I can see one case where a fortified mailbox can be bad is if someone has an accident and has to decide what to hit in a split second and pick the least valuable and dangerous object to hit. Picking a mailbox over a person or another car or something is logical.
@@Minderz at the same time what if that was a person? If you cant drive safely with the regular hazards you shouldnt even be on the road. Differant state but in CA if conditions are to dangerouse for set speed limit you are speeding. This could be rain after a dry spell or when the roads are icy.
They will sue for your tree being too strong, the wall of your home being too sturdy, and probably in the victim in an accident for paint damage and denting jk
A few years back, there was a story on my social media about a guy whose mailbox was constantly being hit by the neighborhood plow service. He made a lot of complaints, but it only seemed like complaining pissed them off, because he was noticing that the mailbox was being hit MORE frequently, not less. So he fortified it in a similar way to this story, basically turning it into a steel box mounted on a rebar-reinforced concrete post. He then called the plow company and warned them not to hit his mailbox again. Apparently, not long after, he was woken up in the middle of the night by the sound of a collision and screeching metal. The plow truck was practically wrapped around the mailbox, which appeared to be basically unscathed. In the post, the guy mentioned that the tracks looked like the plow truck deliberately went out of their way to hit the mailbox, completely ruining the plow and totalling the vehicle. I don't remember if the company tried to sue or if the driver was injured or what, but the guy who posted the story just seemed pleased that he wouldn't have to keep replacing his mailbox.
I was a mail carrier on a rural route. One man's mailbox got smashed by kids driving by with a baseball bat. He replaced the box, soon the same thing happened. He welded up a box from 3/8" steel plate, installed it. It got hit the same way. I heard through the grapevine that a kid had a broken wrist, elbow and permanent nerve damage from "falling down".
Very similar situation on my end. Kids kept hitting our mailbox when I was a kid, so dad fortified it and the kid broke their arm. Also in a rural place... I wonder if it's the same lol
The fact that you can get sued for someone else's stupidity and/or mistake is the dumbest concept in this country. Someone tried to sue me once because their brat hopped my fence and fell in my under construction pool and broke their leg. Thank god I had a security camera back there that showed that the kid clearly entered my yard illegally and I had a padlock on my gate leading to the front of the house which gave me an expectation of privacy which the kid violated. The fact I had to jump through hoops to prove that my backyard is my private property and no one should have been back there other than myself or the guys building the pool just shows how stupid this sue happy country is
happens all the time against my fellow truckers and more times then not they are found guilty not of anything they did immediately but because they had a fancy lawyer and all they do is target truckers they win a verdict regardless theres a current case with a Werner driver trucker did everything right. Conditions were some what bad the trucker didn't leave his lane but guy on opposite lane came across lost control hitting the werner truck driver and they the lawyers found him at fault for driving on unsafe conditions but hey he never left his lane but those same conditions seem not apply to the 4 wheeler gotta love the double standard. currently, Werner trying take to the supreme court sadly it appears a losing battle these truck lawyers are no better then ambulance chasers.
The way things are going I'm surprised the driver DIDN'T win the suit. With so many instances of criminals suing the place/persons they robbed/property destroyed I would definitely have thought the court would've ruled against the property owner.
@@dsandoval9396 Yeah I heard about a time that a robber was on the roof of a house he was trying to break into, he fell threw the roof and got hurt and sued the owner and won....🤔how is this even possible...
@@turboimport95 oh yeah, I heard about that too! 🤦♂️ I don't remember the details but I remember something about that now that you mentioned "robber falling through the roof and sueing the owners". Unfortunately (and sadly) that's just the state of the world we live in. And I live in CA so imagine the asinine crap I have to put up with. First chance I get I'm moving somewhere with less people and laws that don't just ensure my right to be a victim.
This reminds me of when somebody built a giant snowman around a 10' tree stump in the middle of their yard and some ass thought it would be funny to drive through the snowman to obliterate it. Stay on the road, people.
I know of two similar stories: 1) Halloween someone was frustrated people kept intentionally running over his large pumpkin. Found the biggest they could, filled it with concrete resulting it a totaled truck. 2) Winter someone kept running over their snowman. They built a new snowman in another place around a tree stump. Another totaled truck.
As a kid i knew a lady who told of when she was a kid , that kids would go out on holloween and tip over out houses (this was before bathrooms were inside the homes). One neighbor always had his outhouse tipped over so one holloween the home owner went out just at dusk and moved the outhouse over a few feet. Several kids fell into the hole where the outhouse had been sitting. Seems his outhouse was not turned over again.
Stuff like this makes me glad there are drainage ditches all over my neighborhood, including surrounding my house, starting 3 feet away from my mailbox, so it would be really hard to hit it and not end up in the ditch.
Back in the 70' there was crew in my area that was knocking off mail boxes by driving by holding a tire iron out the window. A guy I know who owned a gravel pit had lost his box multiple times, rebuilt his box by sinking a "H" beam and then bending some 8 gauge steal from old hopper he had at his gravel pit. A few weeks later the vandalism crew was making their rounds and when the kid in the front seat holding the tire iron hit the box, instead of knocking the box off, it ripped the tire iron out of his hand, went through the open rear passenger window and hit the kid sitting behind him in the face. He was hurt really bad. ICU for several days. Weeks in the hospital. They tried to sue the guy who beefed up his box, but it went nowhere.
In Guilford CT they had snow plow drivers playing a game of who can plow the closest to the mail boxes. They destroyed thousands 0f mail boxes. One guy sick of replacing his mailbox 5 to 6 times every winter. Fortified his mailbox that he moved back 10 ft onto his property. When a plow hit it? It broke the clamps holding the plow on the truck. They needed a payloads to load the plow on the truck. They sent him a 15000 dollar bill. He refused. The town maintenance manager came with the police threatening to arrest him if he didn't pay. He introduced the post master of CT to them. The post master laid down his paperwork and said we don't know which drivers hit the 750 mailboxes this year. But we know this driver hit this one. And if you arrest this man because your man hit his box? We're going to hit you man with 750 counts of destruction of federal property plus 350 dollar fine times 750. The town rolled up their papers . and he never heard from them again.
YES! Destroying a mailbox is a Federal crime. When you buy it in the store it is YOUR property and falls under State jurisdiction if someone damages or steals it. Once you install it it to be used becomes Federal property.
I think some people just forget that there are certain core, basic things in our society that you don't want to mess with, because certain things have a lot more legal protection for consumers than they would now, and I think it's in part because the laws were created long ago, back when society was different and more accountable. Is that cynical? Is it accurate? Whatever. It's my feeling. Haha
There ARE usually laws against "booby trapping" because of the danger it poses to first responders. It would be very difficult to convince a judge that a sturdy mailbox counts as a booby trap.
@@charliehedrick6414 it is less about deserving and more about the law. I agree that those people have what it is coming to them but the law doesn't and that is what I am pointing out.
Back In the 70’s & 80’s, I worked sales for a pre-cast concrete company that made large steel reinforced planters. Our best customer was a local city that used them to replace wooden planters they had used for many years. The first sale was quite large age we sold 2-3 replacements every year for ones hit by cars. They liked the concrete one because, even though they didn’t survive any better than the wooden ones, the cars weren’t able to just drive away and the replacement was on their insurance and not the taxpayers.
The best fortification I've ever seen was a regular mailbox surrounded by steel pipes that would cause the vehicle to be trapped. We had a problem with a local kid who had a big 4X4 and would routinely hit mailboxes with his oversized bumpers. Nobody would ever witness the crime until one neighbor buried 4 inch steel pipes to a height that the bumper would clear, but the differential would get hung on. It only happened one more time and that kid stranded his big 4X4 on top of those steel pipes. The kid was subsequently charged with property destruction and reckless driving.
Very little recognition is given to the fact that many drivers try to maintain their habitual rate of speed (e.g.70 mph) on icy and snowy roads. Hence, their expected injuries if they crash are greater than if they had left their sense of urgency behind and left their house 15-30 minutes earlier to compensate for the worst spots of snow and ice.
Well, the difference here is that the mailbox was in the public right of way. A house isn't. I can't see any reasonable difference in that if it were a tree instead of a mailbox. Or a boulder, for that matter. If the driver hadn't been driving above the safe speed, the black ice wouldn't have effected his travel so much. I live in an area that, during the Winter, has black ice everywhere. There are many turns on the roads that are perpetually in shadow. Black ice loves to form there, and being that we are near the ski resorts and the California border, we have drivers through here that have never driven in black ice conditions before. They're scattered all over the road and in ditches regularly, because their habit is to go as fast as (usually) safely possible - but in good driving conditions. Better it happen here in the valley than up on the mountain roads, where a mistake like that can easily lead to a 200 foot fall off a sheer cliff where your car (and corpse) may not be found until Spring.
@@jamesrandolph1045 My brother's house in on the corner at a intersection. He had a shorter concrete block fence installed so it curves and faces the road. He had the regular rebar put in but he also had concrete poured in the empty concrete space to keep cars from ever crashing through his wall and into his house. The majority of people will be okay. It's those exceptions: Someone driving recklessly or a drunk driver coming driving by. Cars can really do a crazy amount of damage to a house.
My parents had a restaurant and a customer came in regularly. He did not have a job so made a living by slamming on his brakes in his car and being hit from behind and winning money in the lawsuit. My mother told him he was going to slam on his brakes one day at the wrong time. A few months later he slammed on his brakes and turned out the vehicle behind him was an 18 wheeler. It ran completely over his car and the car was left being approx 18 inches high, and the driver of the car was killed instantly.
A while back a farmer in my home county kept getting his mailbox taken out. He figured it was on purpose because he had a kid in high school that was picked on. He had enough and dug a deep hole and placed a steel pipe in the hole and cemented it in. He then welded his new home made all steel mailbox to the pipe. A while later he heard a loud crash in the middle of the night and went down his drive with his flashlight and saw a pickup truck wrapped neatly around his pipe, but his mailbox was still standing. In the truck were three teenage boys from his kids class messed up and bleeding. He did not get charged and those boys learned a valuable lesson.
Next door neighbor (happened to be my uncle) kept getting his mailbox clobbered by county snowplows. Sometimes as often as half a dozen times per winter. County claimed it was his problem, and refused to replace them after about the third one. The years go by, and after about 5, he was sick and tired of replacing his mailbox due to lazy plow drivers. His cure was to sink a chunk of 12 inch I-beam six feet deep, leaving 2 feet sticking up. Then he put a 55 gallon drum, with enough of a cutout in the bottom to fit, over the I-beam. Sunk the drum about a foot, then filled it with sand. Into the sand he sunk a 6 inch thick fencepost, then mounted his mailbox on it. Sprayed the whole thing hunter-orange, used a hose to make sure the sand was good and soaked, and waited for winter. Time passed, winter came, the wet sand froze into a solid block around the I-beam. Probably couldn't have moved it with a bulldozer. End of January rolls around, and a jeezer of a snowstorm hit. Plows rolled. Nothing the first pass. Nothing the second pass. Nothing the third pass. At a little after 3AM the next morning, I (and everybody else in the family) awakened to a god-awful noise, and the house shaking. We got to looking around, and there's a County Road Commission snow plow laying on its side in our front yard, with a mangled Vee-plow semi-sorta-kinda attached, and most of the front-end just barely attached to the rest of the truck, and a dumptruck load of salt/sand mix spread from here to next week along a trail of debris and gouged ground. As near as anybody could reconstruct the scene, the plow driver lifted the plow to cross the railroad tracks, dropped it again once across, and punched the go-pedal. Somewhere in the 500 or so feet between the railroad tracks and the mailbox, he picked up a good bit of speed, oozed a bit too far right, and clipped the (quite thoroughly frozen) mailbox at what the state police investigators said had to be at least 40MPH (road was pegged for 35), mostly ripping the plow and front of the truck off the chassis, spun the truck end-for-end at least three times based on the tracks, rolled it, flipped down the embankment into the ditch in front of our house, flipped again once it got to the bottom of the 10-ish foot embankment, and came to rest about 15 feet from our front door - about 100, maybe 125 feet from the mailbox. Road commission TRIED to pin something on my uncle, but failed miserably, since to hit the mailbox (even with the Vee-plow on the front) the truck had to be nearly 6 feet off the pavement, practically driving in the ditch. Driver of the plow was dazed and confused, but otherwise undamaged, but the truck was a total write-off. The mailbox? The 55 gallon drum was partly torn off the frozen block of sand, but the ice/sand block was still standing, and the mailbox itself was completely untouched and usable 'til spring, when it was rebuilt. Oddly enough, it never got hit again in the 15 or so years I lived in that house before striking out on my own.
That is the most awesome mailbox story I have ever heard! I drove truck in Minnesota 42 years and our farmers "fortify " their mailboxes also. Never got hit again,legendary!
In truth, those who deliberately vandalise private mailboxes, are the 'cause' of the fortified mailbox - The injured driver should take out a suit, not against the homeowner but all convicted of deliberate mailbox destruction - without them, that mailbox would never have been neither needed nor built...
In an unincorporated area just west of New Orleans, a guy's house kept on getting impacted by vehicles because kids liked to speed around a corner and, as kids, they got sloppy with their driving (not to mention occasional alcohol involvement). Drivers kept on hitting his house. He put up some yellow & black warning signs on steel posts similar to the ones used to hold up street signs. They got knocked over three times and his porch kept on getting crunched. So finally he put up new warning signs mounted on steel railroad rails anchored in concrete about six feet deep. The next such incident involved a car that actually bent the rails a little. The porch was intact but the car was totaled. The driver lived, sued for damages, and lost. PLUS was fined for failure to maintain control of a vehicle.
There is an argument that could be made with things that was it placed there with a purpose and could it have been done so it would minimize potential danger. Also there's a question that can be asked about parked vehicles relating to this. I can understand how people in different places of the world argue through these things and end up with different conclusions. Also apologies for bad English.
So we live out on a country road, but decided to get a P.O. Box since the mailbox was always targeted for vandalism/theft. Our mailbox was the first of five on a single post, with a long T-Bar on the top. Our neighbor's boxes also got bashed down with a bat, and we got a witness who said the culprits were five teens in a car. They drove down slowly, smashing them in horizontal swings. So we filled our box with cement, and left it there to shield the others. Two months later, a car crashes nearby. Three teens and two bats in the car. A week later, they sue us: Claiming that they lost control of the vehicle when attempting to smash our box, as the person who'd swung the bat had *hit a solid concrete block with a filled metal bat*. Shattered his own arm, and screams made his driver crash. The court threw it out, forced them to pay for our damaged fence, forced them to apologize to *everyone on the street*, and to pay for *everyone's box* that they had ever hit, to get a brand new one. But for almost two weeks, it looked like we would have to buy them a new car, and pay almost 25k in medical bills.
This is why you stop @ kicking over trash cans on your bicycle! Also, if you make a routine out of messing with people, people will mess with you back. I like making slow drivers in the fast lane pay, everyone is welcome! I got 2 today, one was a guy towing a generator which took 10 miles to realize I was doing to him what he was doing to everyone else!
@@editedforprivacy207 that is misdemeanor at best, yes those boys were out being jackass kids but sending kids to an American prison where they will either be traumatized or made into hardened criminals and ruining their lives with a felony they will carry till the day they die over a mailbox is utterly asinine 🤦
A local farmer got tired of his barn getting hit on a corner. He put jersey barriers around the barn. They been hit a dozen times and sued each time. Court tossed every case for same reasons in this video.
I'm a mail carrier from Michigan and what always surprises me is the creativeness of people who are tired of their mailboxes getting constantly taken out.
I'm pretty sure there's a business venture to be had there - every mailbox you see gets smashed, you tell a friendly handyman to go fix itin a way it wong get smashed again and you get a cut.
@@rafezetter8003 Large diameter steel pipe or box and a smaller diameter steel pipe for the pole welded to the bottom. You can put a nice redwood door and awning on that paint if and make it look pretty. But underneath it's all steel. Make sure to put reflectors on it.
Did you see that video of a porch pirate trying to steal a package rigged with a flashbang? The house owner was a former Marine who told him, to put it politely, that he's a weak man and to get a job.
Lawyers represent clients, yes they choose who they represent but the fact that this case went to the state Supreme Court and 2 judges dissented and thought is should be decided by a jury means that this lawyer was NOT “Frivolous” his client actually had a chance of winning this case. Think before you type. To avoid looking like a fool.
@TBirum1 just because two judges dissented doesn't mean I'm the fool for thinking it's idiotic for someone to sue a property owner because the first individual left the roadway and damaged the second individual's property. Maybe you should think before speaking and showing yourself to be the fool.
There are 8" pipes filled with concrete in almost every commercial parking lot to keep motorists from striking buildings, cart corrals, electric and gas meters, ect.
Yup they’re called bollards. Here in NYC they are very common. Many busy intersections have bollards to protect pedestrians in case of a runaway vehicle accidentally or otherwise. They also line the perimeter of many federal buildings, courts, and even banks.
My father lived on a corner lot and had his fence taken out regularly by a$$h@les driving too fast around the corner and not able to keep their cars on the road even though the fence line was a good 3 feet off of the right of way. He got tired of constantly repairing the fence and was worried that one day one the cars would go flying through his house so he installed 3 concrete filled bollards to protect his house and fence. People still ran off the road but the bollards protected his house and fence. Several times I was at his house and heard cars squeal around the corner followed by a clang as they hit the bollards. This worked until one night we heard an idiot revving his engine hard down the road and launched with his wheels squealing. I don't know how he thought he was going to make the curve but he managed to hit all 3 bollards pushing the first one about 30% off center and slightly tilting a second one before the rear end of his car spun around hit the last bollard that finally stopped him. I sure his car would slammed into the house if not for the bollards. The ground around his car was littered with beer cans and whisky bottles from his car but when the police showed up instead of citing the driver they said the bollards created an unreasonable road hazard. The jerk tried to sue my father when his insurance refused to pay for his car but the judge dismissed the case saying it had no merit. However the town forced my father to not only remove the bollards but also his fence as road hazards even though they had approved the building permits for them. My father sold the house and moved but a few years later we drove by his old house. The town had installed speed bumps on both sides of the corner and the new owner had reinstalled the fence and bollards!
Due care in parking lots means that drivers should not exceed 20 kph /12 mph due to mixed and unpredictable traffic, unlike rural roads where the speed limit is likely to be 4 times higher. Not the same situation.
@@ZeusBike333 Where I am a dumb teenager decided it was a great idea to 60 mph down a house lined city street. He hit a speed bump, went airborne and smashed the car into a brick fence. He and his friend had minor injuries but his little sister in the back was killed.
Had a similar situation teenagers kept vandalizing my mailbox with baseball Bat So I reinforced it with Flat steel rods Not even a few days later down the road a kid had his arm broken High school kid Part of the baseball team coincidences They tried to hold me liable because he broke his arm trying to break my mailbox They called the police and everything And results the family got Fined for Vandalism a kid had to deal with his broken arm
We tried that at our house. Than a snowplow hit it and bent it backwards and it was a bitch to fix. I have heard of a local that reinforced his and than also made it a swivel at the bottom with springs. So no more baseball bat problems and no more snowplow problems. By the way I'm not blaming the snowplow. Snow gets so deep where I live that even the drifts that they are pushing to the side have enough weight to mess up mailboxes without the blade ever touching them.
You are really very lucky not to be in prison on top of liable for the kids injuries. What you did was essentially the same thing as setting a booby trap and that is a felony in almost all jurisdictions. "Booby traps are actually illegal, and the courts have taken this stance over and over. Even with the excuse of self-defense, setting up traps to harm someone else is illegal. It doesn't matter how effective the movies may make this seem. People cannot do it, and they will be liable for injuries that these traps cause." If there is a reasonable foreseeable cause of bodily harm, and in this case as you say there was bodily harm, and it could easily be argued you INTENDED bodily harm, then not only are you going to be financially liable for the damage you caused but also criminally liable.
@@MAtildaMortuaryserver What part of police were called and they were charged with vandalism do you not understand your logic implys if I replace my front door to a metal door and a thief breaks his leg trying to break in its my fault that's not booby traping welding metal to a mailbox which was very clear to see I didn't hide it in the slightest is a whole lot different than making a contribution to harm someone when they interact with it it's just like putting stone around your mailbox and someone tries to break it and break there arm it's very easy to see its reinforced even the courts say I was in the right for trying to protect my property the way I did so stop trying to play lawyer your bad at it it's very simple a vandal tried to break my mailbox and broke there arm end of story.
@@MrAnony07 I from the UK and and have only two things to say 1good for you, and 2 servers the little bastard right , should teach him not to be a bloody little vandal again.
I had this problem once when I was young and living in a trailer park. There was a speed bump on the road that centered my 2 space parking area in front of my trailer and instead of people slowing to cross the bump, they would dodge into my parking spaces to avoid the bump. Very often these people would take out my mailbox due to bad judgement when performing this maneuver and even damaged my trucks bumper once. It was a running joke as to how many times I had to replace the mailbox. Being a Welder / Fabricator I sank a 10"X10"X1/2" inch thick steel tube 5' deep in concrete and welded on a 12"X12"X1/2" top to act as the box. One guy in particular would take great amusement in destroying my box by purposely running over it and then bragging about it. Well, the day came while sitting eating dinner, I heard a great crash and looked out my window only to see that guys truck literally wrapped around my mailbox. My box didn't even give an inch. No charges could be brought against me due to being on private property...and the owner of the park was tired of people dodging his speed bumps. I've gone back over 20 years later and my box still stands to this day.
I'd have gone with replicating an M2 .50 BMG barrel, albeit a touch longer for the two foot footer. The footer, not being well specified being 12" thick, reinforced 10000 pound test concrete, a foot below the surface and ten x ten feet, to ensure that the box couldn't possibly tilt into the roadway proper.
