calls in the middle of the night, damage to their cars and threats of violence. They say it has gone on daily for at least a year. And they all blame a sole neighbor.

“We’re being held hostage in our own neighborhood,” said Billy Zavala, who has lived on that street for 28 years.

No one has been hurt yet. But one of the neighbors who obtained a restraining order, Marcelino Guerrero, fears it’s just a matter of time.

“We really can’t take it much longer,” he said.

I can picture some city council meetings where the governing body would listen politely, but then say, “There’s nothing we can do about it.” But that didn’t happen in Placentia. These complaining neighbors found a very receptive audience. And here’s why:

Placentia Mayor Norman Z. Eckenrode has the same complaint against the same person. The mayor claims this individual has been harassing him and his family for years, with violent threats and middle-of-the-night telephone calls. The harassment dates back to the early 1980s, the mayor said, when he first entered local politics. In years past, he had filed his own restraining order against this individual.

“He’s the town bully, and something has got to be done about him,” the mayor told me later.

Now something is being done. The mayor said he’s not at liberty to provide details, but Police Chief Daryll Thomann has begun an intense investigation.

I’ve tried repeatedly to get the individual they have targeted to talk with me, but so far he hasn’t answered my knocks on his door. And nobody from his family will return my phone calls.

I bring all this to your attention as a reminder that it’s not always futile if you want to do something about a neighbor you believe is a serious problem.

In fact, neighbor-versus-neighbor problems are quite common in Superior Court’s Family Law Division, said Commissioner Gale P. Hickman. (Family Law seems an ironic place to put these kinds of battles, but they don’t seem to fit naturally with any of the other courtroom divisions.)

Not long ago Hickman had a case in which neighbors got upset about one man’s chickens coming into their yards.

“He knew it bothered them, so he just let the chickens run wild,” the commissioner said. But other cases, he said, involve more violent neighbors.

If you want to go after a neighbor legally, here’s the procedure: Take your complaint to the Family Law clerk’s office on the seventh floor of the Betty Lou Lamoreaux Center at 341 The City Drive in Orange. You will then be assigned to a judge or commissioner, who might then issue a temporary restraining order and set a hearing date.

The restraining order is only good for two weeks, so it’s wise to then show up at the hearing, Hickman said. If the court concurs with your complaint, you can get a permanent restraining order that’s good for three years.

The biggest problems occur when a person violates a restraining order. The penalty for that can be as high as five days in jail for each violation. But Hickman said those can sometimes be difficult to enforce, because you have to show that the defendant was properly served in the first place.

“If you want to have someone found in contempt for not following a restraining order, at that point you really should get a lawyer,” Hickman advised.

Hickman says the original restraining order usually solves the dispute: “It sobers most people up that they’ve been acting like jerks. But in urban living, a few go on being jerks anyway.”

I was surprised by some of the neighborhood cases that actually made it to court. One judge who asked that her name not be used said she’s handled cases in which a teen’s basketball playing bothered a mother’s sleeping child, or one neighbor’s kumquats kept falling from a tree into another neighbor’s backyard.

I suggested it seems silly to take up public courtrooms with some of these minor disputes. But the judge made an interesting observation:

“We don’t want to discourage people from solving their differences in court. As long as there is a forum available to them, they are less likely to solve their problems with their fists. And that’s what we’re trying to avoid.”

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Jerry Hicks’ column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. Readers may reach Hicks by calling the Times Orange County Edition at (714) 966-7823 or by fax to (714) 966-7711, or e-mail to jerry.hicks@latimes.com.