Kill Thy Neighbor

Lesli Trout says the most traumatic experiences for the family were false allegations made to the state Department of Social and Rehabilitation Services about the Trouts' treatment of the family's children. The Trouts accuse Ozuna of making the allegations. (By law, the SRS must protect the identity of its informants, so the agency would not reveal to the Trouts who had made the complaints.)

Whoever did call the agency charged that the Trouts left their children alone on weekends and that their 13-year-old daughter wandered the neighborhood holding the 2-year-old baby on her hip, knocking on doors and asking for food, Lesli says. Another time, someone called the SRS the day after the Trout family had gone off-roading together and had come home covered in mud. SRS was told that the Trout children were "dirty."

After full investigations and visits to the Trout home, SRS investigators sent the Trouts reports stating that both allegations were unsubstantiated.

The Trouts were sure that Ozuna had made the complaints.

Lesli says she called the district attorney's office repeatedly to beg that charges be filed on her complaint that Ozuna had tried to run over her sons. She also called the state attorney general's office and even a Wyandotte County neighborhood dispute hotline to try to alert authorities to Ozuna's behavior.

"I said, 'This lady's psycho. She's going to kill somebody. Please do something,'" Lesli Trout says.

In December 2001, the district attorney's office responded to the July arrests, charging Donna and Carmen Ozuna with making terroristic threats, a felony. The court complaint included statements made at the Eickhoffs' Independence Day party as well as the alleged telephoned death threat to Lesli Trout.

The Ozunas went to trial in April 2002, and the jury heard testimony from Ritch Nigh, Lesli and Jesse Trout, James Eickhoff and several officers from the Edwardsville Police Department.

The assistant district attorney handling the case, Tristram Hunt, now a federal prosecutor, asked the judge to allow him to present evidence to the jury that would show that making threats against neighbors wasn't something new for Donna and Carmen Ozuna.

On the second day of the trial, Hunt called witnesses who remembered Ozuna and her daughter from their previous neighborhood in Kansas City, Kansas.

In a quiet neighborhood near the Eugene Ware Elementary School, where 48th Street intersects Oakland Avenue in Kansas City, Kansas, Tom Powell lived for decades next door to Donna Ozuna and her daughter, Carmen. Powell bought his house from his parents, longtime neighbors of Donna Ozuna's mother, who died a few years ago. "My parents had a real good relationship with her mother, and I think that's probably what protected me all those years while everyone else was getting harassed," Powell says.

Powell says he watched several sets of neighbors clash with Ozuna.

Beverly Smith and Ernest Curtis lived in a pretty stone house on Oakland, across the street from Ozuna. They had bought the home in the fall of 1991, and their troubles with their neighbor, they say, began when one of Curtis' business partners accidentally backed into Donna Ozuna's mailbox. Curtis claimed in court papers to have repaired the damage immediately, but he said the couple was soon the target of Ozuna's wrath.

In 1994, Ozuna filed a civil lawsuit against them in Wyandotte County District Court, and Curtis and Smith countersued. In court records, Curtis and Smith accused Ozuna of filing three false child-abuse charges with the SRS, claiming once that the couple's then-7-year-old daughter, JoAnn, carried a firearm. That prompted state child-welfare investigators to show up at the girl's school to question her, according to the couple.

Curtis and Smith also stated that Ozuna made "constant complaints" about them to numerous government agencies, including the police department, the domestic-relations department, the codes department and animal control, and that none of the agencies had found any problems.

The couple said they feared for their family's safety. Ozuna, they said, had threatened them verbally in front of other neighbors and had then written them an ominous letter using the same wording.

The letter, in words cut from a magazine, said, "your dead bitch!" and continued, in a typewritten rant zigzagging across the page: "DOESN'T MATTER HOW MANY DAM LIGHTS YOU PUT ON IN YOUR HOUSE (you and old MR SHITHEAD CURTIS ARE A BUNCH OF SCARED MOTHERFUCKERS ... YOU CANT HIDE BEHIND YOUR NEIGHBORS FOREVER NOBODY IS GONNA PROTECT YOU BITCH." The letter continued, referring to the couple's daughters as "pigs," to Curtis as an "old old old fuck" and to Smith as an "old worn out bitch."

Court records show that Ozuna denied many of the couple's allegations against her and countered that they were actually harassing her. Their children, Ozuna complained, had thrown balls in her yard, and one of them had chased her niece with a stick. Their dog had "interfered with her trash."

Judge Bill Robinson treated the matter as a neighborhood dispute and suggested mediation. But the mediator, Helen Wahl, soon quit, writing in a letter to the court, "Mediation will not work in every case."