I had the same homeowner experience at a previous rural residence. Most residents like me had 10 acres or more, with homes set back a good way. Mailboxes were sparse and subject to frequent vandalism. Mine was destroyed two times within a few months after moving there. Owning a company whose work included some steel fabrication, I replaced the post and box with a very sturdy steel custom-made box that was 3/8-inch plate and had a 6-inch square x 1/2-inch wall tube post embedded about 4 feet into an 8-inch diameter concrete filled hole. I wanted to be sure that hitting it with a bat would be unrewarding, and deliberately driving into it as some would do was certain to cause vehicle damage. I also have a conscience about anyone being injured from such an obstacle, so it included a heavy plate flange connection a few inches above ground level that was held by four 1/4" bolts. I even used low-strength grade 2 bolts to be sure they would shear off with a hard impact. The portion from the flange up weighed about 100 pounds. I lived there for 5 years after that installation. I saw numerous pieces of shattered wood bats, and the mailbox was sheared off two times, with evidence of vehicle damage such as broken grille pieces, etc. Just a little scratched paint on my mailbox and took me about 10 minutes to get it out of the ditch, clean the mud off, and re-bolt it to the flange.
One of my cousins lived out in the country. He worked at a truck repair place. People were running over his mailbox so he used a heavy duty truck spring and attached it at the bottom of the pipe. It would bend down if they hit it but it would rip up the bottom of their car before springing back up. He had a collection of mufflers that kids had left behind.
I had a neighbor in Vermont years ago. Fred was in his 70's and had retired from the state road dept. Before he retired, he had some kind of ongoing dispute with a fellow road dept employee. Well, Fred's mail box would get crushed many times during the winter by the state snow plows, which just so happened to be driven by the guy he had the problems with. One day i see Fred with a back ho, digging a hole about 6 feet deep right next to the road. He then sunk a solid steel pole, about 8 inches thick in the center of that hole, then filled it in with cement. On top of the pole he mounted his mailbox. The following winter i hear a loud crash, and sure enough, there was a snowplow, half way onto Fred's property, busted up to the point it needed to be towed away. Old Fred never had to replace a mail box again.
@@dreamwolf7302 it did make the news. The state was angry the plow got destroyed. The driver tried to sue Fred. Cops got involved because supposedly he had built a road hazard. In the end, he won the court battle because of how far onto his property the plow was, etc etc. Fred was my hero.
@@fcorso1313 In my home town, we had a local mechanic who got tired of the road crews hired by the board of select camping his lot, and damaging customer cars, that he bought a bunch of parking boots, and installed them on the road crew vehicles over night, and refused to remove them until he was paid for the use of his private business parking lot. New Englanders just have a different mindset lol.
@@AlessioSangalli i could drive down to the local metal shop, and an 8inch solid steel rod. Pricey, but not hard to find. they are called Roof Stilts by so0me, and are often used to make large covered areas, for farm equipment and such.
After having our mailbox destroyed 5 times by vandals my husband was fed up. (We live on a dirt road so the mailbox in actually in our yard just off the road.) So he made a post out of steel I beam. Many tried to knock it down but failed. Then a 17 year old hit it while driving his parents expensive SUV. Recklessly. It totaled the vehicle. The teen wasn't hurt. The mail box survived. They were going to sue but never did. Insurance guy told us they didn't have a case and dropped it. Bottom line... steel beam lasts.
Reminds me of a story I heard on Reddit where a guy was going around pulling Mailboxes out of the ground and seemed to be targeting weaker mailboxes. So OP decided to to dress up their mailbox to look as weak as possible while having a solid concrete foundation with a steel core. Within only a few days, they came home to find a rear fender connected to their mailbox by a chain. They realized the License plate was still attached so they called their local sheriff and had the guy catch a few Felonies.
Why was the license plate attached to the fender? WTF kind of car was this? Most cars I've seen have mounting points on either the rear deck lid or inset with the rear bumper. Fenders are on the front of a car; they're the panels going over the front tires. Nothing about this story makes any sense.
A long time ago there was a CSI TV episode about something like this. The evil doer was a guy that fortified his mailbox with concrete. Two young idiots were the 'victims'. They were driving buy hitting mailboxes with a baseball bat. When they hit the fortified mailbox it caused them to have an car accident and they died. WOW, CSI was so wrong. Those kids were at fault.
I heard about the fortified mailbox concept in the '80s. The CSI episode seems to be a response to the concept from people who don't like the idea of individuals being able to protect their property. What a lot of people are ignoring is that vandalizing a mailbox is a federal crime; from the USPS website: "Mailboxes are protected by federal law and crimes against mailboxes (and the mail inside) are investigated by Postal Inspectors. Those who are convicted of destruction of federal property could spend up to three years in jail and be fined up to $250,000." There's a lot of "FA, FO" here, real and potential, and it's nice to see the people fighting back getting a break for once.
It depends, my state, which has a snowy winter, has laws against building solid items in the right of way if the speed limit is high enough. They also cut down the trees in the right of way.
also, the mailbox had been installed 20 years previously. Assuming in that 20 years there hadn't been such an incident, surely that proves not being a hazard to ordinary traffic.
@@jeremyanderson3819 That may be true, but there's a huge difference in responsibility between causing harm to vandals who deliberately running into it intending to cause harm themselves, and causing additional harm to someone who runs into it by accident. Though I don't think the court is wrong here: first and foremost, the driver was responsible for his own safety. There were no other cars involved, so there had to be some level of negligence by the driver for them to hit the fortified mailbox in the first place.
@@martenkahr3365 this is exactly like the situation my Uncle's bar got into. A towtruck driver had some kind of heart attack behind the wheel and crossed traffic before ramming into my uncle's bar. The Tow company's vehicle insurance tried to claim the bar held liability for the damage to the building. If ANYTHING, the county plow service held liability because there was an impact absorbing crash barrier on the corner of the property which the towtruck went OVER. I assume it was only able to do so due to piled up snow. Nobody was injured outside of the heart attack (and he lived) but the tow truck owners had to call up their insurance provider and tell them how there's no way a building could be liable for a vehicle hitting it, and said that he wasn't going to get sued over this so he was going to fork over the money he (and his insurance) was liable for, and if the insurance company didn't reimburse they'd be seeing 'em in court for breech of contract, fraud.
@@jeremyanderson3819 he fortified it because vandals were destroying it not just because cars were hitting it. If you’re going fast enough to swerve off the road due to ice maybe you should have been going at a slower speed you could control in the event of an unexpected weather condition.
Cases like this are why I'll never be a judge. Me: So let me get this straight. You destroyed this man's property with your vehicle and you think HE should be liable for your damages? 🤕: Yes. Me: .....get the f... out of my court.
@@amzarnacht6710 yes... let's just wrap ourselves in bubble wrap and cower in our basements. You are part of the problem Amzar... frivolous lawsuits are tearing down and clogging up our court systems. Lets make it simple for you: The court ruled the way they did because there are no GUIDELINES as to what constitutes a "heavily fortified mailbox." Until there is an EXACT definition on this... a property owner can't possibly be held responsible for installing the mailbox in a manner he perceives as suitable. Done. 📚🎓🇺🇸
Many years ago my neighbors and I had a problem with kids driving by and smashing our mailboxes. I'm a welder so I made mine with some schedule 80 pipe. Getting home shortly after I was met by some police officers and informed that a kid drove by, hit my mailbox with a baseball bat, which broke and went through the back window and knocked another kid out and was in the hospital with skull fractures. I was informed that I might face a civil lawsuit, but if that happened, i could just call the police officers. I soon did get served a lawsuit so I called the police. They called the Feds who charged all 4 boys in the car with destruction of government property and the local police charged them with criminal mischief and a few other things. The lawsuit against me was quickly dropped and I made a lot of money making mailboxes for my neighbors.
We had a similar problem on my farm. When I was a kid, teens would come through and smash all of the mailboxes along our road. You could see tire tracks where they drove off the road to run over the mailboxes. My grandpa first put a metal wire anchored about 5 feet under a concrete cylinder with a normal 4x4 post implanted 2 feet in the concrete. The cable was wrapped around the concrete a few times, leaving 10ish feet of slack. It then traveled up a channel in the back of the 4x4. At the top was a 3/8" steel plate with a normal large format mailbox mounted on it. The cable was strapped to this plate. The next time the teen ran the mailbox over, the steel plate wrapped around their front axle, breaking the Ubolts on that side and stopping the truck in the ditch, dragging this cylinder of concrete with the remains of the mailbox. The cops came out and arrested the teens and impounding their truck. Their parents tried suing for damages, my grandpa filed a counter claim. They were laughed out of court. My grandpa's counter claim was paid in full plus an additional amount per state law. From that money, my grandpa installed a new mailbox. This was a pair of 4" drill pipes welded side by side with a pipe big enough to fit a mailbox inside. The pipes were about 10 feet long. He had them pushed into the ground with a backhoe and mounted the old mailbox in it after the mailbox was hammered back into shape. A few months later, we found a bent aluminum bat a bit down the road. Never caught how did that one, but didn't have problems again, at least not for a while. I guess the reputation of the mailbox faded from memory, until another young punk learned that smashing mailboxes is a bad idea. 30+ years and, many natural, and man made disasters later and it still stands proudly at the top of the hill.
Buddy of mine kept getting his box wrecked by some high schoolers playing mailbox baseball. After the 3rd box he sank a lalli column 4 feet in the ground, cemented it in place, and bolted a custom fabbed mailbox made from 3/8" steel on top. About 3 weeks later the kid 2 doors down broke his wrist at 2':30 am. Kid never admitted how but the baseball season was over.
@@dustinwashburn1283 Idk if that was something that had routinely happened at my home, but we had to replace the mailbox as the box portion was falling apart. It was welded to a steel plate which was welded to a 4-5 inch diameter steel (i assume) post in the ground. The post weighed easily 120 pounds - so definitely not solid, but quite heavy and quite sturdy. Not knowing how to do any welding, I pulled the post out and replaced it with a 4x4 and a plastic slide-over mailbox. No issues yet, but now I'm curious why such an extreme post was chosen and whether or not it will have to go back.
It's interesting to me how much argument went into the mailbox thing. Since it was an accident and not an act of vandalism, that driver could just as easily hit a light pole or retaining wall and gotten the same injuries. That he hit the mailbox was pure coincidence. It's super tragic, but that homeowner is no more responsible than a city for the durability of their light poles.
In the state of Pennsylvania if you crash into or damage either a light pole or guard rail, you pay to have it replaced. I believe 1 section of guard rail is about $400.00 I suspect it is higher now.
I agree with you, but just FYI, light poles are generally designed to be frangible (break off easily) for this very reason. In my opinion it's good practice that public property be designed with things like this in mind, but it should never be a requirement to force private citizens to modify what they do with their own property on their own land. (unless the government is willing to pay for immediate replacement of all damaged, frangible property)
I’m a little conflicted tbh. I think there could be an argument if you were to disguise something to look safe, but is actually deadly (as I believe has been the case with vandalize mailboxes before). I also think that guardrails and such should be made safely. I remember there being a big issue recently with guardrails that were found to constructed improperly and which led to several motorists being impaled. On the other hand, homeowners shouldn’t be liable for every single structure on their property. A brick mailbox for example is obvious to any driver that it is a durable structure and should not creat e liability, but a concrete post painted to look like a traffic cone could.
Once you said he hit a patch of black ice, I was done. Once he lost control of the vehicle, he could have hit ANYTHING that could have paralyzed him. That’s on the driver for not maintaining a safe speed. If he hit another car head-on, could he sue them for obstructing the right of way?
@dogyerf21 > If he hit another car head-on, could he sue them for obstructing the right of way? There's a fundamental difference between another car on the road and an item of street furniture deliberately designed and constructed to damage a vehicle which hits it.
@@anonnona8099 The mailbox was installed at 6:04 in 1996, and 7:21 it would fall down if hit by a vehicle. Besides, the motorist lost control - was the motorist driving recklessly or negligently?
I had a friend who had his mailbox on a big spring because it kept getting hit. People would hit it and it would just bounce back to its place. Looked absolutely ridiculous, but worked.
@@court2379 that would be easily solved with weatherproof canvas and flexible tent poles. That way the entire mailbox could be crushed and it would return to working conditions.
Grew up a Navy Brat. Lived in a lot of small towns. In the 70's, my folks bought a house out in the sticks. Unfortunately, it was on the only road leading to the teenagers party spot. About the fourth time some kid in a pickup ran down our mailbox, Dad went and bought an 8 foot long 6x6. We spent all day with a posthole digger on a tractor sinking it. Filled bottom with cement, dropped in the post, filled it in with concrete, and mounted the standard hardware store mailbox on top with the biggest nails he could find. We goofed on the depth, as the mailman complained it was too short. Took about 1 week before a drunk 16 year old wrapped the farm's pick-up around it. Kid was arrested for drunk driving, underaged drinking, vandalism, etc. but what really terrified him was having to explain to his Dad what happened to the truck. Farmer actually made a point of apologizing to us.
Another argument: "Since I was never even given the opportunity to teach the injured man to drive properly, I certainly cannot be held accountable for his ignorance, irresponsibility, or stupidity."
Saw a report where an Old Navy Sailor mounted his mailbox on top of a half buried ships steel anchor after having his mailboxes run over for almost 2 years. He finally tiered of having someone destroy his mailbox repeatedly so he buried it in such a way that if someone intentially ran over the mailbox and which was out of the right of way, the anchors tip would pivot up and snag the vehicle as it ran over it. Sadly the Sheriffs own son ran over the mailbox, striking it at high speed with his drivers side fron bumper. The anchors tang came up through the bottom of the boys Camaro and impailed the boy though his legs. Rendering him invalid. Had he driven at it and struck it with the passengers side he would have walked away from his totaled car. And this crash ruined his College Football Scholarship. His Father (the Shreriff) came to the crash sight and threatend to kill the mailbox owner. He did this in front of the Highway Patrol Officers and was subsequently removed from his Job by the City. He was out of control anyway. So good riddance!
Boy, this hit home as this almost exactly happened to me. My mailbox kept getting vandalized. Tired of this, I got a 6 inch schedule 40 pipe, which is about a quarter inch thick, and cemented it 36 inches deep. One morning I get up, and the police are at the end of my driveway. Long story short, a 17-year-old hot shot who should not even have been driving at 2 o’clock in the morning, turned out of my neighbors driveway at a high rate of speed, lost control, hit my mailbox and flipped over. From what I was told he left the scene because he was underage and should not have been driving at 2 AM in the morning. The neighbor was really upset at me because it was his daughter’s boyfriend and yelled at me for putting such a heavy mailbox posting. Thanks for letting me share
Tell ya neighbour you don't think you got it right the first time and appologise. Then tell him you are getting 1/2" not 1/4" pipe. You just wanted to make sure to warn her boyfriend before he drives off upset next time!
If the court decision had found the mailbox owner liable this would IMO make government entities liable too. Things like drainage pipes, light poles, sewer access, high curbs, even handicap cuts in curbing could be considered hazardous to motorists.
In my state, the government is liable for pothole damage from state roads provided the hole was reported. It's a great incentive to get potholes fixed quickly.
You live in Merica all a**holes are looking to make a quick buck even at the risk of their own health. Because current generation doesnt want to work for money.
The court held that the property owner was not liable, but, if you built such a thing with the intent of deterring say mailbox vandals because they hit a reinforced mailbox and were injured then you you are and should be liable. It is not legal anywhere to set booby traps to deter criminals. A solidly reinforced mailbox that can foreseeably cause injury is a booby trap and you will be lucky not to be arrested on a felony charge. The point for the people who set this particular kind of booby trap is to cause injury so the punks stop doing mailbox vandalism. That is so illegal it is not funny and the property owner would deserve whatever the law does to him. You do not injure kids for a little vandalism no matter how grouchy that makes you. If you are having that hard a time with it go rent a PO Box, you do not get to ruin a persons life just because they acted stupid a few times as a teenager.
I used to live in a rural community. There was a family that was the target of vandals and their mailbox was the most frequently vandalized thing on their property. In order to make it more difficult to vandalize, they moved it about 3 or 4 feet from the edge of the shoulder and added a little leeway for the postman to use for access. This of course, did little to stop the vandals. One of the frequent vandals was an acquaintance of mine. He would frequently brag about his conquests. He had bumper on his pickup made from steel pipe. Eventually, the homeowner replaced the post with a 4 inch steel pipe, filled with cement. This was installed into a cement foundation that was about 4 foot by 4 foot and maybe 2 foot thick, but covered by at least a foot of dirt. In other words, the bottom was about 3 foot down. My "friend", not knowing about the upgrade tried to run down the mailbox as he had done many times before. I heard about it a few days later, when I saw him. He was badly bruised and cut up from going through the windshield of his truck. His truck was totaled. He looked at me and grinned behind a busted lip and said, "I guess they fixed their mailbox problem." Unfortunately for him, that was not the end of the story. Since the police determined that he had intentionally tried to destroy the mailbox, he was guilty of a felony. He ended up doing a lot of community service.
@@geoffreylee5199 It was a 1955-ish Ford pickup. It may not have even had seatbelts… and even if it did, this was in the 70s and “real men” didn’t wear seatbelts… : -)
It is important to note - the Ohio Supreme Court is specifically citing that the mailbox was on the tree lawn, a specifically Ohio term, that is the right of way area between the street and the sidewalk. Very curious as to the speed of the vehicle and his seat belt use for a truck to flip in this manner.
Same here. I wondered about his seat belt because so many people who have been drivers or passengers in cars that flipped, and have their seat belts buckled, walk away uninjured.
People around here line their yards with giant stones. They do it to keep people from parking partly in their yards along the streets. If you were to lose control of your car and hit one of those it would be a major accident. And it's happened. The homeowners have never lost a case over it when sued since the stones are inside their property line, even if it's just by inches. This is how it should be. They have a right to put the stones there. I saw several who have put short brick "decorative" walls at the edge of their property, and those things are reinforced. If you hit it you will be stopped cold.
I have noticed many businesses have placed huge stones next to their curbs and I thought it was only for decoration but my grandson told me those are to prevent people from cutting the corner and running over the curb. Apperently they are not getting in trouble for that.
Not american but in a lot of other countries, especially in Ireland the law is very simple. You can put a wall or other object at the bounds of the property, and any driver hitting it is at fault. The only time you may be asked to move a large object is for access to any utilities it may have encroached. The law says you drive to the conditions and terrain, sometjing we all accept since we still commonly use something akin to ancient by-ways and farm tracks, hell we even go racing on them for the thrill of it (Irish Road Racing ruclips.net/video/LU-ynRoqDEs/видео.html).
30+ years ago when my hubby & I were newlyweds our mailbox kept getting hit by the nasty teen that lived with his grandparents down the road from us. We lived on a 90 degree corner & our mailbox was right after you came out of it. Every weekend this brat would hit our mailbox. After replacing it a handful of times we got this plastic one that fit over a 2X4. He hit it again & broke the 2X4, but the mailbox survived with just a couple of scratches. I'd had enough & asked hubby if there was anywhere we could get a big rock to put in front of the mailbox. Just so happened his family had some huge rocks that had been used for the foundation for the house his great grandfather built in the field beside the house. We got to his grandfather & asked for the rocks & they used the tractor with a loader bucket to load them up & we placed these huge 2-3 foot tall by 2-3 foot wide stones on each side of our mailbox. That night the kid comes around the corner not realizing the rocks are there because the road was higher than the mailbox. We hear him gun his truck, ready to hit our mailbox only to come in contact with the rocks. Totally destroyed his bumper, knocks out his headlight. Kid never tried to hit our mailbox again.
What is conveniently overlooked in cases like this is that the law has done absolutely nothing to help the homeowner to protect his mailbox. When he is left to protect his own property you still get judges dissenting against him.
@@t.n.-js6ei The postal service has guidelines so that they can perform their job, if people put them at random heights and locations it would be a huge hassel for the mail man that's why they can refute service. But it's still your mailbox, which is why you have to buy and install it.
@@t.n.-js6ei No, you are incorrect. Mailboxes are not the property of the US Postal Service unless placed by the Postal Service itself, such as the squat blue boxes still found in some bank parking lots. A few _very_ old buildings appear to have USPS boxes as well - they are clearly labeled as such. It is the responsibility of the property owner to provide for mail. The house in which I grew up, we had a mail box. We bought it, we placed it, we had to maintain it. It was on our property. It had to fit USPS guidelines, but that's all, and that has to do with distance from the 'curb' (edge of the road), and height above the ground. The last house I was in, we had no mailbox. We had a slot in the wall for mail to be dropped. You seem to believe that the wall then belongs to the USPS. The current house has community mailboxes. I can guarantee you that our keys do NOT say 'Property of USPS, Do Not Duplicate", and the mailbox certainly does not. The post office has the keys for the main doors of the mailboxes, but I suspect that the HOA also has a set, left from the initial construction of the subdivision. If the mailbox gets destroyed, I also believe that it will be the responsibility of the HOA to replace the box - not USPS. The only laws regarding them are dealing with the handling of the mail itself. That is, breaching the mailbox is a federal offense because it implies that the person breaching the box has the intent to interfere with the delivery of the mail.
and this is what is wrong with this country and society today. Idiots causing mischief have all the rights, and landowners have little, if any recourse.
My dad built a mailbox out of railroad rail and 3/8 in. steel, concreted in the ground 2 ft. He was tired of the snowplow destroying it, people throwing beer bottles at it and people hitting it with baseball bats. He lived on a country road. About 2 weeks after he put it in, he went to get his mail and found a bent baseball bat, broken window glass, blood and part of a finger. He called the police; they came out and did their thing. Taking pictures, evidence his statement and info and said they would be in touch with their findings. He never heard from them.
We were doing telecom work inside a pair of manholes at opposing ends of a bridge. The work was tedious and it went on in shift work for several days. We had the right lane closed, and marked with cones every 25 feet, or so across the whole 400 foot span of the bridge. Every night we would hear a pickup truck rev his engine, and maliciously drive over the cones around 2 AM. We would have to climb out and reset the cones each time this happened. This went on for 3 nights. After the third time we took one of the cones and plugged it with a coffee cup, poured it full of Sackrete, and returned it into the line of cones after it had hardened. As expected, the pickup returned the next night. We heard him rev his engine, and we heard the thump, thump, thump of him running over the ordinary cones. After 5 or 6 thumps, we heard a WHAM. We heard him get out, scream some loud epithets and then get back in and drive away. From my viewpoint his front bumper was folded in the middle, and I think he bent a tie rod because the tow of his front wheels was canted inward. We never hear anything more about the incident, but I am sure the driver does not intentionally run over traffic cones any more. Maybe he could've sued the telephone company for fortifying the cones. This was 40 years ago, so I think the statute of limitations has run out.
