Good Fences, would have made better neighbours!

Beware the neighbour with a grudge that is the advice that a Saskatoon couple can offer, after discovering how much their neighbour really hated them.

Starting in the spring of 2003, Wes and Heather Skakun could not figure out why their garage and graveled area smelled so strongly of urine. Not just a one time thing, but time after time, the smell would come back, puddles of the fetid mixture forming around the door and on the lane.

Finally tiring of the horrid smell, the Skakuns set up a video camera and lights around the garage area, activated by the door opener. One night upon hearing the splash of fluid on the door, Wes lit up the yard and started the camera rolling. What he discovered came as a complete shock to him.

Running away from his garage with bottle in tow was his 60 year old neighbour, Robert Kukura. Kukura had apparently been collecting the weapon of neighbourly destruction, storing it in his garage and letting it ferment to just the right level of obnoxiousness. He would then sneak out at night and splash the substance around the garage and back area of the house.

The dispute seems to originate from when the city of Saskatoon closed down a body shop Kukura operated from his garage, for which he held the Skakuns responsible. They claim they never said a word in the fifteen years it was in operation.

The defence offered up a more mundane accounting of the feud, Saskatoon court was told that Kukura said he was upset with the Skakuns for starting their car at 3 am and letting it idle, waking up his wife who was ill at the time. The rumbling of the motor daily, apparently sending him in search of a way to show his displeasure.

The court was not inclined to accept his excuse as justification for the foul smelling property assault, fining him 1,732 dollars in restitution for replacement of the door and the gravel around it. Perhaps ordering the building of a wall along the property line might have been an idea as well, though one suspects that Mr. Kokura will keep his bodily fluids and any others he may wish to collect on his own property from now on.