Man with junk-filled yard will head back to prison

Man with junk-filled yard will head back to prison

By Rene Stutzman | Sentinel Staff Writer
Posted February 1, 2005


SANFORD -- The Seminole County man who defied authorities for more than a decade by stockpiling junk in his front yard was sentenced Monday to three more years in prison.

It is one of the harshest sentences ever imposed in Florida for someone whose crime was being messy.

In this case, Alan Wayne Davis was defiantly messy.

For more than 13 years, he has ignored notices from Seminole County code-enforcement inspectors to clear barrels, airplane parts and other junk from his yard.

Once, when a judge ordered him to move the trash, he put it on his roof. Another time, when a judge ruled against him, he made a giant sculpture of a derriere, hitched it to his truck and drove it to the courthouse.

Davis had spent nearly a year in prison after being convicted Sept. 18, 2003, of illegal dumping and creating and maintaining a public nuisance. When he was released, he was placed on house arrest.

The issue Monday was whether Davis had violated terms of that house arrest. Assistant State Attorney Beth Rutberg argued that Davis had done that four times in seven weeks. Twice in two days, he stayed too late at work, she said.

Circuit Judge Kenneth Lester Jr. not only agreed that Davis was wrong, he slapped Davis with three years in prison -- three times what Rutberg sought.

"Mr. Davis is marching to the beat of his own drum at all times," the judge said.

Davis, 49, a mechanic and welder, showed no emotion. He merely mouthed "goodbye" to his wife, who sat on the opposite side of the courtroom, and when the judge asked whether he were going to appeal, answered in a loud, clear voice, "Yes, I am."

In the hallway outside, his wife, Aileen Davis, said, "This is crazy. This is a victimless crime."

That's not what some of Davis' neighbors say. The folks on Alpine Street, a mix of working- and middle-class families just north of Altamonte Springs, say they have put up with Davis' antics for years, and some say prison is exactly where he should be.

"He's his own worst enemy," said Carl Jowell, who lives two houses down. "He defies logic. He defies the law. I suppose that's where he belongs, in jail."

But next-door neighbor Irma Ramirez said just the opposite.

Davis has been messy, she said, but he's otherwise a wonderful neighbor. He cleared hurricane debris from her yard without being asked; he lifted her sickly mother into bed when she fell; he repaired her car when she couldn't get it started.

She called his prison sentence "awful. He doesn't deserve to be in jail."

After serving out his original prison sentence, Davis was released Sept. 11, 2004, but was rearrested Oct. 27.

His probation officer, Lee Goodwin Jr., testified Monday that, on Oct. 21 and 22, Davis didn't get home from work when he was supposed to.

Each time, Davis said, he had chosen to stay late while moonlighting, working to repair a 1911 fire engine.

"My work required that I be late," he told the judge Monday.

Goodwin also accused Davis of letting the battery on his electronic monitor go dead, thereby making him impossible to track by satellite.

Davis said that wasn't intentional. His cats liked to play with the battery charger because it was warm, he said, and they probably knocked loose its power cord.

The final count the judge found him guilty of Monday was the same thing that got him in trouble in the first place: letting his yard become a trash heap.

Seminole code-enforcement officer Dot Hird testified that, in mid-October, she found high weeds and something that looked like part of an airplane in his yard. She wrote him a letter, asking him to clean it up.

Davis testified that he pitched the letter into a file with others just like it and hadn't bothered to respond.

On Monday, the weeds were still there. So was the airplane part. Aileen Davis said it was actually a mold used to make replicas of a World War II fighter, the P-51 Mustang.

For years, Davis has complained that he's the victim of a government conspiracy and that he's merely fighting to protect his property rights. He was an artist, he insisted, and the pieces of junk were his supplies.

He said nothing about being an artist Monday but again claimed to be the victim of a government conspiracy.

Someone at the Florida Department of Corrections had monkeyed with his electronic monitor or the agency's computer, he told the judge, causing the department to send out false alarms that he had run away when he was exactly where he was supposed to be.

"It appeared to me that someone was just harassing me," he said.

The judge solved that problem, at least temporarily, by terminating Davis' house arrest and ordering him back to prison. He will likely spend 2½ years locked up, then another year on house arrest.