I'm in the UK (Scotland) My dad worked in construction. While he and his company were working on a road, they had problems with idiots doing the same thing, running over the traffic cones at speed. This was a problem as the cones where marking out lanes to keep the workers safe. The solution was to take a metal pole (rebar?) and set it into the road, then put a traffic cone over it. The special cone was positioned so the drivers would have a good run at it. The idea being, the idiots would have to be driving along the line on purpose instead of accidentally hitting one or two. After a few nights of cars being written off, the idiots seemed to get the message and there were no more flattened cones. This was sometime in the late 1970's / early 80's, he wouldn't have got away with it now.
The idea of him being able to sue is annoying. Cones mean "avoid", everybody knows or should know this. It doesnt matter whether they're made of rubber or solid steel, you should never be contacting one with your vehicle. Judges should immediately throw cases like that out for being baseless.
@@jadedandbitter True and anyone doing this deliberately deserve what they get, IMO but ... there's always the guy who has to take avoiding action, whilst driving safely away from the cones, and then hits the trap cone. He's not going to be pleased.
We have a loading lane outside my house, during high traffic special idiots feel they can drive down this lane which people on my street turn on. City put up tube road barriers, still sometimes one ass comes along and drives over them. I’m thinking I need to fill the hollow tubes with concrete, I’m just wondering if I should also throw a few sticks of rebar in the wet cement to add to the enforcement, maybe a #6 thick bar 😁
When i was a kid some local people thought it was funny to ride down our street and smash everybody's mailbox. This went on for over a month and after the second time my father replaced out mailbox he'd had enough. He brought home some half-inch steel plates that his workplace was throwing out and welded a new mailbox in and stuck into a cement base. A week later a few mailboxes leading up to ours were busted, but ours and those after it were fine. We never had a problem again. I can only assume that they'd been driving down the road with a baseball bat out a window and then got their wrist broken.
Years ago when I was in middle school, our mailbox was regularly vandalized. Someone would drive half off the road and run over the mailbox. Breaking the pole destroying the box scattering the mail across the yard. After about the 6th time in 2 months we buried an 8 foot chain link fence post down to proper mailbox height poured concrete in and around the post. Less than a week later someone tried to run over this post. The box was in the middle of the yard and mail was scattered but the post was bent over at a 45 degree angle. Turns out that the kids 4 doors down were using dad's new pickup truck to run over our box. The post took out the radiator and did some serious damage to bumper and some suspension damage. We were able to straighten the post and remount the mailbox. Our mailbox was never vandalized again.
So glad to see a court finally use the law and common sense! To many of these stupid lawsuits cost us an arm and a leg in increased insurance costs etc. Time people take responsibility for their own actions and mistakes!
Laws aside, I find it pathetic how more and more of society find ways not to take responsibility for their actions. The two dissenting judges make me afraid too,
Well the judges just wanted it to be on a case-by-case basis. They wanted a jury to decide whether or not the intent of the mailbox fortification was to stop it from being damaged or was the intent to cause harm to those damaging. There is a difference. Just a steel rod and cement are a hard object. Now put a sharp edge or point and suddenly you are no longer increasing fortification but intending to cause harm. Whether you find that still justification or not does not matter. Judges and the law tend to not like the public to decide punishment, but the courts themselves to.
@@deathab0ve If you want a mad max themed mailbox you shouldn't be liable for idiots running into it, period. People shouldn't be hitting mailboxes, single vehicle accidents are ALWAYS the fault of the driver, period, those two judges are unfit for office.
@@SherrifOfNottingham That is your opinion. The other 2 judges disagree. Deal with it, this is the real world and intent matters in the real world. Stop crying.
@@deathab0ve Real world? Define "real world" when this world is an absolute clown world that happens to be far worse than any hell itself. Also, intent matters? Like how many other things don't matter? It's really insane how intent matters in some cases while in others it does not. Intent? What does that even supposed to mean when you can get away with alot these days because, People. Don't. Care.
As a road contractor, I frequently had teenagers with big wheeled 4X4 trucks running up and down newly 'dressed' and sodded front slopes on filled areas.....somehow this came to a screeching halt when a full box of roofing nails 'fell off a truck' and scattered requiring my crew to clean up the newly paved road. My foreman received a very nice Xmas bonus for 'forgetting' to clean up the grassed slopes.
This reminds me of when I lived out in the countryside. Our mailboxes were constantly being hit, even though it sat BEHIND the barrier the highway dept. uses to keep cars from going into the ravine. The pole, that is, not the box itself, the box stuck out a little bit so the mail truck could get to it. So my dad put in a solid steel pipe nearly three ft down and a solid steel box. Not long after we had pissed off parents of a kid with a busted arm, and shoulder, threaten to sue us because, apparently, the kid was hitting mailboxes with a baseball bat while a friend drove, and when he hit OUR's, the bat bounced back, busted the kid's arm, and the broken pieces of bat lodged into his shoulder. Obvs. they lost the case, and while our box was dented, it wasn't harmed. Even a car scraping along the highway barrier wouldn't've done much damage to it, or it to the car, honestly as it didn't stuck out THAT far, but it wasn't skidding cars that were damaging it. It was damn teens.
Old saying: stupidity should hurt. Amazing that the parents were mad at your dad, instead of their little darling angel. PS Bet that kid never did that again.
Yeah, the kid should be placed in foster care due to the parents criminally entitled attitude... and the parents should be thrown in jail and forced to pay damages and restitution for all the destroyed mailboxes.
Good for your dad. The teen's parents are unbelievable. Instead of telling the kid to take his blows, and next time respect other folks' property, they want to sue. Crazy.
If a "Mail Box" keeps getting hit repeatedly it speaks to a bigger problem that the City or Township needs to be liable for not fixing the damn road or putting barriers, better grading or road maintenance in place. Some thing has got to be done and its not the mail box.
Rural areas don’t have city or township representation, and often only 3-4 cops in total patrolling for drunks and speeders. Counties and states use infrastructure money in areas that bring in tax dollars. Rural areas almost never get safety measures, repair, repaving, or even lines painted on the road after the old ones fade. At least not until the road is in danger of becoming undrivable.
It's pretty appalling that the defendants can win at every stage but still had to go through years of the stress of a lawsuit and still not be guaranteed attorney fees from the plaintiffs.
@Mister Bister Lol, Generally, around 60% of the founding fathers were attorneys or had legal training or were associated with a legal background, depending the Legal Founding Document under discussion. So, maybe they weren't all practicing attorneys. Looking at the legal complexity that the government has embraced and how attorneys benefit from it, I find it spurious that attorneys don't recognize that their actions will benefit future generations of attorneys when creating legal bureaucracy.
@@johnstibal2131 No, the USA was founded by slaveowners who correctly saw that the democratically elected parliament of their country was about to abolish slavery.
If you’re going fast enough to flip several times after hitting something and proceed to travel another several dozen yards to hit a second mailbox you were probably going too fast for snowy conditions
As he briefly mentioned, it was black ice. You can't see it but it's as slippery as heck. The road seems to be clear, but it's far from it. The worst possible condition when driving in wintertime. Snowy road is easier to drive on, up to six inches of snow.
I've always firmly believed that if you are not allowed to make your mailbox indestructible by law, then if drivers or vandals destroy your mailbox, the city or state should have to pay for the replacement. The ONLY reason it needs to be replaced is because the law is stopping you from having one which would not need replacement. Why should you have to spend your money, time, and effort when you were willing to put a permanent solution in place and they said "No way, you have to LET them destroy your property."
You always have the option to pick your mail up at the post office and forgo a mailbox all together. Also to your second question, it's a crime to use traps to defend your property that's why and in this case the trap could kill a completely innocent person. You say LET them destroy your property, but what happens if someone sideswipes a car and sends it into the mailbox? No fault of the person who got sideswiped, but your trap just killed them so why shouldn't your bear the responsibility when a normal mailbox would have broken away?
@@SJT929496 thats actually a legit question. i have seen in some rural areas in florida mailboxes literally drilled and tied to a tree and multiple of them throughout the road so it wasnt some random person. i was told those people probably dealt with a hurricane and going to the extent drilling and tying it to a tree by their driveway reduces the chances it going missing or found in your neighbors property the day after
If all mailboxes WERE essentially indestructible then there would be no mailbox vandalism. But, we have cheap weak mailboxes and we have mailbox vandals. Kids do dumb things and that is about as foreseeable as the world gets, injuring them intentionally in order to protect a $18 mailbox is and SHOULD be illegal and you should at the very least be financially responsible for the injuries you cause because come on, you intended to injure those kids, that is not deterrence, it is a punishment that you had no right to inflict. Taking the law into your own hands by setting booby traps is not legal or right. Sorry if you don't like it, but kids have been killed by people reinforcing their mailboxes and the last time I checked vandalizing mailboxes is not a capital offense. Nor are you a judge or jury. Breaking arms and shoulders and hands is not an appropriate way to deter petty vandalism. Now if you were to use brickwork to make a shell around your mailbox so that it was OBVIOUS that hitting it from a moving vehicle would result in a lot of pain or injury then you would be fine. But people who do things like use an ordinary mailbox and fill it with cement can only be doing that to cause injury. In that case they should do time and pay restitution and medical bills.
If criminals (even accidentally) were forced to financially compensate the homeowner for damage to their property and inconvenience, then this wouldn't be necessary.
In the 1960s our mailbox was repeatedly hit on purpose. My old man got mad so he moved the mailbox 40' down our property to an outcrop of ledge. He drilled a hole into the ledge and used a 2" diameter steel rod for the post. About a week later, there was a big crashing noise and then the sound of a car driving off. When we went out there, we found a bent up bumper and oil puddles. My Dad thought that the car's engine wasn't going to make it very far with that big of an oil leak.
I've had at least 12 attacks on mailboxes, and everyone was criminal and deliberate. Yeh, and you will find out the value of police, who laugh and do nothing.
@@khatjohnson8204 he did one up from that... Read OPs message, he put a 2 inch steel ROD, ie, no hole down the middle. Solid steel works better than concrete every time!
The road my father used to live on ended in a T. The guy that owned the property at the end of the T had multiple vehicles blow through the stop and run into his yard and in more than one case, hit his house. My father owned a company that sold gravel and sand for cement processors. Thus, he had access to larger quarry products. My father saw the story on the news and approached him about assistance with his problem. The result was the property owner bought several very large cut granite stones and lined the front of his property Inside the easement. The city tried to force him to remove them, citing that he was creating a hazard for people that ran through the stop sign.
Creating a hazard? I guess people had better clear their land of all buildings, trees, fence posts, utility poles, stumps, ponds, culverts, and embankments. If they don't want people to run into the boulders, then they can install a guard rail.
Hahahahaha, the nerve of them. "Okay, good?" Like yeah, don't crash into somebody's yard and you won't get your ass kicked by a big granite "landscaping" boulder, my guy.
The city probably wanted him to get hedges. Something the cars can get caught in that's pliable. I could see that sort of road being a hydroplane nightmare. I also lived at the end of a T. We had a very big oak tree in the middle of our yard. Only close call I had was when I procrastinated taking the trash bin to the curb. Lady blew the stop leaving a domestic and jumped our apron. Tire gouges in the dirt right where my trash can goes. It would have been angled just right to fly the can back into mom's car in the driveway...and me. Lady took out her front tire on our curb and sparked down the rest of the street. Her domestic stabbed her the next year...poor lady.
For years I put up reindeer ornaments with lights or a Santa sleigh at the end of my acreage around the mailbox. I had a couple of punks in trucks run them over, so what I did was cut down a tree that was close by and left a three-foot stump, and mounted a reindeer with lights on the stump and surrounded it with straw bales. As sure as shit a month later in the middle of the night, I heard a noise and saw a newer Chevy 4x4 high centered on the stump.
Back in the '60s, my parents bought a house that was previously owned by a gentleman who owned a 'big-rig' towing company. His mailbox post was made of towing chain, welded into the shape of his surname initial, along with a towing hook, looking as if it was dangling below it. I'm talking BIG chain with 4"x3" links made out of 5/8" diameter rod. This was installed in accordance to USPS regulation -- front edge of the mailbox 12-15" from the edge of the road surface, and 42-45" from the road surface height to the bottom of the mailbox opening. The upright of this mailbox post was probably four feet off the road. We were not about to replace it, even though it wasn't our initial... Well, late one night someone went off the road and nailed that welded chain post, and bent it right over. Remember that hook? It grabbed everything under that car and ripped it right out. The car ended up in the ditch on the other side of the road, 100' farther down. The driver threatened to sue my folks for that 'dangerous' mailbox post. The cop that responded also lived a half-dozen houses down the street from us, and simply asked the driver "Why were you FOUR FEET off the (straight) road???" and further explained that "if he would have continued in a straight line another 20 feet he would have hit a 15" diameter tree, and THAT wouldn''t have bent so easily!" Oh, and the guy was lucky he wasn't another foot off the road, because just that far behind our mailbox post was a telephone pole that he must have missed by mere inches...
My dad who worked in the oilfield business( back in the 80's) got tired of having our mailbox ran over and got his buddies to dig a deep hole with an auger and he cemented a long section of oil pipe and filled it with cement and put our mailbox on top of it. About a month later he went to check the mail and found a car wrapped around it. We lived in the country so we had to drive to check our mail box probably about a quarter mile away. That oil pipe never moved....ever. It had been hit many times after, but all we did is replace the the mailbox on top. We did end up putting a warning sign on the pole stating not to hit this mailbox. I think we got sued once but we won the case because it was proven mail vandalism? Idk. I was young so the detail are vague, but we never had a to replace the pipe. It's actually still there to this day. In fact I went back a couple of years ago to that area as I don't live there anymore and it has been bricked in around the pipe and looks real nice. It's still a mailbox. ;)
I welded a triangle shaped guard around a gas meter (and concreted all 3 legs) out of drill pipe and someone hit it in a truck going god knows how fast and snapped every stick of pipe in multiple places. Uprooted every piece of concrete as well. Also took out the gas companies "H" shaped guard, two gas meters, and a concreted in chain link fence. And drove away with all their fluids.
Almost this exact situation happened to my Dad. His mailbox was repeatedly vandalized. He fortified it. He lives on a very straight and clear road in town. However, there are way too many wrecks on that very short stretch. After the fortification, dude runs off the straight and clear road and hits it. He wasn't hurt thankfully, but it did tear his car up pretty bad. DOT comes by and says he can't have a mailbox like that. Well, I live out in the country, and the mailboxes out there are certainly fortified since they tend to be mounted on various farm implements and other steel products. The punch line is: this weekend a porch pirate tried to rob him, they left in a hurry and ran over his current mailbox! They got caught because it tore up their car so much. In his case, he's gone out of his way to make it safe and secure. He moved it off the road a good bit, but then the post office complained. He was actually making it safer for the driver by allowing them to get off the road completely, but somebody didn't like it. You can't win.
The postal service is horrible about that. My shop is off the service road of the interstate, speed limit is 55. Our mailbox for years was inside our fence without issue. All the sudden we stopped getting mail after a few months we were told the driver has issues accessing it and we have to move it to the side of the road so we did, a few months later they started doing work on our street and put a sign close to the box and we stopped getting mail because the driver would have to backup to not get out of the truck
My house is on a rural road and I had problems with my mailbox being smashed intentionally. After a few times of having to buy a new one I finally encased mine in brick with concrete reinforced base and never had any more trouble.
I also live out in the county and had my mailbox smashed several times by vandals. I wanted to make my mail box stronger and so I dug a nice hole and filled the holes with 6 bags of cement and a Simpson steel deck support under ground and a 6 X 6 wood post bolted into the Simpson deck support. The wood post covers the side of the box that had majority of the impacts from the vehicles and baseball bats out the passenger side of the cars and trucks. I installed a standard large metal mailbox on the pole. In the first 2 years the mailbox had been hit twice and the first time was the baseball bat out the window, the baseball bat was 30' down the road on the shoulder of the road and broken glass next to the box and the 2nd one was a truck mirror sitting on the end of my driveway and red paint on the pole.. All I had was a few marks on the post and nothing more. It should be noted that my mailbox is 4' off the traveled portion of the road and I had the mailbox approach and departure area paved in blacktop so no reason for someone not to know that it was safe distance from the traveled road.
@@cornfed123567Your local post office might have been violating federal law about delivering mail with these stunts. Write to your Postmaster General to find out what your rights are under the law.
@@Maximara we've sent emails and been told, it's unsafe for the driver to get out and put it in the box when it's blocked. But we all know she was lazy and didn't want to do it. It's an issue with this driver all around town.
My grandfather served in the Navy in Korea, and when he got back and moved into a new house with his new wife (my grandmother), many people had fun destroying his mailbox. He got sick of it one day, and asked some of his Navy buddies who were still serving to send him a few links of old anchor chain. They shipped it on a train to his work and he and my great-uncle welded it into a decorative mailbox holder. A month later a drunk teenager totaled his car on it. The anchor chain mailbox was fine. After that, nobody ever hit it again. Or so the story goes.
Nobody ever got drunk after that? Or the teenage intentionally got drunk for the sole purpose of getting at the mailbox, and therefore the chain cured his alcoholism?
@@georgedang449 what? I’m pretty sure the teenager intentionaly drove drunk. This comment sounds very toll-eriffic I could understand if someone put a junk car with a mailbox welded to the trunk on the side of the road, but plenty of people use brick encased mailboxes.
very similar here - my father worked for Bucyrus-Erie in the 70s and used a length of welded up dragline chain with links about 1' each to make a large arch with the mailbox hanging from the end. Not sure how far in the ground it was set. Occasionally kids would manage to take out the box but the chain never failed. We did once find a broken baseball bat after a failed attempt that struck the chain instead of the box. At one point there was actually a local newspaper article about interesting/unusual mailboxes in the area and his was included. Somehow nobody ever tried to sue him over it.
I had a country mail box that was taken out twice in two years, presumably by farm implements. I asked my county sherriff if I could mont it on a heavy steel girder. The sherriff said, "Go for it." I decided instead to relocate the mail box a few feet further off the road and laid down a gravel apron for the mail delivery person to be able to safely reach it. So far, so good.
Back in my hooligan days, a buddy and I went out smashing mailboxes. His preferred choice of destruction was to punch the mailboxes. It was a sight to behold for my young eyes to see something metal and seemingly strong crumple over by a fist. After a night of many bent boxes, my buddy made a running start to pummel a box but instead of the usual sound, we heard a soft thud and the wails of my buddy having broke his hand...the mailbox stood resolute. I don’t quite know what they had done to reinforce that mailbox but it was the first reinforced box I’d ever seen. My next reinforced box also coincided with my very last act of hooliganism. I was out with other friends pulling up stop signs when we came across a lonely mailbox. We decided it needed to come down. Driving my large van, I decided (very thankfully) to hit it at a low speed...the reinforcement stopped my van cold...luckily without damaging the box or the van. It made a very loud noise and being the middle of the night, the homeowner would probably come to investigate...so, we busted a U-ee and sped down the road. In the universe’s way of telling me to quit acting like an ass, I missed the stop where we just pulled up the stop sign and skidded into the crossroad stopping just short of a steep ditch that would have totaled my vehicle. I stopped being a hooligan after that.
Thank you for settling an argument with me and my wife. I have had two mailbox roadkilled. No note, no apologies, but debris all over my yard. I am building a steel and brick mailbox. My wife swears up and down we would get a lawsuit. I'm just sick and tired of inconsiderate drivers and mailbox expenses.
Do it. We had our mailbox taken out one time and I saw the stupid small sedan sitting in our yard with the top of the concrete mailbox on it. Fool was able to drive his pos car off before getting caught, but yanno that pos car was toast.
It's important to realize that even though this guy even eventually won, it took him 6 years and he probably spent tens of thousands of dollars on attorney's fees. Even if he had homeowner's insurance, this probably took a substantial mental and financial toll on him.
Do yourself a huge favor and speak with your insurance agent first. He or she may tell you it is a great idea, a bad idea, or want to sell you a WHOLE LOT more insurance to cover the lawsuits you are going to get. By the way, you probably better also get a county permit because if you build something like a brick shithouse for your mail they are going to have something to say about it. Just be sure to inform your agent that you feel the need to get revenge on stupid teenagers so you are planning to build a boobytrap killing machine on your property that is bound to injure someone eventually. I am sure they will be fine with that.
If my mailbox kept getting vandalized/destroyed I’d certainly reinforce it to stop that nonsense. Replacing a mailbox isn’t exactly cheap if you have to do it multiple times.
As a welder I'm starting to think there's a business opportunity here... Exactly how much damage are we looking for? I'm pretty sure I could make like a fishhook thing that would trap the car there till the police show up OH! HINGE! If we put the whole thing on a hinge with some struts coming out, the mailbox (under 50-60 lbs of spring tension) would be able to tilt back - using the cars own momentum to push some steel struts up into the engine - and arrest the forward travel of the vehicle (there may be some vertical travel)
@@the_inquisitive_inquisitor Although I get were you going with this, I'd not suggest anything that would hook into the underside of a vehicle during impact. Because at some point a tow truck is going to be called to remove said vehicle. And in the process do additional damage to the engine or transmission of said vehicle as it is removed. And in that situation, the lawsuit might prevail. Because you went from a mount to securing the mailbox to adding additional "decoration" with the intended purpose of damaging a vehicle when it impacts the mailbox post.
@@the_inquisitive_inquisitor In practicality I would agree. But legally, you would probably have to prove it is the same person/vehicle doing the repeated damage.
I'm originally from Ohio. I'm still amazed at how people there think things should work, as opposed to how they actually work. That this had to go the Supreme Court is ridiculous.
I had a trespasser driving his vehicle on my property. He slid his vehicle into my fence damaging both the fence and his truck. He came to my door and explained how my fence scratched his vehicle so I need to pay for the damage as well as help him get his rig unstuck! I didnt help him, I didnt pay him for his damaged vehicle, nor did I get compensated for my fence. I still found it to be exceptionally funny.
