Florida Man Jailed For Neglecting His Front Lawn

Sometimes the neighbors that we end up stuck with can be the biggest problems that we face in life and civic associations can be funny things. Here is a case in point. Recently in Florida a retiree named Joseph Prudente had to spend a night in jail for failing to maintain the front lawn of a house he has been living in for ten years.
In 1998 Prudente retired and moved to florida after buying a home there. Everything has been going well until the recent economic downturn began to effect his family. His step daughter had to move into his house along with her husband and her two kids. Prudente's retirement income has been stretched to the limit while he tries to help feed and clothed his family and so he has been forced to neglect matters such as the front lawn due to a lack of money. A neighborhood watchdog group called The beacon woods civic association which runs around worrying about these kinds of things began to notice that Prudente's front lawn just was not being maintained according to a standard that is set out in a neighborhhod rule book about the maintanance of lawns and property. They sent him a warning letter telling him to resolve the issue or they would take action. Prudente, who did not have the money to resolve the issue ended up having to ignore the lawn and instead opted to use his limited funds to buy things like food for his family and to pay his mortgage. The Civic association once they saw no action being taken on the lawn decided to take him to court. The judge in the case did not want to hear about any of Prudente's problems and ordered him to fix his lawn within 30 days or face the possibility of going to jail. After 30 days Prudente still did not have the money to fix his lawn so he turned himself in and had to spend 1 night in jail.
The matter got resolved by a kind neighbor who came to Prudente's rescue the following day, Andy Law. Mr. Law organized some helpers from the neighborhood and gathered up some supplies and they went to work fixing up Prudente's front lawn. The civic association dropped its complaint against Mr. Prudente the next day and he was released from jail after the lawn had been taken care of to the associations satisfaction.