My daughter called the board again and asked who had authorized the inspections, and this time she didn’t accept “the inspector acted within policy” as an answer. She asked for the work order, the date it was issued, and the name of the person who requested it. They sent her a copy that afternoon. The order was for exterior maintenance violations, but there was no mention of anything inside the house. My daughter read it twice and then asked me if anyone from the board had ever been inside my sunroom. I said no. She asked if anyone had ever asked me for permission to photograph the windows. I said no. Then she showed me the order. Someone had handwritten “include interior visibility from common area” across the bottom, and beside it was a set of initials. They belonged to the board president.
She went back to the inspector and asked him why he had taken pictures through my windows when the order only mentioned exterior violations. He said he’d been told that anything visible from a common area could be documented, and that he hadn’t thought anything of it because he’d been doing inspections in the neighborhood for years. My daughter asked who had given him that instruction. He hesitated and said it was the same person who gave him most of his inspection assignments. She asked him to say the name. He did. It was the board president’s husband. The same man who had carried my husband’s casket. The same man who had cut my grass twice after the funeral without being asked. My daughter asked whether he had ever told him to photograph the inside of my house specifically. He said he couldn’t remember. Then she asked him to check his phone records because every inspection assignment was sent by text.
The inspector found the messages and sent them to her. There were four from the previous year, all sent early in the morning before he’d come to my property. Three were ordinary instructions about grass and fencing. The fourth was different. It said to “get the sunroom shots again” and to make sure the photographs showed the living room clearly. My daughter called me from her car and asked whether there was anything in that room that belonged to my husband. I said there were boxes I’d never opened since he died. She told me not to touch them. Then she went through the board’s complaint history and found that the four “interior storage” violations had all been filed on days when the inspector had been at my house for less than ten minutes. And the timestamps on the photographs showed he had taken the pictures at exactly the same time someone else had been standing inside my backyard.