I see their point. There are rules about your duty to other people, even in your property (e.g. you cannot put booby traps, and the attractive nuissance doctrine), so it is not far fetched that by those rules the owner could be liable because of the danger he unnecessarily created. Yes, if the driver had hit a tree by the side of the road, maybe he could have ended the same with no recourse, but: 1. Trees are strong, they are not reinforced. 2. For the description (to the point of maiming the driver of a truck) seems that the mailbox was way more dangerous than a tree. 3. People do not expect mailboxes to be the more dangerous alternative. The driver may steer towards the mailbox to avoid a fallen tree, expecting it to be safest measure (of course he should have then to pay the mailbox). To put another example, think of a fire engine that is too wide for the entrance to the land, and the driver choses to go over the mailbox to save the house owner... So, it is not a clear cut as "I can happily maim whoever happens to get into my property, and there is absolutely zero legal risk" and I understand judges seeing the other side of things.
@@sergiojuanmembiela6223 That's a lot of mental gymnastic there fella. What part of immovable do you not understand? Immovable objects cant cause anything by definition. The only way he would be liable for reinforcing an immovable object is if there is a reasonable expectation that the object would have some movability for safety reason. For what reason would someone have for running into a mailbox? None, therefore its only by accident which negates any expectation.
@sergiojuanmembiela6223 Every single person with more than 2 brain cells knows and understands what you're saying, that's not what's happening here though. You might as well describe the best way to weave a basket underwater
@@williampennjr.4448 A possible reason would be avoiding a bigger danger (e.g. a tree fell on the road). And it would depend of how clear it was that the mailbox was massive (imagine someone building a mailbox that looks like a wooden one but is done in tungsten). Making the road unnecessarily dangerous in case of accident is another possible point that could be brought to a trial. Which explains the points of the two dissenting judges: it is no so clear cut that the lawsuit must be dismissed out of hand, so allow a judge/jury look into this just in case there is something to it, and let them decide. Because there might be situations in which the owner did something unreasonable that did cause injury, and it should be looked upon if it did happen.
@@sergiojuanmembiela6223 What difference does it make if the mail box is made of tungsten or straw. A mailbox doesnt exist to be run into. It exists to collect mail not to be a road barrier. Its clear cut to anyone with half a brain.
I knew a guy that kept having his mailbox destroyed by vandals. He bought an indestructible mailbox kit that a welder made and sunk a huge metal post into the ground. Someone tried to destroy the box shortly after he installed it but there was no damage. How did he know? There were pieces of baseball bat scattered all around the mailbox. Ouch!
One of my grandpa’s neighbour had similar mailbox for similar reasons. He had previously hand made custom mailboxes that kept getting clipped by teenagers. He even tried just plain mailboxes for a while and they kept getting destroyed. So he got 3/8 wall 8in steel pipe and filled it with concrete for the base, welded another section of that pipe to the top for the box, and planted it 4ft deep in more concrete. A couple of days later the ring of the bat woke up the entire block. Years later someone else attempted it and he found the aluminum bat wrapped around the box in the morning.
The comments for this video are GOLD! My addition: Buddy lives in a rural area and had constant mailbox vandalism. He mounted his mail box on a spring tension swivel. So if it gets hit it just swings away and springs back. Hasnt lost his box since.
I think these communities have a mental problem that hasn't been addressed. Teens, adults getting kicks out of running down mailboxes. If they lived in the city what would they do...run down cats?
Steve, We moved into our newly constructed house back in the early '90s. As part of the dead restrictions, we had to have one of those brick mailboxes built in the same archectural style as the home. It was approximately 2'w x 3'd x 4'h made from the same bricks as the house. The box was cemented into the streetside interior of the structure. A couple of months after moving in, we were returned home after taking our kids to a pediatrician in another town. As we drove onto our street, flashing red/blue lights were lighting up the neighborhood. We drove by a police car with a strong odor of alcohol and a unhappily handcuffed man sitting in the rear seat. We had to park a few houses away due to a brick debris field blocking the road. We walked up to the house and found a Jaguar sedan sitting sideways in our front yard. The driver's side was indented about a foot and was resting a couple of feet from the front of our house. The mailbox was reduced to pieces of brick/mortar no larger than 8 inches on a side. The Jaguar was sitting in middle of the debris field. A man was walking around the car, stopping and uttering expletives while rubbing the back of his head. He did this for about an hour while stopping to view the damage from every angle possible. I found out he was a salesman from the local Infiniti dealer and had taken the car home for the weekend. I always try to see the humor in any situation and almost walked up to him and asked if job hunting was in his future. I decided against it. After checking the car out of the dealership, he lent the car to his pregnant girlfriend. She then let her brother(drunk) drive the car around our block a few times for a quick joyride. It is a residential neighborhood with lots of young families and kids playing about. He raced aound the block at well above the speed limit. The last curve in the road is tight enough to be unable to drive comfortably more than 20 mph. The police estimated he was travelling 45+ mph when he entered the curve. He spun out and slid sideways through my newly sodded yard and slammed into the mailbox. This big brick mailbox ($600) exploded in a shower of bricks. I was lucky no windows on my house were broken. My kids would have been playing in the driveway in their electric cars except this one day when my wife decided to take them to the pediatrician. The man who was driving was in the county jail awaiting ajudication of the case. I contacted his girlfriend about replacing the mailbox. My builder was still willing to rebuild it for the original price($600). She replied a judge friend stated a pole with a box afixed to the top was all that was required and she would do no more. She stated my box was illegal because it wasn't "breakaway". I told her it sure did "breakaway" and I was mandated by deed restricions as to the style. She said I would have to take her boyfriend to court. My wife and I decided the cheapest route was to pay for its replacement out of our pockets. While arranging for the re-construction, I received a letter from the county district attorney's office requesting a letter that the defendent had made "full" restitution. His attorney told the court he already paid for damages and we were made whole. I called the DA and informed him of the refusal to pay for a replacement. The DA's comment was "Oh Really!". He said thank you and hung up. The next morning the girlfriend brought us a $600 check. I can't say it was handed over with a smile and I'm glad thoughts can't kill.
I worked in procurement for a large machine shop in rural SC. We had guys that had mailbox vandalism and the like, and we had several people make mailboxes using scrap steel plate that was 1/2" (12.7mm) in thickness. The finished box looked like an ordinary box, but weighed over 50 pounds. One of the guys had some kids try mailbox baseball and his his box. The bounce back broke the rear passenger window and struck a passenger, causing injury to both the passenger and the bat holder. However, he had taken the time to measure from the center of the center line of the road and the opening of the box was on the very limit of the right of way, and was not charged...but the kids were
We had a "Gentleman's Club" that had some of the Lady Dancers on a platform along the Road in front of the Club to the entice customers to stop at the establishment. The authorities made them stop this practice after numerous traffic accidents caused by distracted drivers became a problem.
In the mid 70's, I lived in a small town in the Northeast for a few years. A three road intersection in the center of town had a flower bed in the middle of it, that somebody kept intentionally plowing through at night with a vehicle and ruining. The story goes that the town got tired of this, and hid a steel hedgehog in the flowers once again replanted. Sure enough, one night the perp drove through the flowers but got a surprise. The hedgehog ripped the oil pan and other parts from the underside of the vehicle, and a long streak of oil was left. The flowers were replanted once again, and, no more problems.
I had a friend in my home town who did the same thing because drunk drivers & kids with bats destroyed his mailbox over 6 times in as many months. After rebuilding the box in 1/4" plate & a concrete filled steel post only the drunks have managed to chip the paint since. This is in Washington state btw. It was well marked with reflective media so as to be more like a bollard in front of a business.
A farmer from where I grew up had people running over his mailbox which was halfway up the driveway, because the rural carrier turned around at their place. A natural gas well pipe (very heavy wall) and concrete solved that. Many pieces of a pickup’s front end as well as coolant and automatic transmission fluid was scattered all around, and the mailbox was scratched but basically unhurt.
Do we hold local councils/utility companies responsible when someone in a car drives into a lamp-post, or a power-pole, or a telegraph-pole? Do we hold the home owner responsible if a driver crashes into their brick/block wall? Do we hold the owners of legally parked cars responsible if a driver loses control and crashes into it? Of course not!!
My township holds me responsible for any trees or other potential hazards in the right-of-way. If I don't remove trees, etc., they'll do it for me and I have to pay for the work. Mt property has a mile of road frontage, so it's a fair bit of effort keeping it clear.
@@rangerdan824 When my township wanted to shift the burden of cutting weeds to the landowners, I was pissed. It doesn't make sense for everybody to have the capability to cut the weeds, the township could have one sickle bar mower and do everybody's. I too had a mile of frontage. I looked at the easement they had for the road on my property, and it said that they were responsible for maintaining the right of way. I went to the town board meeting where they were going to consider the new rule, and said "If you aren't going to handle all the maintenance of the right of way, I'm taking back the right of way." My property included all but about a foot of the width of the paved roadway. They backed down at that point.
My parents had an issue like this about 2 decades ago. Out in the middle of nowhere on the road they live on a bunch of teenagers kept driving by and running over multiple mailboxes with a truck at night. After replacing the mailbox about a dozen times my dad paid for one of those brick things to be built around the mailbox but the mailbox itself had a 1ft thick metal pole put 3ft in the ground then the mailbox on that with the bricks built around it. He also painted it black. The next time those teenagers came around at night they wrecked and left a bunch of pieces of the truck behind and drove off and left. A few days later my parents were served court papers that they were being sued civilly by the kids parents for his injuries and the damage to the truck. They went to court and had a lawyer and won, it was an easy win but it cost them a lot in court and lawyer fees that they were unable to recover. This was in Tennessee and around 2005
@@donnapauley8183 from my understanding they were willing to try but according to my parents lawyer the family of the teenager didn't have much money and the lawyer told them that it would cost court and lawyer fees up front for a likely judgement in my parents favor but a judgement that probably wasn't ever going to get paid. So they dropped it and went on with their lives.
@@spart0n654 > @donnapauley8183 from my understanding they were willing to try > but according to my parents lawyer the family of the teenager didn't > have much money I expect they owned things, though. Vehicle(s), TVs, ...
>.. a judgement that probably wasn't ever going to get paid. Do you not have bailiffs in the USA?
When I was a kid my neighbor put spikes in his yard to keep ppl from driving through the middle. He lost a law suit and had to pay for some teenagers car tires. So he built a small retaining wall and flower garden. That same teen completely destroyed his car on it a week later. They tried to sue him again. This time he won easily.
That teenagers parents were obviously POS for suing the landowner the second time instead of asking their child “How did you manage to drive through this guys yard again”?
@@jordanaguilar4812 They were POS for suing the first time. My brother was a passenger in a car that drove through a friends yard. When my Dad found out, he made my brother go fix the yard. It didn't matter that he was only a passenger or who else was involved. It is the lesson to teach teens that taking responsibility for their own good name is important. If you can do that, you won't damage others property.
How absurd to think you can hold a landowner responsible for this. It's tragic what happened to the guy. But he was going to suffer injuries no matter what. He had lost control of his vehicle and veered OFF the road. This is like trying to sue someone for putting a dent in your bumper after you drove onto their property and ran them over.
@@FinneasJedidiah But it'd also be like that if the land owner had any secure structure on his property at that point. A brick and concrete fence is as much a 'booby trap' as a concrete mailbox by that logic.
@@FinneasJedidiah it can be a fuzzy line sometimes Most people would consider this reasonable property defense, I'd agree But It would be possible to argue it was a trap because he knew they would be there and it was designed to cause them some form of harm, even if by their own doing
When we moved to our current rural property, I set my mail box post in a short section of 16" PVC pipe filled with potting soil and planted a Jasmine vine. Then anchored a trifold trellis for it to climb. Couple of months later my trellis is gone, well that's nice, not! I build my own out of 5/8" steel rods and concrete it 3' in the ground. About a week later my wife tells me a man is out there yanking on it. Turns out to be the state highway man. He admitted to taking the 1st, & tells me I can't have it, and that I need to turn my mail box around, just as our mail carrier drives up, he proceeded to tell her that her truck didn't have required flashing lights. She corrected him on both items. I told him I wanted my trellis returned, which he didn't. Anyways I had already had a dust-up over poorly maintained hwy right of way, causing drainage incursion onto my property. I didn't call his boss, rather, his boss's boss in the capitol. Next day there were 4 pieces of heavy equipment fixing the drainage. I have not heard back from him since...
I fortified my mailbox a few years back. It served two purposes, to prevent someone from hitting it to destroy it and prevent their vehicle from hitting my house if it kept going.
If the decision hadn’t gone this way, I wonder how long it would have been that lawyers would use that to argue that a pedestrian on the side of the road was at fault for being hit by a car.
depends on how effectively they could argue that a pedestrian on the side of the road could constitute enough of a hazard to be dangerous to the vehicle and its driver. And I don't think that would be possible at all, even if this decision had been the other way.
Imagine a bar fight. "Your honor the defendant assaulted my fist with their unreasonable hard head when I punched them." or imagine if you expose the government breaking a law and then you get in trouble for exposing their crimes. ...wait a minute
Many years ago, when I lived in Cincinnati, OH, I heard this story: A home owner owned a house on a corner lot, and city buses would make a right hand turn around this corner. The problem was that the bus drivers would not plan the turn correctly and often ran over the corner of his property. He complained to the bus folks several times, but the overruns continued. So, the owner contacted a quarry and had a huge rock placed in that corner of his property. Problem solved, although at owner's expense.
I drove by one of those ‘i’m putting this rock here on the corner so you quit ruining my yard’ boulders a few weeks ago. Someone had obviously hit it because it was two feet away and on its side XD
That was definitely the right court decision. 15 or so years ago I had to rebuild my mailbox after someone ran it over. You could follow the tire tracks where they almost hit a telephone pole after they hit my mailbox. After calling them, I asked the officers who showed up if I could put in a metal post instead of the wood one that it had been destroyed? He said "sure" and pointed out that the mailbox wouldn't pose as much problem to a vehicle that the telephone pole would, and they were both approx. the same distance off of the road. The Post Office refused to give me ANY guidance on how it should be built, how high to make it off of the ground or how far off of the road it should be so I just built it in the same old hole and put it the same height as my neighbors. This time with 4" square steel tubing which wouldn't offer near as much of a barrier that the telephone pole would - that is less than 20' away. If the power company isn't responsible for an immovable object, there is no way any individual should be. BTW, this was in CA so I'm not sure why this had to take so long to litigate in another state.
@@Sylusssss not really, it makes more sense to sue the city/county/state actor responsible for public road maintenance if they have been unreasonably derilict in their snow/ice clearing duty.
I too had an issue with vandalism involving mine (and other's) mailboxes. I too "fortified" my mailbox, but i used a tree growing next to the mailbox to assist in the fortification process by way of self welded up brackets and braces. Thank God i lived in Florida (almost never ice on the road,) and the road was paved. After i moved the house was put on the market, and apparently the mail service in Florida deems it necessary to remove the mailbox while the house is not occupied. I heard from my realtor that many many arduous attempts were made to remove my mailbox, without success. This was twenty plus years ago, and i smile proudly every time i think of that mailbox, as i am now, smiling my a••• of.😁
I had a friend who lived on the outside of a sharp turn, and people kept running off the road and mowing down anything left in his front yard, one who almost hit his house. He went to a lumber yard, bought some creosote poles (the kind you mount electrical service drops and meters to), cut them up, and sunk them into his front yard along the curve, sticking up about 3 feet and 4 feet apart. He then petioned the county to put a a warning sign. It took the county 2 years to get a sign up. In the mean time severl people hit one or more of his posts, but nobody sued him, nor tore up his yard either.
![[4K] Watch SpaceX Catch A Starship Rocket From Space!!! #IFT5](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/pIKI7y3DTXk/mqdefault.jpg)
All drivers have an obligation to AVOID hitting stationary objects.
Hahahaha naw your the crazy one
For self preservation if nothing else.
I can see one case where a fortified mailbox can be bad is if someone has an accident and has to decide what to hit in a split second and pick the least valuable and dangerous object to hit. Picking a mailbox over a person or another car or something is logical.
@@Minderz at the same time what if that was a person? If you cant drive safely with the regular hazards you shouldnt even be on the road. Differant state but in CA if conditions are to dangerouse for set speed limit you are speeding. This could be rain after a dry spell or when the roads are icy.
They will sue for your tree being too strong, the wall of your home being too sturdy, and probably in the victim in an accident for paint damage and denting jk
A few years back, there was a story on my social media about a guy whose mailbox was constantly being hit by the neighborhood plow service. He made a lot of complaints, but it only seemed like complaining pissed them off, because he was noticing that the mailbox was being hit MORE frequently, not less. So he fortified it in a similar way to this story, basically turning it into a steel box mounted on a rebar-reinforced concrete post. He then called the plow company and warned them not to hit his mailbox again.
Apparently, not long after, he was woken up in the middle of the night by the sound of a collision and screeching metal. The plow truck was practically wrapped around the mailbox, which appeared to be basically unscathed. In the post, the guy mentioned that the tracks looked like the plow truck deliberately went out of their way to hit the mailbox, completely ruining the plow and totalling the vehicle. I don't remember if the company tried to sue or if the driver was injured or what, but the guy who posted the story just seemed pleased that he wouldn't have to keep replacing his mailbox.
I can’t believe that this is even a lawsuit. The mailbox did not run out in front of the car,
@@sharonbowers9929 its america they sue for anything and everything
I remember this story. Good for that guy who fortified his mailbox. The plow company were AHs
@@TheBananaman491lawyers are the bane of society. Most of the unelected bureaucrats are lawyers
it was a greentext story, which means there's a 90% chance it was made up for the lulz. Fun for a story though.
I was a mail carrier on a rural route. One man's mailbox got smashed by kids driving by with a baseball bat. He replaced the box, soon the same thing happened. He welded up a box from 3/8" steel plate, installed it. It got hit the same way. I heard through the grapevine that a kid had a broken wrist, elbow and permanent nerve damage from "falling down".
Very similar situation on my end. Kids kept hitting our mailbox when I was a kid, so dad fortified it and the kid broke their arm. Also in a rural place... I wonder if it's the same lol
Lol
@@grodon909I’m guessing kids do this in rural areas because their isn’t much to do out their. 🤦🏽♀️
@@cherrelleg8276 Are you claiming there's no vandalism in urban areas?
@@robertawalsh2995, Thats not at all what that person said. They didn't even imply it.
The fact that you can get sued for someone else's stupidity and/or mistake is the dumbest concept in this country. Someone tried to sue me once because their brat hopped my fence and fell in my under construction pool and broke their leg. Thank god I had a security camera back there that showed that the kid clearly entered my yard illegally and I had a padlock on my gate leading to the front of the house which gave me an expectation of privacy which the kid violated. The fact I had to jump through hoops to prove that my backyard is my private property and no one should have been back there other than myself or the guys building the pool just shows how stupid this sue happy country is
happens all the time against my fellow truckers and more times then not they are found guilty not of anything they did immediately but because they had a fancy lawyer and all they do is target truckers they win a verdict regardless theres a current case with a Werner driver trucker did everything right. Conditions were some what bad the trucker didn't leave his lane but guy on opposite lane came across lost control hitting the werner truck driver and they the lawyers found him at fault for driving on unsafe conditions but hey he never left his lane but those same conditions seem not apply to the 4 wheeler gotta love the double standard. currently, Werner trying take to the supreme court sadly it appears a losing battle these truck lawyers are no better then ambulance chasers.
@@Tommygunz106 they are ambulance chasers in a way.
Imagine going to court arguing "it's your fault I got hurt driving through your yard".
The way things are going I'm surprised the driver DIDN'T win the suit.
With so many instances of criminals suing the place/persons they robbed/property destroyed I would definitely have thought the court would've ruled against the property owner.
He wasn't in their yard he was 21" from the edge of the pavement.
Damn cops profiling. Pulling over everyone driving down the sidewalk
@@dsandoval9396 Yeah I heard about a time that a robber was on the roof of a house he was trying to break into, he fell threw the roof and got hurt and sued the owner and won....🤔how is this even possible...
@@turboimport95 oh yeah, I heard about that too! 🤦♂️
I don't remember the details but I remember something about that now that you mentioned "robber falling through the roof and sueing the owners".
Unfortunately (and sadly) that's just the state of the world we live in. And I live in CA so imagine the asinine crap I have to put up with.
First chance I get I'm moving somewhere with less people and laws that don't just ensure my right to be a victim.
This reminds me of when somebody built a giant snowman around a 10' tree stump in the middle of their yard and some ass thought it would be funny to drive through the snowman to obliterate it.
Stay on the road, people.
Saw that picture last month on RUclips.
I remember that one! I howled!
Best story all day I've got to find it
@@zxggwrt Good luck on finding the story!
@@jtc1947 not that hard to find! It seems to happen every year!
I know of two similar stories:
1) Halloween someone was frustrated people kept intentionally running over his large pumpkin. Found the biggest they could, filled it with concrete resulting it a totaled truck.
2) Winter someone kept running over their snowman. They built a new snowman in another place around a tree stump. Another totaled truck.
As a kid i knew a lady who told of when she was a kid , that kids would go out on holloween and tip over out houses (this was before bathrooms were inside the homes). One neighbor always had his outhouse tipped over so one holloween the home owner went out just at dusk and moved the outhouse over a few feet. Several kids fell into the hole where the outhouse had been sitting. Seems his outhouse was not turned over again.
Putting a cardboard box over a brick and asking your unknowing friend how far he thinks he can kick the box.
Post links
Stuff like this makes me glad there are drainage ditches all over my neighborhood, including surrounding my house, starting 3 feet away from my mailbox, so it would be really hard to hit it and not end up in the ditch.
Back in the 70' there was crew in my area that was knocking off mail boxes by driving by holding a tire iron out the window. A guy I know who owned a gravel pit had lost his box multiple times, rebuilt his box by sinking a "H" beam and then bending some 8 gauge steal from old hopper he had at his gravel pit. A few weeks later the vandalism crew was making their rounds and when the kid in the front seat holding the tire iron hit the box, instead of knocking the box off, it ripped the tire iron out of his hand, went through the open rear passenger window and hit the kid sitting behind him in the face. He was hurt really bad. ICU for several days. Weeks in the hospital. They tried to sue the guy who beefed up his box, but it went nowhere.
hell yeah
Play stupid games win stupid prizes!
