Foothills Area
Nov. 8, 11:36 a.m.
A three-year-long feud between two neighbors, whose exercise routines matched temporally but clashed logistically, came to a head after one of the men accused the other of vengefully covering his driveway with nails, according to a Pima County Sheriff's Department report.
Late one morning, a sheriff's deputy responded to their north-side neighborhood to meet with the younger neighbor, who'd called to report that someone had scattered scores of big nails across his driveway, where he parked his truck. The deputy indeed saw approximately 100 large, sharp, silver-colored roofing nails (which had thus far not harmed the reportee's truck).
The reportee declared he suspected one particular neighbor of throwing the nails on his property—an older guy with whom he'd had an altercation earlier that very morning, when the other man had threatened to spray him with mace.
To provide context, the reportee explained that he and this neighbor had actually been quarrelling for about three years, because he himself liked to drive to the gym every day around 6:30 a.m.—just when this other man also habitually got his daily exercise in the form of a morning walk around their neighborhood streets. The reportee said "apparently this individual does not like the way he drives," since as he would go by his pedestrian neighbor, the man would often "yell stuff" at him.
That morning, he said, when the other man had again yelled as he drove by in his truck, he finally decided to pull over and confront him, saying, "What's the deal?" This allegedly sparked an argument in which "the older man basically admitted to walking in the middle of the street ... but nothing was resolved," and the reportee drove away after the other man said he was going to pepper-spray him.
When the deputy interviewed the accused, the older man said yes, he did "have a problem" with the gym-going motorist because he "regularly speeds around the neighborhood" and has come very close to hitting him and some of the other people he walks with.
However, the older gentleman proclaimed, he knew nothing about the nails in his neighbor's driveway, and anyway, he'd been having coffee with another neighbor that morning after the confrontation in the street. (Presumably this was his way of establishing an alibi, since the nails would've had to have been planted sometime around then.) He neither confirmed nor denied threatening his foe with pepper-spray.
The deputy told both parties they each had a right to use the road, whether for exercising or for driving somewhere else to exercise. But from now on, he told the gym-going neighbor, he must drive very slowly when passing any pedestrians; meanwhile, the pedestrian neighbor must stay away from the other man's residence. In fact, the deputy said, both men should stay away from one another, period. They agreed.
