He stood in his driveway and called out, nice day for a swim, huh. So I did not say a word to him. I held up my phone, showed him the log, and told him a sheriffs detective had the whole thing and was coming to our house that afternoon to take my daughters statement.
Because I have spent my whole career as a paralegal, so I did what I know how to do. I logged every flight, date, time, how long it hovered, which direction it came from. I have videos of it sitting over my daughter for four minutes at a time. And I looked up the county and state laws about drone surveillance over private property. Forty-one flights since June third.
For a summer the only thing I had lacked was the record laid out the way a court reads it, and the moment I had forty-one dated flights and video of a drone hovering over a girl in her own pool, the paranoid neighbor became a documented surveillance case a detective had to open.
His wife had posted that we were harassing a small business owner and threatening to shoot down a drone, which nobody ever said. But a four-minute video of a drone parked over a sixteen-year-old is not paranoia, and a hover log is not a threat.
I did not argue. I said, a sheriffs detective has forty-one flights logged and the videos of your drone hovering over my daughter in our fenced yard, and he is taking her statement this afternoon. There are county and state laws about surveillance over private property and about filming into a pool. You can call it aerial photography, but the sheriff is going to read the log now.
The log was the log. There is no real-estate-side-hustle-ing your way out of forty-one flights and video of a drone fixed over a child for minutes at a time.
The sheriff did what my husbands one question never could. The detective found the flights violated the surveillance and privacy laws, and the man was ordered to stop flying over our property, with a warning that the next flight meant charges.
The drone stopped coming. And the thing that mattered most: my daughter swims in her own backyard again. She had not gotten in that pool since July, and this month she finally did.
He can fly his drone over his own listings; he just cannot park it over a teenage girl in her own yard. A summer of that ended not with anyone shooting anything down, but with forty-one dated flights and a hover log, and it turned out the paranoid neighbors were just parents who wanted their daughter to feel safe swimming at home.