In Guilford CT they had snow plow drivers playing a game of who can plow the closest to the mail boxes. They destroyed thousands 0f mail boxes. One guy sick of replacing his mailbox 5 to 6 times every winter. Fortified his mailbox that he moved back 10 ft onto his property. When a plow hit it? It broke the clamps holding the plow on the truck. They needed a payloads to load the plow on the truck. They sent him a 15000 dollar bill. He refused. The town maintenance manager came with the police threatening to arrest him if he didn't pay. He introduced the post master of CT to them. The post master laid down his paperwork and said we don't know which drivers hit the 750 mailboxes this year. But we know this driver hit this one. And if you arrest this man because your man hit his box? We're going to hit you man with 750 counts of destruction of federal property plus 350 dollar fine times 750. The town rolled up their papers . and he never heard from them again.
YES! Destroying a mailbox is a Federal crime. When you buy it in the store it is YOUR property and falls under State jurisdiction if someone damages or steals it. Once you install it it to be used becomes Federal property.
@@donotneed2250 for it to be protect it needs to pass the postal test. They have the stamp on them.
I think some people just forget that there are certain core, basic things in our society that you don't want to mess with, because certain things have a lot more legal protection for consumers than they would now, and I think it's in part because the laws were created long ago, back when society was different and more accountable. Is that cynical? Is it accurate? Whatever. It's my feeling. Haha
If you hit a mailbox with a 10' setback you're going out of your way to hit them.
Excellent!!
There ARE usually laws against "booby trapping" because of the danger it poses to first responders. It would be very difficult to convince a judge that a sturdy mailbox counts as a booby trap.
I can hear the judges brain disconnect as soon as someone says "But what if a first responder hits that mailbox?!"
I would wager hitting a reinforced mailbox reasonably far onto somebody's property is legally no different than hitting a tree.@@Puddingskin01
It is not just first responders. It is to protect everyone including criminals from tripping a trap.
@@Shadow-bk1im My opinion, If you cant read the "traps set" sign you want whats coming.
@@charliehedrick6414 it is less about deserving and more about the law. I agree that those people have what it is coming to them but the law doesn't and that is what I am pointing out.
Back In the 70’s & 80’s, I worked sales for a pre-cast concrete company that made large steel reinforced planters. Our best customer was a local city that used them to replace wooden planters they had used for many years. The first sale was quite large age we sold 2-3 replacements every year for ones hit by cars. They liked the concrete one because, even though they didn’t survive any better than the wooden ones, the cars weren’t able to just drive away and the replacement was on their insurance and not the taxpayers.
Now that was using your head. Common sense is no longer common though...
Small world.. if thats the same Stephen Given that lives in vancouver
Its all about money
@@mmmgy9727 it’s about trying to use the law, to effectively swindle common folks out of their money to pay for drivers’ stupidity...
@@FirstLastOne more like, Common sense isn't common enough.
The best fortification I've ever seen was a regular mailbox surrounded by steel pipes that would cause the vehicle to be trapped. We had a problem with a local kid who had a big 4X4 and would routinely hit mailboxes with his oversized bumpers. Nobody would ever witness the crime until one neighbor buried 4 inch steel pipes to a height that the bumper would clear, but the differential would get hung on. It only happened one more time and that kid stranded his big 4X4 on top of those steel pipes. The kid was subsequently charged with property destruction and reckless driving.
That's genius
I feel like if that had been allowed, people would be very quick to "accidentally" run into houses for money.
I agree, toe this is no different than if they had ran into something else on the property.
Very little recognition is given to the fact that many drivers try to maintain their habitual rate of speed (e.g.70 mph) on icy and snowy roads.
Hence, their expected injuries if they crash are greater than if they had left their sense of urgency behind and left their house 15-30 minutes earlier to compensate for the worst spots of snow and ice.
Well, the difference here is that the mailbox was in the public right of way. A house isn't. I can't see any reasonable difference in that if it were a tree instead of a mailbox. Or a boulder, for that matter. If the driver hadn't been driving above the safe speed, the black ice wouldn't have effected his travel so much. I live in an area that, during the Winter, has black ice everywhere. There are many turns on the roads that are perpetually in shadow. Black ice loves to form there, and being that we are near the ski resorts and the California border, we have drivers through here that have never driven in black ice conditions before. They're scattered all over the road and in ditches regularly, because their habit is to go as fast as (usually) safely possible - but in good driving conditions. Better it happen here in the valley than up on the mountain roads, where a mistake like that can easily lead to a 200 foot fall off a sheer cliff where your car (and corpse) may not be found until Spring.
@@jamesrandolph1045 My brother's house in on the corner at a intersection. He had a shorter concrete block fence installed so it curves and faces the road. He had the regular rebar put in but he also had concrete poured in the empty concrete space to keep cars from ever crashing through his wall and into his house. The majority of people will be okay. It's those exceptions: Someone driving recklessly or a drunk driver coming driving by. Cars can really do a crazy amount of damage to a house.
My parents had a restaurant and a customer came in regularly. He did not have a job so made a living by slamming on his brakes in his car and being hit from behind and winning money in the lawsuit. My mother told him he was going to slam on his brakes one day at the wrong time. A few months later he slammed on his brakes and turned out the vehicle behind him was an 18 wheeler. It ran completely over his car and the car was left being approx 18 inches high, and the driver of the car was killed instantly.
A while back a farmer in my home county kept getting his mailbox taken out. He figured it was on purpose because he had a kid in high school that was picked on. He had enough and dug a deep hole and placed a steel pipe in the hole and cemented it in. He then welded his new home made all steel mailbox to the pipe. A while later he heard a loud crash in the middle of the night and went down his drive with his flashlight and saw a pickup truck wrapped neatly around his pipe, but his mailbox was still standing. In the truck were three teenage boys from his kids class messed up and bleeding. He did not get charged and those boys learned a valuable lesson.
Because of your picture of Bender, I was able to read this in his voice. It was glorious.
@@wr85487 *Bender:* _Bite my shiny metal mailbox!_ /s
The definition of "play stupid games, win stupid prizes"
Great lesson for idiots
@@geoffbeidler pshh. bet they didn't pull that bullshit again
Next door neighbor (happened to be my uncle) kept getting his mailbox clobbered by county snowplows. Sometimes as often as half a dozen times per winter. County claimed it was his problem, and refused to replace them after about the third one. The years go by, and after about 5, he was sick and tired of replacing his mailbox due to lazy plow drivers. His cure was to sink a chunk of 12 inch I-beam six feet deep, leaving 2 feet sticking up. Then he put a 55 gallon drum, with enough of a cutout in the bottom to fit, over the I-beam. Sunk the drum about a foot, then filled it with sand. Into the sand he sunk a 6 inch thick fencepost, then mounted his mailbox on it. Sprayed the whole thing hunter-orange, used a hose to make sure the sand was good and soaked, and waited for winter. Time passed, winter came, the wet sand froze into a solid block around the I-beam. Probably couldn't have moved it with a bulldozer. End of January rolls around, and a jeezer of a snowstorm hit. Plows rolled. Nothing the first pass. Nothing the second pass. Nothing the third pass. At a little after 3AM the next morning, I (and everybody else in the family) awakened to a god-awful noise, and the house shaking. We got to looking around, and there's a County Road Commission snow plow laying on its side in our front yard, with a mangled Vee-plow semi-sorta-kinda attached, and most of the front-end just barely attached to the rest of the truck, and a dumptruck load of salt/sand mix spread from here to next week along a trail of debris and gouged ground.
As near as anybody could reconstruct the scene, the plow driver lifted the plow to cross the railroad tracks, dropped it again once across, and punched the go-pedal. Somewhere in the 500 or so feet between the railroad tracks and the mailbox, he picked up a good bit of speed, oozed a bit too far right, and clipped the (quite thoroughly frozen) mailbox at what the state police investigators said had to be at least 40MPH (road was pegged for 35), mostly ripping the plow and front of the truck off the chassis, spun the truck end-for-end at least three times based on the tracks, rolled it, flipped down the embankment into the ditch in front of our house, flipped again once it got to the bottom of the 10-ish foot embankment, and came to rest about 15 feet from our front door - about 100, maybe 125 feet from the mailbox.
Road commission TRIED to pin something on my uncle, but failed miserably, since to hit the mailbox (even with the Vee-plow on the front) the truck had to be nearly 6 feet off the pavement, practically driving in the ditch. Driver of the plow was dazed and confused, but otherwise undamaged, but the truck was a total write-off.
The mailbox? The 55 gallon drum was partly torn off the frozen block of sand, but the ice/sand block was still standing, and the mailbox itself was completely untouched and usable 'til spring, when it was rebuilt. Oddly enough, it never got hit again in the 15 or so years I lived in that house before striking out on my own.
That is the most awesome mailbox story I have ever heard! I drove truck in Minnesota 42 years and our farmers "fortify " their mailboxes also. Never got hit again,legendary!
We do a little trolling. Your neighbor had his moment raging against the machine.
Consequences are the best teacher, and the only teacher of government
This story belongs in Reddit's ProRevenge or something. Well done!
Must have been the same driver hitting it all the time
In truth, those who deliberately vandalise private mailboxes, are the 'cause' of the fortified mailbox - The injured driver should take out a suit, not against the homeowner but all convicted of deliberate mailbox destruction - without them, that mailbox would never have been neither needed nor built...
In an unincorporated area just west of New Orleans, a guy's house kept on getting impacted by vehicles because kids liked to speed around a corner and, as kids, they got sloppy with their driving (not to mention occasional alcohol involvement). Drivers kept on hitting his house. He put up some yellow & black warning signs on steel posts similar to the ones used to hold up street signs. They got knocked over three times and his porch kept on getting crunched. So finally he put up new warning signs mounted on steel railroad rails anchored in concrete about six feet deep. The next such incident involved a car that actually bent the rails a little. The porch was intact but the car was totaled. The driver lived, sued for damages, and lost. PLUS was fined for failure to maintain control of a vehicle.
Neighbor had the same issue, used RR rails, boxed it in siding, looked like a wooden post.😢
He obviously needed ballards put up around his property.
Too bad the homeowner had to resort to such extreme measures.
Good decision
I hope the homeowner got his legal fees covered by the plaintiff.
How many immoveable objects are within range of an out-of-control car? Light poles, utility poles, walls, buildings ...
You forgot trees.
There is an argument that could be made with things that was it placed there with a purpose and could it have been done so it would minimize potential danger.
Also there's a question that can be asked about parked vehicles relating to this.
I can understand how people in different places of the world argue through these things and end up with different conclusions. Also apologies for bad English.
Trees...
Guard rails, drainage ditches, overpass pillars, a home, parked car… Would have spurred all sorts of lawsuits had this ruling gone the other way.
Immovable depends on speed.
So we live out on a country road, but decided to get a P.O. Box since the mailbox was always targeted for vandalism/theft. Our mailbox was the first of five on a single post, with a long T-Bar on the top. Our neighbor's boxes also got bashed down with a bat, and we got a witness who said the culprits were five teens in a car. They drove down slowly, smashing them in horizontal swings. So we filled our box with cement, and left it there to shield the others.
Two months later, a car crashes nearby. Three teens and two bats in the car. A week later, they sue us: Claiming that they lost control of the vehicle when attempting to smash our box, as the person who'd swung the bat had *hit a solid concrete block with a filled metal bat*. Shattered his own arm, and screams made his driver crash.
The court threw it out, forced them to pay for our damaged fence, forced them to apologize to *everyone on the street*, and to pay for *everyone's box* that they had ever hit, to get a brand new one. But for almost two weeks, it looked like we would have to buy them a new car, and pay almost 25k in medical bills.
That's on the level of "I'm going to sue this homeowner because the spray-paint can I was using to vandalize their wall gave me brain damage"
It's funny, they wouldn't have gotten injured at all if they hadn't chosen to do what they did. Both their pride and pocketbooks would be intact.
This is why you stop @ kicking over trash cans on your bicycle!
Also, if you make a routine out of messing with people, people will mess with you back.
I like making slow drivers in the fast lane pay, everyone is welcome! I got 2 today, one was a guy towing a generator which took 10 miles to realize I was doing to him what he was doing to everyone else!
@@editedforprivacy207 that is misdemeanor at best, yes those boys were out being jackass kids but sending kids to an American prison where they will either be traumatized or made into hardened criminals and ruining their lives with a felony they will carry till the day they die over a mailbox is utterly asinine 🤦
@@robdeskrd Reality is, messing with anything relating to the post is a federal crime.
A local farmer got tired of his barn getting hit on a corner. He put jersey barriers around the barn. They been hit a dozen times and sued each time. Court tossed every case for same reasons in this video.
I'm a mail carrier from Michigan and what always surprises me is the creativeness of people who are tired of their mailboxes getting constantly taken out.
I'm pretty sure there's a business venture to be had there - every mailbox you see gets smashed, you tell a friendly handyman to go fix itin a way it wong get smashed again and you get a cut.
@@rafezetter8003 Large diameter steel pipe or box and a smaller diameter steel pipe for the pole welded to the bottom. You can put a nice redwood door and awning on that paint if and make it look pretty. But underneath it's all steel. Make sure to put reflectors on it.
Did you see that video of a porch pirate trying to steal a package rigged with a flashbang? The house owner was a former Marine who told him, to put it politely, that he's a weak man and to get a job.
Trouble is if you secure it to a point it can't be knocked down and someone gets injured, surprisingly you are made responsible.
but USPS requires that mailboxes be break away
It's idiotic to think that someone running into your property could even sue you. I cannot stand frivolous lawsuits.
It wasn't his property.
I can't stand frivolous lawyers.
”I can’t stand frivolous lawyers.”
You really thought you did something there, didn’t you? Spoken like a true half-wit.
Lawyers represent clients, yes they choose who they represent but the fact that this case went to the state Supreme Court and 2 judges dissented and thought is should be decided by a jury means that this lawyer was NOT “Frivolous” his client actually had a chance of winning this case.
Think before you type.
To avoid looking like a fool.
@TBirum1 just because two judges dissented doesn't mean I'm the fool for thinking it's idiotic for someone to sue a property owner because the first individual left the roadway and damaged the second individual's property.
Maybe you should think before speaking and showing yourself to be the fool.
Just remember, messing with a mailbox is a FEDERAL crime
The most un enforced law ever.
Right next to illegal immigration these days.@@zoggrog8823
*defacing or destroying a mailbox is a federal crime. The law doesn't say you can't make it indestructible.
@@SethSkoda I don't think the OP was referring to the home owner, but to the people destroying the mailbox.
@@MarieAnne. Ah, okay. Good point. They really shouldn't be doing that.
There are 8" pipes filled with concrete in almost every commercial parking lot to keep motorists from striking buildings, cart corrals, electric and gas meters, ect.
Yup they’re called bollards. Here in NYC they are very common. Many busy intersections have bollards to protect pedestrians in case of a runaway vehicle accidentally or otherwise. They also line the perimeter of many federal buildings, courts, and even banks.
My father lived on a corner lot and had his fence taken out regularly by a$$h@les driving too fast around the corner and not able to keep their cars on the road even though the fence line was a good 3 feet off of the right of way. He got tired of constantly repairing the fence and was worried that one day one the cars would go flying through his house so he installed 3 concrete filled bollards to protect his house and fence.
People still ran off the road but the bollards protected his house and fence. Several times I was at his house and heard cars squeal around the corner followed by a clang as they hit the bollards. This worked until one night we heard an idiot revving his engine hard down the road and launched with his wheels squealing. I don't know how he thought he was going to make the curve but he managed to hit all 3 bollards pushing the first one about 30% off center and slightly tilting a second one before the rear end of his car spun around hit the last bollard that finally stopped him. I sure his car would slammed into the house if not for the bollards.
The ground around his car was littered with beer cans and whisky bottles from his car but when the police showed up instead of citing the driver they said the bollards created an unreasonable road hazard. The jerk tried to sue my father when his insurance refused to pay for his car but the judge dismissed the case saying it had no merit. However the town forced my father to not only remove the bollards but also his fence as road hazards even though they had approved the building permits for them. My father sold the house and moved but a few years later we drove by his old house. The town had installed speed bumps on both sides of the corner and the new owner had reinstalled the fence and bollards!
Due care in parking lots means that drivers should not exceed 20 kph /12 mph due to mixed and unpredictable traffic, unlike rural roads where the speed limit is likely to be 4 times higher. Not the same situation.
@@ZeusBike333 Where I am a dumb teenager decided it was a great idea to 60 mph down a house lined city street. He hit a speed bump, went airborne and smashed the car into a brick fence. He and his friend had minor injuries but his little sister in the back was killed.
Had a similar situation teenagers kept vandalizing my mailbox with baseball Bat So I reinforced it with Flat steel rods Not even a few days later down the road a kid had his arm broken High school kid Part of the baseball team coincidences They tried to hold me liable because he broke his arm trying to break my mailbox They called the police and everything And results the family got Fined for Vandalism a kid had to deal with his broken arm
We tried that at our house. Than a snowplow hit it and bent it backwards and it was a bitch to fix. I have heard of a local that reinforced his and than also made it a swivel at the bottom with springs. So no more baseball bat problems and no more snowplow problems.
By the way I'm not blaming the snowplow. Snow gets so deep where I live that even the drifts that they are pushing to the side have enough weight to mess up mailboxes without the blade ever touching them.
@@Ahw1231 ha ha
all this over a mailbox.
Have you looked into a Mail Box Cluster? And set as far off the street as possible.
You are really very lucky not to be in prison on top of liable for the kids injuries. What you did was essentially the same thing as setting a booby trap and that is a felony in almost all jurisdictions. "Booby traps are actually illegal, and the courts have taken this stance over and over. Even with the excuse of self-defense, setting up traps to harm someone else is illegal. It doesn't matter how effective the movies may make this seem. People cannot do it, and they will be liable for injuries that these traps cause." If there is a reasonable foreseeable cause of bodily harm, and in this case as you say there was bodily harm, and it could easily be argued you INTENDED bodily harm, then not only are you going to be financially liable for the damage you caused but also criminally liable.
@@MAtildaMortuaryserver What part of police were called and they were charged with vandalism do you not understand your logic implys if I replace my front door to a metal door and a thief breaks his leg trying to break in its my fault that's not booby traping welding metal to a mailbox which was very clear to see I didn't hide it in the slightest is a whole lot different than making a contribution to harm someone when they interact with it it's just like putting stone around your mailbox and someone tries to break it and break there arm it's very easy to see its reinforced even the courts say I was in the right for trying to protect my property the way I did so stop trying to play lawyer your bad at it it's very simple a vandal tried to break my mailbox and broke there arm end of story.
@@MrAnony07 I from the UK and and have only two things to say 1good for you, and 2 servers the little bastard right , should teach him not to be a bloody little vandal again.
I had this problem once when I was young and living in a trailer park. There was a speed bump on the road that centered my 2 space parking area in front of my trailer and instead of people slowing to cross the bump, they would dodge into my parking spaces to avoid the bump. Very often these people would take out my mailbox due to bad judgement when performing this maneuver and even damaged my trucks bumper once. It was a running joke as to how many times I had to replace the mailbox. Being a Welder / Fabricator I sank a 10"X10"X1/2" inch thick steel tube 5' deep in concrete and welded on a 12"X12"X1/2" top to act as the box. One guy in particular would take great amusement in destroying my box by purposely running over it and then bragging about it. Well, the day came while sitting eating dinner, I heard a great crash and looked out my window only to see that guys truck literally wrapped around my mailbox. My box didn't even give an inch. No charges could be brought against me due to being on private property...and the owner of the park was tired of people dodging his speed bumps. I've gone back over 20 years later and my box still stands to this day.
Leave it to a Welder to solve a problem... and it will be solved forever! 🍻
What a great story!
Controversy: Stick, Mig or Tig ?
@@citylockapolytechnikeyllcc7936 I used a 220v Buzz Box Stick. Root 6011 and cap e7018
I'd have gone with replicating an M2 .50 BMG barrel, albeit a touch longer for the two foot footer.
The footer, not being well specified being 12" thick, reinforced 10000 pound test concrete, a foot below the surface and ten x ten feet, to ensure that the box couldn't possibly tilt into the roadway proper.
I had the same homeowner experience at a previous rural residence. Most residents like me had 10 acres or more, with homes set back a good way. Mailboxes were sparse and subject to frequent vandalism. Mine was destroyed two times within a few months after moving there. Owning a company whose work included some steel fabrication, I replaced the post and box with a very sturdy steel custom-made box that was 3/8-inch plate and had a 6-inch square x 1/2-inch wall tube post embedded about 4 feet into an 8-inch diameter concrete filled hole. I wanted to be sure that hitting it with a bat would be unrewarding, and deliberately driving into it as some would do was certain to cause vehicle damage.
I also have a conscience about anyone being injured from such an obstacle, so it included a heavy plate flange connection a few inches above ground level that was held by four 1/4" bolts. I even used low-strength grade 2 bolts to be sure they would shear off with a hard impact. The portion from the flange up weighed about 100 pounds. I lived there for 5 years after that installation. I saw numerous pieces of shattered wood bats, and the mailbox was sheared off two times, with evidence of vehicle damage such as broken grille pieces, etc. Just a little scratched paint on my mailbox and took me about 10 minutes to get it out of the ditch, clean the mud off, and re-bolt it to the flange.
One of my cousins lived out in the country. He worked at a truck repair place. People were running over his mailbox so he used a heavy duty truck spring and attached it at the bottom of the pipe. It would bend down if they hit it but it would rip up the bottom of their car before springing back up. He had a collection of mufflers that kids had left behind.
After reading a good dozen stories, this one here is my favorite. It wouldn't total the vehicle, but I bet they wished it did.
This is...elegant in conception and exquisite in delivery. Kudos to your cousin, sir!
I love it!!
Reddit is full of similar stories. Ramming mailboxes with pickup trucks seems to be a popular pass time.
@@johnkochen7264 ramming them with trucks, or in the old days, take a baseball bat and hit a mailbox drive by home run
I had a neighbor in Vermont years ago. Fred was in his 70's and had retired from the state road dept. Before he retired, he had some kind of ongoing dispute with a fellow road dept employee. Well, Fred's mail box would get crushed many times during the winter by the state snow plows, which just so happened to be driven by the guy he had the problems with.
