In 2010, we returned home to care for ailing family members, the years that followed were unequivocally the hardest in our lives. We watched as our family slowly shrank in numbers before our eyes. It didn’t take long until there was only one left and the place our family had called home for sixty years.

Then in 2016, the same neighbor who had emptied all of our wells in the early 2000s, managed to railroad plans for a sixty acre solar power plant through approval near our family’s farm. We did our research, learned all we could, and chose to oppose the construction. Our opposition was vocal and highly contested, but proponents of the project and county officials handled our opposition in another way.

Rather than address the topic at hand, they choose to come after our family and home. At first it was mild acts of harassment, then it evolved into stalking, vandalization, and defamation. Then, when our neighbor disappeared and we discovered the property he owned across the street was up for sale, we suspected something was coming. What began was a systematic and coordinated county backed destruction of the neighborhood through illegal property development and destructive construction practices. Federal protective laws were disregarded, complaints ignored, and legal loopholes exploited.

It was planned in advance with the aid of an attorney, it was an abuse of governmental power performed out of malicious spite, and it destroyed what little of our family we had left. It is Anathema.

These are the people.