Malicious mischief

Dear Atty. Shalie,

I bought a property, as evidenced by a Contract to Sell and a Schedule of Payments. One of my neighbors claimed that the same property is owned by his brother, and they asked me to vacate the property. Since we have not yet come to a reasonable solution to the issue, I decided to build a fence around the property, to protect it from trespassers or would-be intruders.

A few weeks later, my neighbor and a few other individuals were destroying the fence that I built while damaging my property. Can I hold these people accountable for what they did to my property?

Teddy

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Dear Teddy,

The claim of ownership by your neighbor’s brother will, in no way, affect your right to institute a criminal case against your neighbor, and against any other individual who might have directly or indirectly, participated in damaging your property. At the very least, your neighbor may be held responsible for malicious mischief. The law provides that any person who shall deliberately cause to the property of another any damage not constituting arson or other crime involving destruction, and that the act of damaging another’s property was committed merely for the sake of damaging it, shall be guilty of malicious mischief. Thus, in your case, it appears that the elements of malicious mischief could be shown: your neighbor deliberately destroyed your fence and caused damage to your property. Now, assuming that your neighbor or his brother owned the property, he had no right to summarily destroy any improvements thereon. There are laws and procedures for them to protect their rights. They cannot unlawfully take the law into their own hands when they damaged your fence and property, for some personal motive.

Atty. Shalimar P. Lazatin-Obinque