Kill Thy Neighbor

Robinson ultimately ordered Curtis and Smith and Ozuna to refrain from "hindering, assaulting or in any way harassing each other."

Then a neighbor, Danny Yeo, watched a desperate Curtis and Smith put up a tall wooden privacy fence around their home to shut out Ozuna.

"If someone were to say she's a lunatic, they wouldn't be lying," Yeo says.

Ozuna's complaints about Yeo's dogs landed him in court numerous times, he says. When his beagle disappeared, neighbors told him they had seen Ozuna take the dog and drive off, Yeo says. A few days later, an office worker found the dog wandering in a business park in Lenexa near Interstate 435 and took it to an animal shelter, where Yeo located it.

After one of their younger children stepped on Ozuna's grass, Yeo says, Ozuna tried to intimidate his wife.

"After that, my wife told the children, 'You don't even walk on her side of the street. And if your ball goes in her yard -- it's gone," Yeo says. When the family finally moved to Missouri 10 years ago, they were relieved to get away from Ozuna.

A few years later, Ozuna moved to Edwardsville. On the second day of the 2002 trial in which Ozuna and her daughter faced felony charges of making terroristic threats, Assistant District Attorney Hunt called two women as witnesses who had worked at the elementary school in Ozuna's old neighborhood. They testified that they had witnessed a frightening encounter in 1998 in which Carmen Ozuna had pulled a gun on the mother of two schoolchildren.

The children had cut though the Ozunas' yard, and Donna Ozuna had followed them around the corner to their home, the witnesses testified. She pounded on their door, screaming at them. The frightened children called their mother, Telisha Relliford, who confronted Donna Ozuna. The two women argued. The school employees testified that Carmen Ozuna then ran out of her house waving a handgun, pointed the weapon at Relliford and shouted, "I'll kill you, black bitch." Neighbors called the police, court records show. Carmen Ozuna pleaded guilty to aggravated assault without admitting that she'd had a gun, and a judge placed her on probation.

After hearing this testimony as well as accounts of what had taken place in Edwardsville at the July 4, 2001, party, the jury deliberated for an afternoon and a morning before finding Donna and Carmen Ozuna not guilty of making criminal threats.

Lesli Trout and Stephanie Eickhoff were bitterly disappointed.

After the trial, they say, Ozuna smirked when she saw them. "She was always out there after that, smiling, flipping us off and just laughing," Lesli Trout says.

The Trouts, fed up with the neighborhood dispute, found a house to rent in a nearby area.

The Eickhoffs believe that's when Ozuna turned her attention to them. James says he was convinced that Ozuna was determined to punish him for testifying in the 2002 trial.

When he saw Ozuna make a throat-slashing gesture at him a month after the trial, he says, he started to worry. "I began to think she might harm us, especially when I talked to some of the neighbors," he says.

The previous fall, the Eickhoffs were told that Ozuna had allegedly pulled a gun on Darryl Ford, the adult son of their neighbors Robert and Debbie Ford, a retired couple who lived up the street. Darryl Ford tells the Pitch that he was at his brother's house about a mile away helping to fix the roof when it started to rain. He had left his convertible, parked with the top down, in front of his parents' house, and he decided to run over and close up the car.

As Ford sprinted, getting pelted with rain, he cut through yards. Donna Ozuna saw him step on her grass and yelled at him through the window. He says he replied, "Whatever, lady," and kept going. Then, he says, she ran out of her house, jumped in her car and pulled up next to him aiming what looked like a .38-caliber handgun out the window at him. He ducked, thinking she was going to shoot.

"Don't ever do that again or I'll shoot you!" he says she yelled before driving away. He called police, who encouraged him to press charges. But he decided not to. "They said she had a bunch of complaints against her, and I think they wanted to get another one. But I didn't want the hassle of having to come back and testify," he says.

James Eickhoff says he figured a physical barrier might help reduce the number of encounters with his neighbor. So in 2002, he purchased a motor home and parked it so that it blocked Ozuna's view of their home.

The Eickhoffs claim that Ozuna retaliated by making three complaints to the SRS, falsely charging that the Eickhoffs were abusing their three children.