Hoop puts spotlight on community values

Charlene Ashendorf’s story sounds more like a mob hit from “The Godfather” then a simple planning code violation.

Anonymous letters to her family, city employees acting on the behalf of shadowy figures, and even a chain-saw massacre played a role in her family’s recent battle over a simple basketball hoop stationed outside of her home.

Curiously, Ashendorf says she never heard a peep from her neighbors about the hoop, which she bought for her husband’s Father’s Day present two years ago, until a Monday morning earlier this month.

“We received an anonymous, typed letter in our mailbox, and it said, ‘Please remove your basketball hoop, put it on your property out of sight, because it’s lowering property values,’” she said. “No name, no nothing.”

Ashendorf poked around, asking her neighbors if they wrote the letter or had a problem with the position of the hoop, which was often used by neighborhood kids.

They all said no.

Then things got a whole lot stranger.

“That Friday, the city came out with a flatbed truck to haul [the hoop] away, without my notification or any recourse,” she said. “I was at work, but my neighbors came out and moved [it] to our garage to keep him from taking it away.”

Normally, Public Services Director Peter Naghavi said, a code violation would involve multiple attempts to contact the violator before such a confiscation occurred.

He chalked up the employee’s approach to inexperience but acknowledged that City Hall, too, received numerous anonymous complaints about the hoop.

While Ashendorf said she felt some confidence after learning her neighbors had intervened to save her property, she was hardly prepared for what she found the next morning: The hoop, missing from her property, had been cut and mangled with a power saw, and strewn across Gisler Avenue.

Ashendorf doesn’t think it was random — she’s convinced her anonymous nemesis was behind it.

She filed a police report but, unfortunately, there aren’t many leads for the officers to follow.

Fortunately, she doesn’t seem to mind, noting that the outpouring of affection from her neighbors — such as bouquets of flowers and even offers to buy a new hoop for her family — have adequately cheered her.

“You know what that proves? That this community is a pretty nice place,” she said. “One bad apple doesn’t spoil the whole bunch.”

CHRIS CAESAR may be reached at (714) 966-4626 or at [email protected].