Woman Arrested And Jailed For Accidentally Scraping Low-Hanging Tree Limb In Parking Lot With Her Car

Who could use the fire of righteous anger this morning? We all could, let’s be honest, which is why I’m happy/angry to tell you about a genuinely maddening situation that happened in Cape Coral, Florida. It starts with a pretty innocuous situation, one that is more annoyance than anything else. A woman, parking her car at a spot under a tree that had low-hanging branches, found that the roof of her car scraped along part of the tree branch when parking. So, like many of us would, she grumbled to herself, backed out and moved to a different spot.

Usually, the story would end there, perhaps just with you inspecting the damage to the car’s roof. But in the case of Yanelly Guzman, it ended with her getting arrested.

Yes, she was arrested. For scraping the roof of her car against the underside of a thick tree branch. Guzman is an employee at a T.J. Maxx store (I believe that stands for Thomas Jefferson Maxx) and at the time when the incident happened, a Christmas Eve shift, she recalls asking her manager what she should do. As she told local news channel WECT 6:

“I feel like something was making pressure on my car, so when I do that, I back up,” Guzman said. “Then, I decide to park in another spot.”

Shortly after, Guzman realized she hit a low-hanging tree branch hovering over the first parking spot. She spoke to her manager about the incident, but he didn’t know what to do. Other people she talked to advised her to contact the Cape Coral Police Department.

“The district manager told him for me to make a report, an accident report… so I could file for a claim, so they could pay my damage. That’s what I did,” Guzman said.”

Looking at the tree in WECT6’s news footage, it makes sense how one could scrape the roof of a higher car like an SUV without realizing it, based on the low angle of the branch that arches over the spot:

(Screengrab: WECT6, WBBH, YANELLY GUZMAN, CAPE CORAL POLICE DEPARTMENT, CNN)

Guzman’s car did sustain some damage along the A-pillar in the form of a dent, and the tree’s bark was scraped off a bit where it encountered her 2020-ish Toyota RAV4:

(Screengrab: WECT6, WBBH, YANELLY GUZMAN, CAPE CORAL POLICE DEPARTMENT, CNN)

That’s an annoying panel to replace/fix on most cars or SUVs, and the scraped bark on the tree may grow back a bit, but even if not the extent of the damage makes any real harm to the tree pretty unlikely. I’m no arborist, but I have done similar things to trees with cars and other implements, and so far my hands and conscience have remained fairly free of sap-stains.

Here’s a Gulf Coast News interview with Guzman about the event:

Okay, let’s get right to the maddening part. Because she wished to file an insurance claim and because Guzman seems like someone who follows the rules, she met in January with a Cape Coral police officer to issue a report about the tree-scraping incident. Instead of just taking the report, though, the police officer decided to arrest Guzman on hit-and-run charges and took her to jail.

To jail! He took this woman to jail for scraping a tree! Why the hell would that be considered necessary in any context? Was the tree community demanding this unrepentant tree-scraper be taken off the streets? Was the community of Cape Coral made safer by handcuffing and putting this woman in jail? This is absurd, and Guzman had to pay $150 in bail to be freed.

When WECT6 reached out to the police department, they said

“For every call, we assess if there is a crime involved. In this case, the facts clearly match up with the criteria for a hit-and-run, a misdemeanor crime.”

This is, of course, incredible idiocy. To really put an idiotic cherry on this heaping, dripping sundae of stupidity, you need to know what the police officer told Guzman she should have done:

“Guzman says the officer told her she should have left her name, car registration number and her phone number in a note hanging in the tree.”

W, it’s worth noting, T.F.

She should have left her information and phone number hanging in the fucking tree? What would that have done? Let the squirrel whose job it is to inspect the tree get that information to the common grackle that lives in the tree and works for the owner of that T.J. Maxx parking lot? This is absurd.

It may be absurd and comical to us, but Guzman is out over $4,000 even though the state attorney general’s office dropped the charges due to insufficient evidence, and Guzman is severely shaken and disturbed by the whole mess. I know what jail can be like for people very unsuited to jail, because I once had to bail my own parents out. It messed them up, and it makes sense Guzman would have similar repercussions.

This is some Kafkaesque-level of bureaucratic destructive foolishness. Guzman’s life would have been immeasurably better had the police never been involved at all. Involving the police made no one’s experience better; rather, it complicated and harmed everyone involved for no clear benefit whatsoever.

The tree was unavailable for comment.

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(top image: WECT6, WBBH, YANELLY GUZMAN, CAPE CORAL POLICE DEPARTMENT, CNN)