A Stonecrest woman found herself behind bars Monday after a large SUV knocked down a metal exit gate at the Summerfield retirement subdivision.
Officials from the community called a Marion County sheriff’s deputy to show him video surveillance footage of a large black Chevrolet SUV intentionally knocking down a gate this past Friday. The gate, control arm and motor suffered $6,000 in damage and officials said they wanted to prosecute the vehicle’s driver.
The deputy ran the license tag from the SUV and discovered that it belonged to 52-year-old Nancy Renee Broad, who lives at 17783 SE 113th Terr. The surveillance footage showed the SUV slowly approach the exit gate and come to a stop. When the gate didn’t open – a fuse had been tripped, apparently by lightning – the vehicle slowly and forcefully pushed the gate open and drove forward about 30 yards before coming to a stop, a sheriff’s office report says.
The driver can then be seen exiting the SUV and walking around it before getting back into the driver’s seat and leaving the area. The deputy noted that the video “appeared to show a deliberate attempt to force the gate open,” the report says.
The deputy attempted to make contact with Broad around 2:20 p.m. but she wasn’t home. So he returned a couple of hours later and saw the black SUV in the driveway, with white scuff marks along the passenger side and a green scuff mark on the front passenger-side bumper, “which is consistent” with the incident he saw on the surveillance footage, the report says.
Broad told the deputy “the gate kind of started coming back at me.” She claimed she had called Stonecrest officials about 20 minutes earlier to report the incident. And she maintained that the gate opened at first and only made contact with her vehicle when it closed as she was driving through the exit, the report says.
The deputy told Broad that the video showed the gate didn’t move until her vehicle pushed it open, but she still insisted that it had opened and it was an accident. She said she didn’t make a report of the incident at the time because she was in a hurry to get to a meeting with a client, the report says.
Broad then told the deputy she didn’t want to speak to him about the incident and he stopped questioning her. But when she was told that she was being arrested, she said, “OK, well, I don’t understand how I can be arrested for something like that,” the report says.
Broad was transported to the Marion County Jail and charged with criminal mischief ($100 or more). She was released early Tuesday morning and her next court date hasn’t yet been set, the report says.