One day i see Fred with a back ho, digging a hole about 6 feet deep right next to the road. He then sunk a solid steel pole, about 8 inches thick in the center of that hole, then filled it in with cement. On top of the pole he mounted his mailbox. The following winter i hear a loud crash, and sure enough, there was a snowplow, half way onto Fred's property, busted up to the point it needed to be towed away. Old Fred never had to replace a mail box again.
I grew up in the border region of Vermont and NH, and well, i think i ahve heard of Fred's Conquest.
@@dreamwolf7302 it did make the news. The state was angry the plow got destroyed. The driver tried to sue Fred. Cops got involved because supposedly he had built a road hazard. In the end, he won the court battle because of how far onto his property the plow was, etc etc. Fred was my hero.
@@fcorso1313 In my home town, we had a local mechanic who got tired of the road crews hired by the board of select camping his lot, and damaging customer cars, that he bought a bunch of parking boots, and installed them on the road crew vehicles over night, and refused to remove them until he was paid for the use of his private business parking lot.
New Englanders just have a different mindset lol.
8in solid steel? Honestly i doubt it
@@AlessioSangalli i could drive down to the local metal shop, and an 8inch solid steel rod. Pricey, but not hard to find. they are called Roof Stilts by so0me, and are often used to make large covered areas, for farm equipment and such.
After having our mailbox destroyed 5 times by vandals my husband was fed up. (We live on a dirt road so the mailbox in actually in our yard just off the road.) So he made a post out of steel I beam. Many tried to knock it down but failed.
Then a 17 year old hit it while driving his parents expensive SUV. Recklessly. It totaled the vehicle. The teen wasn't hurt. The mail box survived. They were going to sue but never did. Insurance guy told us they didn't have a case and dropped it.
Bottom line... steel beam lasts.
Smart insurance guy
Sorry about the teen.
@@christheother9088 why? actions have consequences.
SUVS CANT MELT STEAL BEAMS!!!
The steal beam is the MVP
Reminds me of a story I heard on Reddit where a guy was going around pulling Mailboxes out of the ground and seemed to be targeting weaker mailboxes.
So OP decided to to dress up their mailbox to look as weak as possible while having a solid concrete foundation with a steel core.
Within only a few days, they came home to find a rear fender connected to their mailbox by a chain. They realized the License plate was still attached so they called their local sheriff and had the guy catch a few Felonies.
That's awesome, typically should have a license plate. It's required by law..
Why was the license plate attached to the fender? WTF kind of car was this? Most cars I've seen have mounting points on either the rear deck lid or inset with the rear bumper. Fenders are on the front of a car; they're the panels going over the front tires. Nothing about this story makes any sense.
A long time ago there was a CSI TV episode about something like this. The evil doer was a guy that fortified his mailbox with concrete. Two young idiots were the 'victims'. They were driving buy hitting mailboxes with a baseball bat. When they hit the fortified mailbox it caused them to have an car accident and they died. WOW, CSI was so wrong. Those kids were at fault.
I heard about the fortified mailbox concept in the '80s. The CSI episode seems to be a response to the concept from people who don't like the idea of individuals being able to protect their property.
What a lot of people are ignoring is that vandalizing a mailbox is a federal crime; from the USPS website:
"Mailboxes are protected by federal law and crimes against mailboxes (and the mail inside) are investigated by Postal Inspectors. Those who are convicted of destruction of federal property could spend up to three years in jail and be fined up to $250,000."
There's a lot of "FA, FO" here, real and potential, and it's nice to see the people fighting back getting a break for once.
It depends, my state, which has a snowy winter, has laws against building solid items in the right of way if the speed limit is high enough. They also cut down the trees in the right of way.
@@jarboyjarboy6855 I wonder if they still apply when it’s not snowing, and damaging the object on the side of the road was intentional?
You are, to some degree, responsible for your own safety. We don’t fence every cliff in the wilderness either.
That person also did so with an intent to harm and had filled the actual mailbox with concrete. Very different situations.
also, the mailbox had been installed 20 years previously. Assuming in that 20 years there hadn't been such an incident, surely that proves not being a hazard to ordinary traffic.
said 96 i think so 26 years now.
Not to say it matters, but apparently he fortified the mailbox BECAUSE people kept running into it.
@@jeremyanderson3819 That may be true, but there's a huge difference in responsibility between causing harm to vandals who deliberately running into it intending to cause harm themselves, and causing additional harm to someone who runs into it by accident. Though I don't think the court is wrong here: first and foremost, the driver was responsible for his own safety. There were no other cars involved, so there had to be some level of negligence by the driver for them to hit the fortified mailbox in the first place.
@@martenkahr3365 this is exactly like the situation my Uncle's bar got into. A towtruck driver had some kind of heart attack behind the wheel and crossed traffic before ramming into my uncle's bar. The Tow company's vehicle insurance tried to claim the bar held liability for the damage to the building. If ANYTHING, the county plow service held liability because there was an impact absorbing crash barrier on the corner of the property which the towtruck went OVER. I assume it was only able to do so due to piled up snow. Nobody was injured outside of the heart attack (and he lived) but the tow truck owners had to call up their insurance provider and tell them how there's no way a building could be liable for a vehicle hitting it, and said that he wasn't going to get sued over this so he was going to fork over the money he (and his insurance) was liable for, and if the insurance company didn't reimburse they'd be seeing 'em in court for breech of contract, fraud.
@@jeremyanderson3819 he fortified it because vandals were destroying it not just because cars were hitting it. If you’re going fast enough to swerve off the road due to ice maybe you should have been going at a slower speed you could control in the event of an unexpected weather condition.
Cases like this are why I'll never be a judge.
Me: So let me get this straight. You destroyed this man's property with your vehicle and you think HE should be liable for your damages?
🤕: Yes.
Me: .....get the f... out of my court.
….and you owe the guy a new mailbox!
This is also why judges shouldn't be elected...
@@amzarnacht6710 do you understand how insane that sounds, when you could just keep the car on the road
@@amzarnacht6710 yes... let's just wrap ourselves in bubble wrap and cower in our basements.
You are part of the problem Amzar... frivolous lawsuits are tearing down and clogging up our court systems.
Lets make it simple for you:
The court ruled the way they did because there are no GUIDELINES as to what constitutes a "heavily fortified mailbox." Until there is an EXACT definition on this... a property owner can't possibly be held responsible for installing the mailbox in a manner he perceives as suitable.
Done. 📚🎓🇺🇸
@@amzarnacht6710 I think you just showed your shit hand here bud. The US HIGHWAY standards, not the US residential road standards...
Many years ago my neighbors and I had a problem with kids driving by and smashing our mailboxes. I'm a welder so I made mine with some schedule 80 pipe. Getting home shortly after I was met by some police officers and informed that a kid drove by, hit my mailbox with a baseball bat, which broke and went through the back window and knocked another kid out and was in the hospital with skull fractures. I was informed that I might face a civil lawsuit, but if that happened, i could just call the police officers. I soon did get served a lawsuit so I called the police. They called the Feds who charged all 4 boys in the car with destruction of government property and the local police charged them with criminal mischief and a few other things. The lawsuit against me was quickly dropped and I made a lot of money making mailboxes for my neighbors.
We had a similar problem on my farm. When I was a kid, teens would come through and smash all of the mailboxes along our road. You could see tire tracks where they drove off the road to run over the mailboxes. My grandpa first put a metal wire anchored about 5 feet under a concrete cylinder with a normal 4x4 post implanted 2 feet in the concrete. The cable was wrapped around the concrete a few times, leaving 10ish feet of slack. It then traveled up a channel in the back of the 4x4. At the top was a 3/8" steel plate with a normal large format mailbox mounted on it. The cable was strapped to this plate. The next time the teen ran the mailbox over, the steel plate wrapped around their front axle, breaking the Ubolts on that side and stopping the truck in the ditch, dragging this cylinder of concrete with the remains of the mailbox. The cops came out and arrested the teens and impounding their truck. Their parents tried suing for damages, my grandpa filed a counter claim. They were laughed out of court. My grandpa's counter claim was paid in full plus an additional amount per state law.
From that money, my grandpa installed a new mailbox. This was a pair of 4" drill pipes welded side by side with a pipe big enough to fit a mailbox inside. The pipes were about 10 feet long. He had them pushed into the ground with a backhoe and mounted the old mailbox in it after the mailbox was hammered back into shape. A few months later, we found a bent aluminum bat a bit down the road. Never caught how did that one, but didn't have problems again, at least not for a while. I guess the reputation of the mailbox faded from memory, until another young punk learned that smashing mailboxes is a bad idea. 30+ years and, many natural, and man made disasters later and it still stands proudly at the top of the hill.
Buddy of mine kept getting his box wrecked by some high schoolers playing mailbox baseball. After the 3rd box he sank a lalli column 4 feet in the ground, cemented it in place, and bolted a custom fabbed mailbox made from 3/8" steel on top. About 3 weeks later the kid 2 doors down broke his wrist at 2':30 am. Kid never admitted how but the baseball season was over.
On the one hand, 4 feet deep seems a little much. On the other, karmic justice can be painful.
Baseball season over...... ha ha ha
@@dustinwashburn1283 Idk if that was something that had routinely happened at my home, but we had to replace the mailbox as the box portion was falling apart. It was welded to a steel plate which was welded to a 4-5 inch diameter steel (i assume) post in the ground. The post weighed easily 120 pounds - so definitely not solid, but quite heavy and quite sturdy.
Not knowing how to do any welding, I pulled the post out and replaced it with a 4x4 and a plastic slide-over mailbox. No issues yet, but now I'm curious why such an extreme post was chosen and whether or not it will have to go back.
It's interesting to me how much argument went into the mailbox thing. Since it was an accident and not an act of vandalism, that driver could just as easily hit a light pole or retaining wall and gotten the same injuries. That he hit the mailbox was pure coincidence. It's super tragic, but that homeowner is no more responsible than a city for the durability of their light poles.
In the state of Pennsylvania if you crash into or damage either a light pole or guard rail, you pay to have it replaced. I believe 1 section of guard rail is about $400.00 I suspect it is higher now.
@@kerryedavis Would you rather flip or be impaled?
A light pole isn't likely to make you flip.
I agree with you, but just FYI, light poles are generally designed to be frangible (break off easily) for this very reason.
In my opinion it's good practice that public property be designed with things like this in mind, but it should never be a requirement to force private citizens to modify what they do with their own property on their own land. (unless the government is willing to pay for immediate replacement of all damaged, frangible property)
I’m a little conflicted tbh. I think there could be an argument if you were to disguise something to look safe, but is actually deadly (as I believe has been the case with vandalize mailboxes before). I also think that guardrails and such should be made safely. I remember there being a big issue recently with guardrails that were found to constructed improperly and which led to several motorists being impaled. On the other hand, homeowners shouldn’t be liable for every single structure on their property. A brick mailbox for example is obvious to any driver that it is a durable structure and should not creat e liability, but a concrete post painted to look like a traffic cone could.
Once you said he hit a patch of black ice, I was done. Once he lost control of the vehicle, he could have hit ANYTHING that could have paralyzed him. That’s on the driver for not maintaining a safe speed. If he hit another car head-on, could he sue them for obstructing the right of way?
Plus you have to be aware there could be black ice.
@@jamesbell1613that’s why you drive for the conditions, if it’s cold and there could be black ice on the road you need to drive accordingly.
@@fretless7099 Exactly!
@dogyerf21
> If he hit another car head-on, could he sue them for obstructing the right of way?
There's a fundamental difference between another car on the road and an item of street furniture deliberately designed and constructed to damage a vehicle which hits it.
@@anonnona8099 The mailbox was installed at 6:04 in 1996, and 7:21 it would fall down if hit by a vehicle. Besides, the motorist lost control - was the motorist driving recklessly or negligently?
I had a friend who had his mailbox on a big spring because it kept getting hit. People would hit it and it would just bounce back to its place. Looked absolutely ridiculous, but worked.
That's rad
A fantastic idea.
That's brilliant.
Well the post would survive maybe. The sheet metal box will still be crushed.
@@court2379 that would be easily solved with weatherproof canvas and flexible tent poles. That way the entire mailbox could be crushed and it would return to working conditions.
Grew up a Navy Brat. Lived in a lot of small towns. In the 70's, my folks bought a house out in the sticks. Unfortunately, it was on the only road leading to the teenagers party spot. About the fourth time some kid in a pickup ran down our mailbox, Dad went and bought an 8 foot long 6x6. We spent all day with a posthole digger on a tractor sinking it. Filled bottom with cement, dropped in the post, filled it in with concrete, and mounted the standard hardware store mailbox on top with the biggest nails he could find. We goofed on the depth, as the mailman complained it was too short. Took about 1 week before a drunk 16 year old wrapped the farm's pick-up around it. Kid was arrested for drunk driving, underaged drinking, vandalism, etc. but what really terrified him was having to explain to his Dad what happened to the truck. Farmer actually made a point of apologizing to us.
nothing like consequences from parents to put the fear of god into a child
It must be a dark road. Did you put reflectors, bright color or something to see it at night?
@@Blue-hf7xt given that they were drunk, I really don't know if any of those would have made any difference.
@@teknikal_domain also given that they were intentionally hitting it with a truck, all the reflectors in the world would not have made a difference.
PplMOmnon
Another argument: "Since I was never even given the opportunity to teach the injured man to drive properly, I certainly cannot be held accountable for his ignorance, irresponsibility, or stupidity."
Saw a report where an Old Navy Sailor mounted his mailbox on top of a half buried ships steel anchor after having his mailboxes run over for almost 2 years. He finally tiered of having someone destroy his mailbox repeatedly so he buried it in such a way that if someone intentially ran over the mailbox and which was out of the right of way, the anchors tip would pivot up and snag the vehicle as it ran over it. Sadly the Sheriffs own son ran over the mailbox, striking it at high speed with his drivers side fron bumper. The anchors tang came up through the bottom of the boys Camaro and impailed the boy though his legs. Rendering him invalid. Had he driven at it and struck it with the passengers side he would have walked away from his totaled car. And this crash ruined his College Football Scholarship. His Father (the Shreriff) came to the crash sight and threatend to kill the mailbox owner. He did this in front of the Highway Patrol Officers and was subsequently removed from his Job by the City. He was out of control anyway. So good riddance!
Parents should teach from an early the truth about consequences.
Boy, this hit home as this almost exactly happened to me. My mailbox kept getting vandalized. Tired of this, I got a 6 inch schedule 40 pipe, which is about a quarter inch thick, and cemented it 36 inches deep. One morning I get up, and the police are at the end of my driveway. Long story short, a 17-year-old hot shot who should not even have been driving at 2 o’clock in the morning, turned out of my neighbors driveway at a high rate of speed, lost control, hit my mailbox and flipped over. From what I was told he left the scene because he was underage and should not have been driving at 2 AM in the morning. The neighbor was really upset at me because it was his daughter’s boyfriend and yelled at me for putting such a heavy mailbox posting. Thanks for letting me share
His fault for being irresponsible. based on the way you're talking it seems like the kid got horribly injured or died.
Should have told the neighbor that if his daughter is a hussy to be meeting her boyfriend at 2 in the morning.
Tell ya neighbour you don't think you got it right the first time and appologise. Then tell him you are getting 1/2" not 1/4" pipe. You just wanted to make sure to warn her boyfriend before he drives off upset next time!
Tell the neighbor his daughter shouldn’t be having her boyfriend over at 2:00 in the morning.
"Hey neighbour, your daughter is a dumb broad who makes dumb choices. EAT ME."
If the court decision had found the mailbox owner liable this would IMO make government entities liable too.
Things like drainage pipes, light poles, sewer access, high curbs, even handicap cuts in curbing could be considered hazardous to motorists.
Probably why government made that decision they didn't want that can o worms.
Yep.
A motorist could also run into an overpass cement structure and sue the city for making the cement too rigid.
In my state, the government is liable for pothole damage from state roads provided the hole was reported. It's a great incentive to get potholes fixed quickly.
@@abramhunsberger3511 I'm betting that state isn't California. We have potholes that rarely get filled.
the idea that I should be liable or have softer items on my property to allow for cars to crash on it astounds me.
You live in Merica all a**holes are looking to make a quick buck even at the risk of their own health. Because current generation doesnt want to work for money.
That makes sense, though the “right of way” part of your property makes this legally “squishy”, as we heard here.
@@jimtalbott9535 Maybe the concept of "right of way" (which is a questionable term to begin with) is wrong in its basis in the first place.
no not liable...but it would be a nicer idea.
The court held that the property owner was not liable, but, if you built such a thing with the intent of deterring say mailbox vandals because they hit a reinforced mailbox and were injured then you you are and should be liable. It is not legal anywhere to set booby traps to deter criminals. A solidly reinforced mailbox that can foreseeably cause injury is a booby trap and you will be lucky not to be arrested on a felony charge. The point for the people who set this particular kind of booby trap is to cause injury so the punks stop doing mailbox vandalism. That is so illegal it is not funny and the property owner would deserve whatever the law does to him. You do not injure kids for a little vandalism no matter how grouchy that makes you. If you are having that hard a time with it go rent a PO Box, you do not get to ruin a persons life just because they acted stupid a few times as a teenager.
I used to live in a rural community. There was a family that was the target of vandals and their mailbox was the most frequently vandalized thing on their property. In order to make it more difficult to vandalize, they moved it about 3 or 4 feet from the edge of the shoulder and added a little leeway for the postman to use for access. This of course, did little to stop the vandals. One of the frequent vandals was an acquaintance of mine. He would frequently brag about his conquests. He had bumper on his pickup made from steel pipe.
Eventually, the homeowner replaced the post with a 4 inch steel pipe, filled with cement. This was installed into a cement foundation that was about 4 foot by 4 foot and maybe 2 foot thick, but covered by at least a foot of dirt. In other words, the bottom was about 3 foot down.
My "friend", not knowing about the upgrade tried to run down the mailbox as he had done many times before. I heard about it a few days later, when I saw him. He was badly bruised and cut up from going through the windshield of his truck. His truck was totaled. He looked at me and grinned behind a busted lip and said, "I guess they fixed their mailbox problem." Unfortunately for him, that was not the end of the story. Since the police determined that he had intentionally tried to destroy the mailbox, he was guilty of a felony. He ended up doing a lot of community service.
And not wearing a seatbelt …
@@geoffreylee5199 It was a 1955-ish Ford pickup. It may not have even had seatbelts… and even if it did, this was in the 70s and “real men” didn’t wear seatbelts… : -)
felony charges for stuff like this is stupid
@@vsync messing with the mail in any way has always been a felony. Whether it’s breaking the mailbox, or opening a letter that isn’t addressed to you.
@@vsync Simple... don't do stupid stuff like that and you won't get charged with a felony.
It is important to note - the Ohio Supreme Court is specifically citing that the mailbox was on the tree lawn, a specifically Ohio term, that is the right of way area between the street and the sidewalk.
Very curious as to the speed of the vehicle and his seat belt use for a truck to flip in this manner.
That was my logic going into this as well. What if the mailbox was a tree? It's likely in the same spot as you might find trees
Same here. I wondered about his seat belt because so many people who have been drivers or passengers in cars that flipped, and have their seat belts buckled, walk away uninjured.
People around here line their yards with giant stones. They do it to keep people from parking partly in their yards along the streets. If you were to lose control of your car and hit one of those it would be a major accident. And it's happened. The homeowners have never lost a case over it when sued since the stones are inside their property line, even if it's just by inches. This is how it should be. They have a right to put the stones there. I saw several who have put short brick "decorative" walls at the edge of their property, and those things are reinforced. If you hit it you will be stopped cold.
house near be put up some of those stones after 3 cars visited the inside of the house.
@@jappperon7012 They are especially common along houses at street intersections because people are terrible and should not have driver's licenses.
A typical retaining wall will definitely not stop a car. I build retaining walls for a living. They are not designed to hold up to forces like that.
I have noticed many businesses have placed huge stones next to their curbs and I thought it was only for decoration but my grandson told me those are to prevent people from cutting the corner and running over the curb. Apperently they are not getting in trouble for that.
Not american but in a lot of other countries, especially in Ireland the law is very simple. You can put a wall or other object at the bounds of the property, and any driver hitting it is at fault. The only time you may be asked to move a large object is for access to any utilities it may have encroached. The law says you drive to the conditions and terrain, sometjing we all accept since we still commonly use something akin to ancient by-ways and farm tracks, hell we even go racing on them for the thrill of it (Irish Road Racing ruclips.net/video/LU-ynRoqDEs/видео.html).
30+ years ago when my hubby & I were newlyweds our mailbox kept getting hit by the nasty teen that lived with his grandparents down the road from us.
We lived on a 90 degree corner & our mailbox was right after you came out of it. Every weekend this brat would hit our mailbox. After replacing it a handful of times we got this plastic one that fit over a 2X4. He hit it again & broke the 2X4, but the mailbox survived with just a couple of scratches.
I'd had enough & asked hubby if there was anywhere we could get a big rock to put in front of the mailbox. Just so happened his family had some huge rocks that had been used for the foundation for the house his great grandfather built in the field beside the house.
We got to his grandfather & asked for the rocks & they used the tractor with a loader bucket to load them up & we placed these huge 2-3 foot tall by 2-3 foot wide stones on each side of our mailbox.
That night the kid comes around the corner not realizing the rocks are there because the road was higher than the mailbox. We hear him gun his truck, ready to hit our mailbox only to come in contact with the rocks. Totally destroyed his bumper, knocks out his headlight. Kid never tried to hit our mailbox again.
I've seen plenty of people edge their lawn with large rocks to stop stupid drivers running over their property.
Dont you guys just start shooting, isnt that how you solve things?
@@Darkpara1 Yep, that’s what the beach association did for the parking lot along one of the roads that my family owns a house on.
What is conveniently overlooked in cases like this is that the law has done absolutely nothing to help the homeowner to protect his mailbox. When he is left to protect his own property you still get judges dissenting against him.
@@t.n.-js6ei I think the one and only "like" on your comment is your own. Prove me otherwise.
@@t.n.-js6ei The postal service has guidelines so that they can perform their job, if people put them at random heights and locations it would be a huge hassel for the mail man that's why they can refute service. But it's still your mailbox, which is why you have to buy and install it.
