The tree company told me the woman had walked the property with them in February and pointed directly at the oak before they ever measured anything. I couldn’t understand why a neighbor would have authority to tell a contractor to remove a tree from my property, so I went to the county recorder and asked for every document affecting that corner of my lot. There was our original deed, the subdivision plat, and an easement from 1998 that had nothing to do with the oak. Then there was a document recorded in January that I’d never seen before. It described a narrow strip of land running directly beneath the tree and transferred it to the neighboring property.
I asked the clerk who had filed it, and she said it had been submitted electronically by an attorney I’d never heard of. The grantor was my husband, and the document said he had signed it in person. My husband died in 2017. I showed the clerk his death certificate, and she immediately called her supervisor. They pulled the recording history and found that the document had been rejected once because the notarization was incomplete, then resubmitted two days later with a different notarial page attached.
My lawyer requested the notary journal for both versions. There was no appointment, no identification number, and no signature from my husband anywhere in the entry. There was, however, a witness listed beside his name, and that witness was the same woman who had walked the property with the tree company. Then my lawyer found the HOA emails discussing the oak months before it was removed. One email said they needed the strip transferred first because the tree could not legally be touched while it remained on my property.
I thought that was the worst part until we found the payment records. The woman had paid the attorney who prepared the deed, and the money came from an account belonging to the HOA’s landscaping contractor. The contractor’s work order called the tree removal “common-area maintenance,” even though every survey showed the oak was on my lot. And under the authorization line was the woman’s name, followed by three words that made me realize this had been planned from the beginning: “Board approved removal.”
