Iowa Woman Arrested After Assaulting Boy Who Was Retrieving Ball
In the movie The Sandlot, a group of boys lost a baseball over a fence to a dog in a neighboring yard. The same thing happened in Iowa, except in this case "The Beast" was a 71-year-old woman.
According to NWestIowa.com, Rebecca Ann Heidebrink was arrested and charged with assault after a neighboring boy walked onto her property to retrieve a ball that got away.
Heidebrink was apparently not happy with the boy trespassing on her portion of the Candlelight Village Mobile Home Park to get the ball. This led to an argument with the mother of the boy with the ball. She admitted to shoving both the mother and the son. She also said that she tried to hit the boy.
It is understandable that Heidebrink was irritated with the boy walking on her winter-killed grass. Who knows if it will pop right back in the spring-like it is supposed to? But is it worth shoving a kid and a mom over it? Probably not.
In South Dakota, a landowner is allowed to use reasonable force to remove a person from the "real property" outside of their home if they were trespassing. But it is likely not reasonable
Unlike the classic 1993 film The Sandlot, it does not sound like there was a fence involved, nor was there a large dog hoarding a bunch of balls. It was just this one woman yelling for the "damn kid to get off her lawn." Had there been a fence involved, perhaps the boy could have avoided trespassing by using an erector set, or even a long pool net to get the ball back without setting foot on her land.