@@t.n.-js6ei No, you are incorrect. Mailboxes are not the property of the US Postal Service unless placed by the Postal Service itself, such as the squat blue boxes still found in some bank parking lots. A few _very_ old buildings appear to have USPS boxes as well - they are clearly labeled as such. It is the responsibility of the property owner to provide for mail. The house in which I grew up, we had a mail box. We bought it, we placed it, we had to maintain it. It was on our property. It had to fit USPS guidelines, but that's all, and that has to do with distance from the 'curb' (edge of the road), and height above the ground. The last house I was in, we had no mailbox. We had a slot in the wall for mail to be dropped. You seem to believe that the wall then belongs to the USPS. The current house has community mailboxes. I can guarantee you that our keys do NOT say 'Property of USPS, Do Not Duplicate", and the mailbox certainly does not. The post office has the keys for the main doors of the mailboxes, but I suspect that the HOA also has a set, left from the initial construction of the subdivision. If the mailbox gets destroyed, I also believe that it will be the responsibility of the HOA to replace the box - not USPS.
The only laws regarding them are dealing with the handling of the mail itself. That is, breaching the mailbox is a federal offense because it implies that the person breaching the box has the intent to interfere with the delivery of the mail.
Oh Bert, if the law was that simple then we would not need police, judges, juries, and lawyers.
and this is what is wrong with this country and society today. Idiots causing mischief have all the rights, and landowners have little, if any recourse.
My dad built a mailbox out of railroad rail and 3/8 in. steel, concreted in the ground 2 ft. He was tired of the snowplow destroying it, people throwing beer bottles at it and people hitting it with baseball bats. He lived on a country road. About 2 weeks after he put it in, he went to get his mail and found a bent baseball bat, broken window glass, blood and part of a finger. He called the police; they came out and did their thing. Taking pictures, evidence his statement and info and said they would be in touch with their findings. He never heard from them.
Normally I complain about the police not doing their jobs, but I think in this case justice was already served.
@@arthurwintersight7868 I have to agree.
We were doing telecom work inside a pair of manholes at opposing ends of a bridge. The work was tedious and it went on in shift work for several days. We had the right lane closed, and marked with cones every 25 feet, or so across the whole 400 foot span of the bridge. Every night we would hear a pickup truck rev his engine, and maliciously drive over the cones around 2 AM. We would have to climb out and reset the cones each time this happened. This went on for 3 nights. After the third time we took one of the cones and plugged it with a coffee cup, poured it full of Sackrete, and returned it into the line of cones after it had hardened. As expected, the pickup returned the next night. We heard him rev his engine, and we heard the thump, thump, thump of him running over the ordinary cones. After 5 or 6 thumps, we heard a WHAM. We heard him get out, scream some loud epithets and then get back in and drive away. From my viewpoint his front bumper was folded in the middle, and I think he bent a tie rod because the tow of his front wheels was canted inward. We never hear anything more about the incident, but I am sure the driver does not intentionally run over traffic cones any more. Maybe he could've sued the telephone company for fortifying the cones. This was 40 years ago, so I think the statute of limitations has run out.
Think property damage is 10 years. Either way, i would have paid to see that. He knew he F'ed up and owned every second.
I'm in the UK (Scotland) My dad worked in construction. While he and his company were working on a road, they had problems with idiots doing the same thing, running over the traffic cones at speed. This was a problem as the cones where marking out lanes to keep the workers safe. The solution was to take a metal pole (rebar?) and set it into the road, then put a traffic cone over it. The special cone was positioned so the drivers would have a good run at it. The idea being, the idiots would have to be driving along the line on purpose instead of accidentally hitting one or two.
After a few nights of cars being written off, the idiots seemed to get the message and there were no more flattened cones.
This was sometime in the late 1970's / early 80's, he wouldn't have got away with it now.
The idea of him being able to sue is annoying. Cones mean "avoid", everybody knows or should know this. It doesnt matter whether they're made of rubber or solid steel, you should never be contacting one with your vehicle. Judges should immediately throw cases like that out for being baseless.
@@jadedandbitter True and anyone doing this deliberately deserve what they get, IMO but ... there's always the guy who has to take avoiding action, whilst driving safely away from the cones, and then hits the trap cone. He's not going to be pleased.
We have a loading lane outside my house, during high traffic special idiots feel they can drive down this lane which people on my street turn on. City put up tube road barriers, still sometimes one ass comes along and drives over them. I’m thinking I need to fill the hollow tubes with concrete, I’m just wondering if I should also throw a few sticks of rebar in the wet cement to add to the enforcement, maybe a #6 thick bar 😁
When i was a kid some local people thought it was funny to ride down our street and smash everybody's mailbox. This went on for over a month and after the second time my father replaced out mailbox he'd had enough. He brought home some half-inch steel plates that his workplace was throwing out and welded a new mailbox in and stuck into a cement base. A week later a few mailboxes leading up to ours were busted, but ours and those after it were fine. We never had a problem again. I can only assume that they'd been driving down the road with a baseball bat out a window and then got their wrist broken.
Years ago when I was in middle school, our mailbox was regularly vandalized. Someone would drive half off the road and run over the mailbox. Breaking the pole destroying the box scattering the mail across the yard. After about the 6th time in 2 months we buried an 8 foot chain link fence post down to proper mailbox height poured concrete in and around the post. Less than a week later someone tried to run over this post. The box was in the middle of the yard and mail was scattered but the post was bent over at a 45 degree angle. Turns out that the kids 4 doors down were using dad's new pickup truck to run over our box. The post took out the radiator and did some serious damage to bumper and some suspension damage. We were able to straighten the post and remount the mailbox. Our mailbox was never vandalized again.
Were they injured by the pipe?
Hopefully
@@editedforprivacy207 you would have to prove it was on purpose
Which is a very hard thing to do
They could claim it was a accident
How glorious was their punishment?
@@thatdamncrow9197 an "Accident" when they did it six times
So glad to see a court finally use the law and common sense! To many of these stupid lawsuits cost us an arm and a leg in increased insurance costs etc. Time people take responsibility for their own actions and mistakes!
Laws aside, I find it pathetic how more and more of society find ways not to take responsibility for their actions. The two dissenting judges make me afraid too,
Tell me about it. How much longer till its 2-5.... Only a matter of time with these snowflake times.
Well the judges just wanted it to be on a case-by-case basis. They wanted a jury to decide whether or not the intent of the mailbox fortification was to stop it from being damaged or was the intent to cause harm to those damaging. There is a difference. Just a steel rod and cement are a hard object. Now put a sharp edge or point and suddenly you are no longer increasing fortification but intending to cause harm.
Whether you find that still justification or not does not matter. Judges and the law tend to not like the public to decide punishment, but the courts themselves to.
@@deathab0ve If you want a mad max themed mailbox you shouldn't be liable for idiots running into it, period.
People shouldn't be hitting mailboxes, single vehicle accidents are ALWAYS the fault of the driver, period, those two judges are unfit for office.
@@SherrifOfNottingham That is your opinion. The other 2 judges disagree.
Deal with it, this is the real world and intent matters in the real world. Stop crying.
@@deathab0ve
Real world? Define "real world" when this world is an absolute clown world that happens to be far worse than any hell itself.
Also, intent matters? Like how many other things don't matter? It's really insane how intent matters in some cases while in others it does not. Intent? What does that even supposed to mean when you can get away with alot these days because, People. Don't. Care.
As a road contractor, I frequently had teenagers with big wheeled 4X4 trucks running up and down newly 'dressed' and sodded front slopes on filled areas.....somehow this came to a screeching halt when a full box of roofing nails 'fell off a truck' and scattered requiring my crew to clean up the newly paved road. My foreman received a very nice Xmas bonus for 'forgetting' to clean up the grassed slopes.
This reminds me of when I lived out in the countryside. Our mailboxes were constantly being hit, even though it sat BEHIND the barrier the highway dept. uses to keep cars from going into the ravine. The pole, that is, not the box itself, the box stuck out a little bit so the mail truck could get to it. So my dad put in a solid steel pipe nearly three ft down and a solid steel box. Not long after we had pissed off parents of a kid with a busted arm, and shoulder, threaten to sue us because, apparently, the kid was hitting mailboxes with a baseball bat while a friend drove, and when he hit OUR's, the bat bounced back, busted the kid's arm, and the broken pieces of bat lodged into his shoulder. Obvs. they lost the case, and while our box was dented, it wasn't harmed. Even a car scraping along the highway barrier wouldn't've done much damage to it, or it to the car, honestly as it didn't stuck out THAT far, but it wasn't skidding cars that were damaging it. It was damn teens.
Old saying: stupidity should hurt. Amazing that the parents were mad at your dad, instead of their little darling angel. PS Bet that kid never did that again.
Yeah, the kid should be placed in foster care due to the parents criminally entitled attitude... and the parents should be thrown in jail and forced to pay damages and restitution for all the destroyed mailboxes.
If my dad had found out I had done something that stupid the only person who would have paid would have been my hide. 😆
Good for your dad. The teen's parents are unbelievable. Instead of telling the kid to take his blows, and next time respect other folks' property, they want to sue. Crazy.
"Oh, so your kid admitted to deliberately destroying a series of mailboxes? Here, meet Mr Postal Inspector. You two have a nice looooooooooong chat."
If a "Mail Box" keeps getting hit repeatedly it speaks to a bigger problem that the City or Township needs to be liable for not fixing the damn road or putting barriers, better grading or road maintenance in place. Some thing has got to be done and its not the mail box.
Rural areas don’t have city or township representation, and often only 3-4 cops in total patrolling for drunks and speeders. Counties and states use infrastructure money in areas that bring in tax dollars. Rural areas almost never get safety measures, repair, repaving, or even lines painted on the road after the old ones fade. At least not until the road is in danger of becoming undrivable.
It's pretty appalling that the defendants can win at every stage but still had to go through years of the stress of a lawsuit and still not be guaranteed attorney fees from the plaintiffs.
This country was Founded By Attorneys FOR Attorneys...Had Nothing to do with the "people".
@Mister Bister Lol, Generally, around 60% of the founding fathers were attorneys or had legal training or were associated with a legal background, depending the Legal Founding Document under discussion. So, maybe they weren't all practicing attorneys. Looking at the legal complexity that the government has embraced and how attorneys benefit from it, I find it spurious that attorneys don't recognize that their actions will benefit future generations of attorneys when creating legal bureaucracy.
@@johnstibal2131 No, the USA was founded by slaveowners who correctly saw that the democratically elected parliament of their country was about to abolish slavery.
@Mister Bister and the lot of this is state law, not federal law.
@@kevinlove4356 The British banned the slave trade in 1807 and abolition in most of the empire (but not all) didn't occur until 1833.
If you’re going fast enough to flip several times after hitting something and proceed to travel another several dozen yards to hit a second mailbox you were probably going too fast for snowy conditions
As he briefly mentioned, it was black ice. You can't see it but it's as slippery as heck. The road seems to be clear, but it's far from it. The worst possible condition when driving in wintertime. Snowy road is easier to drive on, up to six inches of snow.
@@OldieBugger well this is a road condition the driver must count on encountering and be cautious.
I've always firmly believed that if you are not allowed to make your mailbox indestructible by law, then if drivers or vandals destroy your mailbox, the city or state should have to pay for the replacement.
The ONLY reason it needs to be replaced is because the law is stopping you from having one which would not need replacement. Why should you have to spend your money, time, and effort when you were willing to put a permanent solution in place and they said "No way, you have to LET them destroy your property."
You always have the option to pick your mail up at the post office and forgo a mailbox all together.
Also to your second question, it's a crime to use traps to defend your property that's why and in this case the trap could kill a completely innocent person. You say LET them destroy your property, but what happens if someone sideswipes a car and sends it into the mailbox? No fault of the person who got sideswiped, but your trap just killed them so why shouldn't your bear the responsibility when a normal mailbox would have broken away?
Supreme Court disagrees.
@@wanderingmercurymarauder761 what if the mailbox was a tree? Would the owner still be liable?
@@SJT929496 thats actually a legit question. i have seen in some rural areas in florida mailboxes literally drilled and tied to a tree and multiple of them throughout the road so it wasnt some random person. i was told those people probably dealt with a hurricane and going to the extent drilling and tying it to a tree by their driveway reduces the chances it going missing or found in your neighbors property the day after
If all mailboxes WERE essentially indestructible then there would be no mailbox vandalism. But, we have cheap weak mailboxes and we have mailbox vandals. Kids do dumb things and that is about as foreseeable as the world gets, injuring them intentionally in order to protect a $18 mailbox is and SHOULD be illegal and you should at the very least be financially responsible for the injuries you cause because come on, you intended to injure those kids, that is not deterrence, it is a punishment that you had no right to inflict. Taking the law into your own hands by setting booby traps is not legal or right. Sorry if you don't like it, but kids have been killed by people reinforcing their mailboxes and the last time I checked vandalizing mailboxes is not a capital offense. Nor are you a judge or jury. Breaking arms and shoulders and hands is not an appropriate way to deter petty vandalism. Now if you were to use brickwork to make a shell around your mailbox so that it was OBVIOUS that hitting it from a moving vehicle would result in a lot of pain or injury then you would be fine. But people who do things like use an ordinary mailbox and fill it with cement can only be doing that to cause injury. In that case they should do time and pay restitution and medical bills.
If criminals (even accidentally) were forced to financially compensate the homeowner for damage to their property and inconvenience, then this wouldn't be necessary.
Consequences to our actions
In the 1960s our mailbox was repeatedly hit on purpose. My old man got mad so he moved the mailbox 40' down our property to an outcrop of ledge. He drilled a hole into the ledge and used a 2" diameter steel rod for the post. About a week later, there was a big crashing noise and then the sound of a car driving off. When we went out there, we found a bent up bumper and oil puddles. My Dad thought that the car's engine wasn't going to make it very far with that big of an oil leak.
Where did he get the idea? A Roadrunner cartoon! 😀
@@gordonshumway7239 Probably from his buddies. They were all WWII vets.
Next round, make it a 3" diameter steel pipe & fill it with concrete =)
I've had at least 12 attacks on mailboxes, and everyone was criminal and deliberate. Yeh, and you will find out the value of police, who laugh and do nothing.
@@khatjohnson8204 he did one up from that... Read OPs message, he put a 2 inch steel ROD, ie, no hole down the middle. Solid steel works better than concrete every time!
The road my father used to live on ended in a T. The guy that owned the property at the end of the T had multiple vehicles blow through the stop and run into his yard and in more than one case, hit his house.
My father owned a company that sold gravel and sand for cement processors. Thus, he had access to larger quarry products. My father saw the story on the news and approached him about assistance with his problem.
The result was the property owner bought several very large cut granite stones and lined the front of his property Inside the easement.
The city tried to force him to remove them, citing that he was creating a hazard for people that ran through the stop sign.
Creating a hazard? I guess people had better clear their land of all buildings, trees, fence posts, utility poles, stumps, ponds, culverts, and embankments. If they don't want people to run into the boulders, then they can install a guard rail.
Hahahahaha, the nerve of them. "Okay, good?" Like yeah, don't crash into somebody's yard and you won't get your ass kicked by a big granite "landscaping" boulder, my guy.
The city probably wanted him to get hedges. Something the cars can get caught in that's pliable. I could see that sort of road being a hydroplane nightmare.
I also lived at the end of a T. We had a very big oak tree in the middle of our yard.
Only close call I had was when I procrastinated taking the trash bin to the curb.
Lady blew the stop leaving a domestic and jumped our apron. Tire gouges in the dirt right where my trash can goes. It would have been angled just right to fly the can back into mom's car in the driveway...and me. Lady took out her front tire on our curb and sparked down the rest of the street.
Her domestic stabbed her the next year...poor lady.
He lived in the wrong city.
@singlekc yas. Yes they are.
For years I put up reindeer ornaments with lights or a Santa sleigh at the end of my acreage around the mailbox. I had a couple of punks in trucks run them over, so what I did was cut down a tree that was close by and left a three-foot stump, and mounted a reindeer with lights on the stump and surrounded it with straw bales. As sure as shit a month later in the middle of the night, I heard a noise and saw a newer Chevy 4x4 high centered on the stump.
Did You go out, laugh and take photos??
😂😂🤣🤣
The sense of satisfaction must have been overwhelming. Just thinking about it makes me SMILE.
@@isleno101 It is SO NICE when jerks experience VERY BAD KARMA!
😁
Back in the '60s, my parents bought a house that was previously owned by a gentleman who owned a 'big-rig' towing company. His mailbox post was made of towing chain, welded into the shape of his surname initial, along with a towing hook, looking as if it was dangling below it. I'm talking BIG chain with 4"x3" links made out of 5/8" diameter rod. This was installed in accordance to USPS regulation -- front edge of the mailbox 12-15" from the edge of the road surface, and 42-45" from the road surface height to the bottom of the mailbox opening. The upright of this mailbox post was probably four feet off the road. We were not about to replace it, even though it wasn't our initial...
Well, late one night someone went off the road and nailed that welded chain post, and bent it right over. Remember that hook? It grabbed everything under that car and ripped it right out. The car ended up in the ditch on the other side of the road, 100' farther down. The driver threatened to sue my folks for that 'dangerous' mailbox post. The cop that responded also lived a half-dozen houses down the street from us, and simply asked the driver "Why were you FOUR FEET off the (straight) road???" and further explained that "if he would have continued in a straight line another 20 feet he would have hit a 15" diameter tree, and THAT wouldn''t have bent so easily!" Oh, and the guy was lucky he wasn't another foot off the road, because just that far behind our mailbox post was a telephone pole that he must have missed by mere inches...
My dad who worked in the oilfield business( back in the 80's) got tired of having our mailbox ran over and got his buddies to dig a deep hole with an auger and he cemented a long section of oil pipe and filled it with cement and put our mailbox on top of it. About a month later he went to check the mail and found a car wrapped around it. We lived in the country so we had to drive to check our mail box probably about a quarter mile away. That oil pipe never moved....ever. It had been hit many times after, but all we did is replace the the mailbox on top. We did end up putting a warning sign on the pole stating not to hit this mailbox. I think we got sued once but we won the case because it was proven mail vandalism? Idk. I was young so the detail are vague, but we never had a to replace the pipe. It's actually still there to this day. In fact I went back a couple of years ago to that area as I don't live there anymore and it has been bricked in around the pipe and looks real nice. It's still a mailbox. ;)
I welded a triangle shaped guard around a gas meter (and concreted all 3 legs) out of drill pipe and someone hit it in a truck going god knows how fast and snapped every stick of pipe in multiple places. Uprooted every piece of concrete as well. Also took out the gas companies "H" shaped guard, two gas meters, and a concreted in chain link fence. And drove away with all their fluids.
Challenge failed successfully.
Almost this exact situation happened to my Dad. His mailbox was repeatedly vandalized. He fortified it. He lives on a very straight and clear road in town. However, there are way too many wrecks on that very short stretch. After the fortification, dude runs off the straight and clear road and hits it. He wasn't hurt thankfully, but it did tear his car up pretty bad. DOT comes by and says he can't have a mailbox like that. Well, I live out in the country, and the mailboxes out there are certainly fortified since they tend to be mounted on various farm implements and other steel products. The punch line is: this weekend a porch pirate tried to rob him, they left in a hurry and ran over his current mailbox! They got caught because it tore up their car so much. In his case, he's gone out of his way to make it safe and secure. He moved it off the road a good bit, but then the post office complained. He was actually making it safer for the driver by allowing them to get off the road completely, but somebody didn't like it. You can't win.
The postal service is horrible about that. My shop is off the service road of the interstate, speed limit is 55. Our mailbox for years was inside our fence without issue. All the sudden we stopped getting mail after a few months we were told the driver has issues accessing it and we have to move it to the side of the road so we did, a few months later they started doing work on our street and put a sign close to the box and we stopped getting mail because the driver would have to backup to not get out of the truck
My house is on a rural road and I had problems with my mailbox being smashed intentionally. After a few times of having to buy a new one I finally encased mine in brick with concrete reinforced base and never had any more trouble.
I also live out in the county and had my mailbox smashed several times by vandals. I wanted to make my mail box stronger and so I dug a nice hole and filled the holes with 6 bags of cement and a Simpson steel deck support under ground and a 6 X 6 wood post bolted into the Simpson deck support. The wood post covers the side of the box that had majority of the impacts from the vehicles and baseball bats out the passenger side of the cars and trucks. I installed a standard large metal mailbox on the pole. In the first 2 years the mailbox had been hit twice and the first time was the baseball bat out the window, the baseball bat was 30' down the road on the shoulder of the road and broken glass next to the box and the 2nd one was a truck mirror sitting on the end of my driveway and red paint on the pole.. All I had was a few marks on the post and nothing more. It should be noted that my mailbox is 4' off the traveled portion of the road and I had the mailbox approach and departure area paved in blacktop so no reason for someone not to know that it was safe distance from the traveled road.
@@cornfed123567Your local post office might have been violating federal law about delivering mail with these stunts. Write to your Postmaster General to find out what your rights are under the law.
@@Maximara we've sent emails and been told, it's unsafe for the driver to get out and put it in the box when it's blocked. But we all know she was lazy and didn't want to do it. It's an issue with this driver all around town.
My grandfather served in the Navy in Korea, and when he got back and moved into a new house with his new wife (my grandmother), many people had fun destroying his mailbox. He got sick of it one day, and asked some of his Navy buddies who were still serving to send him a few links of old anchor chain. They shipped it on a train to his work and he and my great-uncle welded it into a decorative mailbox holder. A month later a drunk teenager totaled his car on it. The anchor chain mailbox was fine. After that, nobody ever hit it again. Or so the story goes.
I have seen several mail box posts like this. They welded the chains into house numbers.
@@chrisbudesa : That is best described as quality work.
Nobody ever got drunk after that? Or the teenage intentionally got drunk for the sole purpose of getting at the mailbox, and therefore the chain cured his alcoholism?
@@georgedang449 what? I’m pretty sure the teenager intentionaly drove drunk. This comment sounds very toll-eriffic
I could understand if someone put a junk car with a mailbox welded to the trunk on the side of the road, but plenty of people use brick encased mailboxes.
very similar here - my father worked for Bucyrus-Erie in the 70s and used a length of welded up dragline chain with links about 1' each to make a large arch with the mailbox hanging from the end. Not sure how far in the ground it was set. Occasionally kids would manage to take out the box but the chain never failed. We did once find a broken baseball bat after a failed attempt that struck the chain instead of the box. At one point there was actually a local newspaper article about interesting/unusual mailboxes in the area and his was included. Somehow nobody ever tried to sue him over it.
I had a country mail box that was taken out twice in two years, presumably by farm implements. I asked my county sherriff if I could mont it on a heavy steel girder. The sherriff said, "Go for it." I decided instead to relocate the mail box a few feet further off the road and laid down a gravel apron for the mail delivery person to be able to safely reach it. So far, so good.
Back in my hooligan days, a buddy and I went out smashing mailboxes. His preferred choice of destruction was to punch the mailboxes. It was a sight to behold for my young eyes to see something metal and seemingly strong crumple over by a fist. After a night of many bent boxes, my buddy made a running start to pummel a box but instead of the usual sound, we heard a soft thud and the wails of my buddy having broke his hand...the mailbox stood resolute. I don’t quite know what they had done to reinforce that mailbox but it was the first reinforced box I’d ever seen.
My next reinforced box also coincided with my very last act of hooliganism. I was out with other friends pulling up stop signs when we came across a lonely mailbox. We decided it needed to come down. Driving my large van, I decided (very thankfully) to hit it at a low speed...the reinforcement stopped my van cold...luckily without damaging the box or the van. It made a very loud noise and being the middle of the night, the homeowner would probably come to investigate...so, we busted a U-ee and sped down the road. In the universe’s way of telling me to quit acting like an ass, I missed the stop where we just pulled up the stop sign and skidded into the crossroad stopping just short of a steep ditch that would have totaled my vehicle. I stopped being a hooligan after that.
A wise decision, grasshopper...😊
Thank you for settling an argument with me and my wife. I have had two mailbox roadkilled. No note, no apologies, but debris all over my yard. I am building a steel and brick mailbox. My wife swears up and down we would get a lawsuit. I'm just sick and tired of inconsiderate drivers and mailbox expenses.
Do it. We had our mailbox taken out one time and I saw the stupid small sedan sitting in our yard with the top of the concrete mailbox on it. Fool was able to drive his pos car off before getting caught, but yanno that pos car was toast.
You still could
It's important to realize that even though this guy even eventually won, it took him 6 years and he probably spent tens of thousands of dollars on attorney's fees. Even if he had homeowner's insurance, this probably took a substantial mental and financial toll on him.
Yes just check your state laws before doing so.
Do yourself a huge favor and speak with your insurance agent first. He or she may tell you it is a great idea, a bad idea, or want to sell you a WHOLE LOT more insurance to cover the lawsuits you are going to get. By the way, you probably better also get a county permit because if you build something like a brick shithouse for your mail they are going to have something to say about it. Just be sure to inform your agent that you feel the need to get revenge on stupid teenagers so you are planning to build a boobytrap killing machine on your property that is bound to injure someone eventually. I am sure they will be fine with that.
If my mailbox kept getting vandalized/destroyed I’d certainly reinforce it to stop that nonsense. Replacing a mailbox isn’t exactly cheap if you have to do it multiple times.
As a welder I'm starting to think there's a business opportunity here...
Exactly how much damage are we looking for? I'm pretty sure I could make like a fishhook thing that would trap the car there till the police show up
OH! HINGE! If we put the whole thing on a hinge with some struts coming out, the mailbox (under 50-60 lbs of spring tension) would be able to tilt back - using the cars own momentum to push some steel struts up into the engine - and arrest the forward travel of the vehicle (there may be some vertical travel)
With the cost of materials right now ... $75 - $100 easy. And that is if you do the work yourself.
@@the_inquisitive_inquisitor Although I get were you going with this, I'd not suggest anything that would hook into the underside of a vehicle during impact. Because at some point a tow truck is going to be called to remove said vehicle. And in the process do additional damage to the engine or transmission of said vehicle as it is removed.
And in that situation, the lawsuit might prevail. Because you went from a mount to securing the mailbox to adding additional "decoration" with the intended purpose of damaging a vehicle when it impacts the mailbox post.
@@superdave8248 you're only allowed to drive away after knocking over my mailbox so many times...
@@the_inquisitive_inquisitor In practicality I would agree. But legally, you would probably have to prove it is the same person/vehicle doing the repeated damage.
I'm originally from Ohio. I'm still amazed at how people there think things should work, as opposed to how they actually work. That this had to go the Supreme Court is ridiculous.
I had a trespasser driving his vehicle on my property. He slid his vehicle into my fence damaging both the fence and his truck. He came to my door and explained how my fence scratched his vehicle so I need to pay for the damage as well as help him get his rig unstuck! I didnt help him, I didnt pay him for his damaged vehicle, nor did I get compensated for my fence. I still found it to be exceptionally funny.
@Mud Puddle I would have told him that he would have to settle for one out of three, then had his car towed.
The fact that two judges dissented is just horrifying.
I see their point. There are rules about your duty to other people, even in your property (e.g. you cannot put booby traps, and the attractive nuissance doctrine), so it is not far fetched that by those rules the owner could be liable because of the danger he unnecessarily created.
Yes, if the driver had hit a tree by the side of the road, maybe he could have ended the same with no recourse, but:
1. Trees are strong, they are not reinforced.
2. For the description (to the point of maiming the driver of a truck) seems that the mailbox was way more dangerous than a tree.
3. People do not expect mailboxes to be the more dangerous alternative. The driver may steer towards the mailbox to avoid a fallen tree, expecting it to be safest measure (of course he should have then to pay the mailbox).
To put another example, think of a fire engine that is too wide for the entrance to the land, and the driver choses to go over the mailbox to save the house owner...
So, it is not a clear cut as "I can happily maim whoever happens to get into my property, and there is absolutely zero legal risk" and I understand judges seeing the other side of things.
@@sergiojuanmembiela6223 That's a lot of mental gymnastic there fella. What part of immovable do you not understand? Immovable objects cant cause anything by definition. The only way he would be liable for reinforcing an immovable object is if there is a reasonable expectation that the object would have some movability for safety reason. For what reason would someone have for running into a mailbox? None, therefore its only by accident which negates any expectation.
@sergiojuanmembiela6223 Every single person with more than 2 brain cells knows and understands what you're saying, that's not what's happening here though. You might as well describe the best way to weave a basket underwater
@@williampennjr.4448 A possible reason would be avoiding a bigger danger (e.g. a tree fell on the road). And it would depend of how clear it was that the mailbox was massive (imagine someone building a mailbox that looks like a wooden one but is done in tungsten).
Making the road unnecessarily dangerous in case of accident is another possible point that could be brought to a trial.
Which explains the points of the two dissenting judges: it is no so clear cut that the lawsuit must be dismissed out of hand, so allow a judge/jury look into this just in case there is something to it, and let them decide.
Because there might be situations in which the owner did something unreasonable that did cause injury, and it should be looked upon if it did happen.
@@sergiojuanmembiela6223 What difference does it make if the mail box is made of tungsten or straw. A mailbox doesnt exist to be run into. It exists to collect mail not to be a road barrier. Its clear cut to anyone with half a brain.
I knew a guy that kept having his mailbox destroyed by vandals.
He bought an indestructible mailbox kit that a welder made and sunk a huge metal post into the ground.
Someone tried to destroy the box shortly after he installed it but there was no damage.
How did he know?
There were pieces of baseball bat scattered all around the mailbox.
Ouch!
One of my grandpa’s neighbour had similar mailbox for similar reasons. He had previously hand made custom mailboxes that kept getting clipped by teenagers. He even tried just plain mailboxes for a while and they kept getting destroyed. So he got 3/8 wall 8in steel pipe and filled it with concrete for the base, welded another section of that pipe to the top for the box, and planted it 4ft deep in more concrete. A couple of days later the ring of the bat woke up the entire block. Years later someone else attempted it and he found the aluminum bat wrapped around the box in the morning.
The comments for this video are GOLD!
My addition: Buddy lives in a rural area and had constant mailbox vandalism. He mounted his mail box on a spring tension swivel. So if it gets hit it just swings away and springs back. Hasnt lost his box since.
A Weeble-Wobble mailbox that bounces back and smashes the vandal right between the eyes.
I think these communities have a mental problem that hasn't been addressed. Teens, adults getting kicks out of running down mailboxes.
If they lived in the city what would they do...run down cats?
Steve,
We moved into our newly constructed house back in the
early '90s. As part of the dead restrictions, we had to have one of
those brick mailboxes built in the same archectural style as the
home. It was approximately 2'w x 3'd x 4'h made from the same
bricks as the house. The box was cemented into the streetside interior
of the structure.
A couple of months after moving in, we were returned home after
taking our kids to a pediatrician in another town. As we drove onto
our street, flashing red/blue lights were lighting up the
neighborhood. We drove by a police car with a strong odor of
alcohol and a unhappily handcuffed man sitting in the rear seat.
We had to park a few houses away due to a brick debris field blocking
the road. We walked up to the house and found a Jaguar sedan
sitting sideways in our front yard. The driver's side was indented
about a foot and was resting a couple of feet from the front of our
house. The mailbox was reduced to pieces of brick/mortar no larger
than 8 inches on a side. The Jaguar was sitting in middle of the
debris field. A man was walking around the car, stopping and uttering
expletives while rubbing the back of his head. He did this for
about an hour while stopping to view the damage from every angle
possible. I found out he was a salesman from the local Infiniti dealer
and had taken the car home for the weekend. I always try
to see the humor in any situation and almost walked up to him and
asked if job hunting was in his future. I decided against it.
After checking the car out of the dealership, he lent the car to his
pregnant girlfriend. She then let her brother(drunk) drive the car
around our block a few times for a quick joyride. It is a residential
neighborhood with lots of young families and kids playing about. He
raced aound the block at well above the speed limit. The last curve
in the road is tight enough to be unable to drive comfortably more
than 20 mph. The police estimated he was travelling 45+ mph when he
entered the curve. He spun out and slid sideways through my newly
sodded yard and slammed into the mailbox. This big brick mailbox
($600) exploded in a shower of bricks. I was lucky no windows on
my house were broken. My kids would have been playing in the
driveway in their electric cars except this one day when my wife
decided to take them to the pediatrician.
The man who was driving was in the county jail awaiting ajudication
of the case. I contacted his girlfriend about replacing the mailbox.
My builder was still willing to rebuild it for the original price($600).
She replied a judge friend stated a pole with a box afixed to the top
was all that was required and she would do no more. She stated my
box was illegal because it wasn't "breakaway". I told her it sure did
"breakaway" and I was mandated by deed restricions as to the
style. She said I would have to take her boyfriend to court. My wife
and I decided the cheapest route was to pay for its replacement out
of our pockets.
While arranging for the re-construction, I received a letter from the
county district attorney's office requesting a letter that the defendent
had made "full" restitution. His attorney told the court he already
paid for damages and we were made whole. I called the DA and
informed him of the refusal to pay for a replacement. The DA's
comment was "Oh Really!". He said thank you and hung up. The
next morning the girlfriend brought us a $600 check. I can't say it
was handed over with a smile and I'm glad thoughts can't kill.
fun story. thanks for taking the time to type it all out. LOL
🤣🤣🤣
I worked in procurement for a large machine shop in rural SC. We had guys that had mailbox vandalism and the like, and we had several people make mailboxes using scrap steel plate that was 1/2" (12.7mm) in thickness. The finished box looked like an ordinary box, but weighed over 50 pounds.
One of the guys had some kids try mailbox baseball and his his box. The bounce back broke the rear passenger window and struck a passenger, causing injury to both the passenger and the bat holder. However, he had taken the time to measure from the center of the center line of the road and the opening of the box was on the very limit of the right of way, and was not charged...but the kids were
We had a "Gentleman's Club" that had some of the Lady Dancers on a platform along the Road in front of the Club to the entice customers to stop at the establishment. The authorities made them stop this practice after numerous traffic accidents caused by distracted drivers became a problem.
Gentleman’s club is an oxymoron. No getleman would go to that club. 🤢🤮
In the mid 70's, I lived in a small town in the Northeast for a few years. A three road intersection in the center of town had a flower bed in the middle of it, that somebody kept intentionally plowing through at night with a vehicle and ruining. The story goes that the town got tired of this, and hid a steel hedgehog in the flowers once again replanted. Sure enough, one night the perp drove through the flowers but got a surprise. The hedgehog ripped the oil pan and other parts from the underside of the vehicle, and a long streak of oil was left. The flowers were replanted once again, and, no more problems.
I had a friend in my home town who did the same thing because drunk drivers & kids with bats destroyed his mailbox over 6 times in as many months. After rebuilding the box in 1/4" plate & a concrete filled steel post only the drunks have managed to chip the paint since. This is in Washington state btw. It was well marked with reflective media so as to be more like a bollard in front of a business.
A farmer from where I grew up had people running over his mailbox which was halfway up the driveway, because the rural carrier turned around at their place. A natural gas well pipe (very heavy wall) and concrete solved that. Many pieces of a pickup’s front end as well as coolant and automatic transmission fluid was scattered all around, and the mailbox was scratched but basically unhurt.
Do we hold local councils/utility companies responsible when someone in a car drives into a lamp-post, or a power-pole, or a telegraph-pole? Do we hold the home owner responsible if a driver crashes into their brick/block wall? Do we hold the owners of legally parked cars responsible if a driver loses control and crashes into it?
Of course not!!
My township holds me responsible for any trees or other potential hazards in the right-of-way. If I don't remove trees, etc., they'll do it for me and I have to pay for the work. Mt property has a mile of road frontage, so it's a fair bit of effort keeping it clear.
@@rangerdan824 When my township wanted to shift the burden of cutting weeds to the landowners, I was pissed. It doesn't make sense for everybody to have the capability to cut the weeds, the township could have one sickle bar mower and do everybody's. I too had a mile of frontage. I looked at the easement they had for the road on my property, and it said that they were responsible for maintaining the right of way. I went to the town board meeting where they were going to consider the new rule, and said "If you aren't going to handle all the maintenance of the right of way, I'm taking back the right of way." My property included all but about a foot of the width of the paved roadway. They backed down at that point.
Lamp posts, power poles, traffic lights are frangible and have to meet crash safety tests to be on the road
@@IIGrayfoxII I see, so in the whole of the USA, no-one is ever killed in car when the car hit a lamp-post, traffic light or power pole. Got it!
@@davidanderson4091 did I say no one will die?
No I said those poles have to break in a manner that meets crash safety standards
My parents had an issue like this about 2 decades ago. Out in the middle of nowhere on the road they live on a bunch of teenagers kept driving by and running over multiple mailboxes with a truck at night. After replacing the mailbox about a dozen times my dad paid for one of those brick things to be built around the mailbox but the mailbox itself had a 1ft thick metal pole put 3ft in the ground then the mailbox on that with the bricks built around it. He also painted it black.
The next time those teenagers came around at night they wrecked and left a bunch of pieces of the truck behind and drove off and left. A few days later my parents were served court papers that they were being sued civilly by the kids parents for his injuries and the damage to the truck. They went to court and had a lawyer and won, it was an easy win but it cost them a lot in court and lawyer fees that they were unable to recover.
This was in Tennessee and around 2005
They should have counter sued
@@donnapauley8183 from my understanding they were willing to try but according to my parents lawyer the family of the teenager didn't have much money and the lawyer told them that it would cost court and lawyer fees up front for a likely judgement in my parents favor but a judgement that probably wasn't ever going to get paid. So they dropped it and went on with their lives.
@@spart0n654
> @donnapauley8183 from my understanding they were willing to try
> but according to my parents lawyer the family of the teenager didn't
> have much money
I expect they owned things, though. Vehicle(s), TVs, ...
>.. a judgement that probably wasn't ever going to get paid.
Do you not have bailiffs in the USA?
When I was a kid my neighbor put spikes in his yard to keep ppl from driving through the middle. He lost a law suit and had to pay for some teenagers car tires. So he built a small retaining wall and flower garden. That same teen completely destroyed his car on it a week later. They tried to sue him again. This time he won easily.
@ RENNY.....Glad that the stupid kid lost the 2nd case.
@@jtc1947 The court might have caught on to what was going on.
Trap vs. heavily reinforced decoration. I can understand the rulings.
That teenagers parents were obviously POS for suing the landowner the second time instead of asking their child “How did you manage to drive through this guys yard again”?
@@jordanaguilar4812 They were POS for suing the first time. My brother was a passenger in a car that drove through a friends yard. When my Dad found out, he made my brother go fix the yard. It didn't matter that he was only a passenger or who else was involved. It is the lesson to teach teens that taking responsibility for their own good name is important. If you can do that, you won't damage others property.
How absurd to think you can hold a landowner responsible for this.
It's tragic what happened to the guy. But he was going to suffer injuries no matter what. He had lost control of his vehicle and veered OFF the road.
This is like trying to sue someone for putting a dent in your bumper after you drove onto their property and ran them over.
I think the strongest argument is that this is similar to 'booby trap' cases, which have been ruled to be illegal
@@FinneasJedidiah But it'd also be like that if the land owner had any secure structure on his property at that point. A brick and concrete fence is as much a 'booby trap' as a concrete mailbox by that logic.
@@vulpes133 yeah, I'm not saying it's a good argument, just that it is the most likely one I can see
@@FinneasJedidiah it can be a fuzzy line sometimes
Most people would consider this reasonable property defense, I'd agree
But
It would be possible to argue it was a trap because he knew they would be there and it was designed to cause them some form of harm, even if by their own doing
@@FinneasJedidiah the intention of booby traps is to hurt people, this is like putting a bullet proof door and the bullet ricocheting on the shooter
When we moved to our current rural property, I set my mail box post in a short section of 16" PVC pipe filled with potting soil and planted a Jasmine vine. Then anchored a trifold trellis for it to climb. Couple of months later my trellis is gone, well that's nice, not! I build my own out of 5/8" steel rods and concrete it 3' in the ground. About a week later my wife tells me a man is out there yanking on it. Turns out to be the state highway man. He admitted to taking the 1st, & tells me I can't have it, and that I need to turn my mail box around, just as our mail carrier drives up, he proceeded to tell her that her truck didn't have required flashing lights. She corrected him on both items.
I told him I wanted my trellis returned, which he didn't. Anyways I had already had a dust-up over poorly maintained hwy right of way, causing drainage incursion onto my property. I didn't call his boss, rather, his boss's boss in the capitol. Next day there were 4 pieces of heavy equipment fixing the drainage. I have not heard back from him since...
I fortified my mailbox a few years back. It served two purposes, to prevent someone from hitting it to destroy it and prevent their vehicle from hitting my house if it kept going.
That's a great rulling... A homeowner should not be responsible for a motorist accident.
If the decision hadn’t gone this way, I wonder how long it would have been that lawyers would use that to argue that a pedestrian on the side of the road was at fault for being hit by a car.
depends on how effectively they could argue that a pedestrian on the side of the road could constitute enough of a hazard to be dangerous to the vehicle and its driver.
And I don't think that would be possible at all, even if this decision had been the other way.
Imagine a bar fight. "Your honor the defendant assaulted my fist with their unreasonable hard head when I punched them."
or imagine if you expose the government breaking a law and then you get in trouble for exposing their crimes.
...wait a minute
@@josephreagan9545 a pedestrian would only be liable if he wasn't wearing bright orange clothing with flashing red lights
"So, in conclusion... Unlike the mailbox, you can get bent."
Many years ago, when I lived in Cincinnati, OH, I heard this story: A home owner owned a house on a corner lot, and city buses would make a right hand turn around this corner. The problem was that the bus drivers would not plan the turn correctly and often ran over the corner of his property. He complained to the bus folks several times, but the overruns continued. So, the owner contacted a quarry and had a huge rock placed in that corner of his property. Problem solved, although at owner's expense.
I drove by one of those ‘i’m putting this rock here on the corner so you quit ruining my yard’ boulders a few weeks ago. Someone had obviously hit it because it was two feet away and on its side XD
That’s the best solution honestly
The disguised stuff just feels like deception
That was definitely the right court decision. 15 or so years ago I had to rebuild my mailbox after someone ran it over. You could follow the tire tracks where they almost hit a telephone pole after they hit my mailbox. After calling them, I asked the officers who showed up if I could put in a metal post instead of the wood one that it had been destroyed? He said "sure" and pointed out that the mailbox wouldn't pose as much problem to a vehicle that the telephone pole would, and they were both approx. the same distance off of the road. The Post Office refused to give me ANY guidance on how it should be built, how high to make it off of the ground or how far off of the road it should be so I just built it in the same old hole and put it the same height as my neighbors. This time with 4" square steel tubing which wouldn't offer near as much of a barrier that the telephone pole would - that is less than 20' away. If the power company isn't responsible for an immovable object, there is no way any individual should be. BTW, this was in CA so I'm not sure why this had to take so long to litigate in another state.
Good decision. The driver is responsible for his own injuries.
Suing the mailbox owner is just like suing the state for having ice on the road
Makes no sense
Yep
@@Sylusssss not really, it makes more sense to sue the city/county/state actor responsible for public road maintenance if they have been unreasonably derilict in their snow/ice clearing duty.
if you're quadriplegic from hitting a mailbox, that's evidence prima facie he wasn't wearing a seat belt.
@@AugustusTitus ...no? I mean you could get injured in the neck pretty damned easily
I too had an issue with vandalism involving mine (and other's) mailboxes. I too "fortified" my mailbox, but i used a tree growing next to the mailbox to assist in the fortification process by way of self welded up brackets and braces. Thank God i lived in Florida (almost never ice on the road,) and the road was paved. After i moved the house was put on the market, and apparently the mail service in Florida deems it necessary to remove the mailbox while the house is not occupied. I heard from my realtor that many many arduous attempts were made to remove my mailbox, without success. This was twenty plus years ago, and i smile proudly every time i think of that mailbox, as i am now, smiling my a••• of.😁
I had a friend who lived on the outside of a sharp turn, and people kept running off the road and mowing down anything left in his front yard, one who almost hit his house. He went to a lumber yard, bought some creosote poles (the kind you mount electrical service drops and meters to), cut them up, and sunk them into his front yard along the curve, sticking up about 3 feet and 4 feet apart. He then petioned the county to put a a warning sign. It took the county 2 years to get a sign up. In the mean time severl people hit one or more of his posts, but nobody sued him, nor tore up his yard either.