The Unforgiving Town Was Real
Joan Livingston's Novel and the Man the Greenfield Recorder Helped Destroy
By John F. Sendelbach
I. The Book Review Lands
On May 15, 2026, the Greenfield Recorder published a book review.
That is not unusual. The Recorder publishes book reviews, community announcements, features on beloved local residents. It is a newspaper of record for Franklin County and the North Quabbin, serving, as its masthead says, the people of this region since 1792. It has served some of them better than others.
The review was of a novel called The Unforgiving Town, written by Joan Livingston, who served as editor-in-chief of the Greenfield Recorder, and the Daily Hampshire Gazette and the Athol Daily News, from December 2018 through January 2022. The reviewer was Tinky Weisblat, an award-winning writer and self-described "Diva of Deliciousness," and her admiration for Livingston was total. Five books since leaving the paper. An audiobook. Two screenplay projects in development. "Talk about a work ethic!" Weisblat wrote. "I admit I'm a little jealous."
Here is the plot of The Unforgiving Town, as described in the review. A man named Al Kitchen returns to the fictional Massachusetts hilltown of Holden after serving 17 years in prison for manslaughter. He killed the owner of the local bar while attempting to rob it. He and the bar owner had a longstanding feud. Most people in town believe the killing was deliberate, not the lesser charge he was convicted of. He has nowhere to go except the house he inherited from his grandmother. Prison changed him, he read, he worked hard, he came to regret what he did. All he wants is to fix up the house, find a job, live quietly. To become, in the reviewer's words, "a useful member of society."
The town won't have it.
It treats him as a permanent pariah. It refuses to accept that a man can change. It harasses him, freezes him out, blocks every path toward ordinary life. When he ends up dead on a back road, in what the police chief suspects was not an accident, his cousin is the only mourner.
The reviewer calls it hopeful, ultimately. "If this criminal can reform, so can any of us."
I am not a criminal. I have never been convicted of a crime. I have lived and worked in this town since 2008, eighteen years, approximately, which is, in one of this story's sharper ironies, almost exactly as long as Al Kitchen served in prison. I am a metalworker and sculptor. I created the custom bench that sits on the Bridge of Flowers in Shelburne Falls, the same bench that became, in June 2020, the symbol of what I was supposed to have done wrong. I built the Black Stones of Africa into the Pothole Fountain at the bridge's entrance, polished stones shaped to the continent, permanently embedded in the pavement, an anti-racist installation completed nine years before the petition calling me a racist arrived. I aligned the Sojourner Truth memorial plaques in Florence in 2002, drilling the anchor holes in slanted granite with my own hands, hands-in-the-ground anti-racist public art, installed without fanfare, eighteen years before the cultural moment that would weaponize the language of anti-racism against the man who had quietly practiced it.
Beginning in the summer of 2020, a coalition of neighbors, civic organizations, a police department, multiple courts, and one newspaper, the Greenfield Recorder, then under the editorial leadership of Joan Livingston, decided I was the disruptor. The troublemaker. The man who should go.
I did not go quietly. What followed was not a social unpleasantness. It was six years of documented institutional machinery, running without neutral review, producing false criminal charges, collapsed HPO proceedings, a physical assault, the destruction of evidence, and a permanent cardiac condition. Every piece of it is in the record. The record did not go into the river with my phone.
Al Kitchen went to prison first. I never did anything that warranted prison, or a criminal charge that survived a single evidentiary review. That is the sharpest difference between his story and mine, and it is worth sitting with: the town in The Unforgiving Town at least required a crime before it destroyed a man. Mine manufactured the crime from a selectively edited video and ran the machinery from there.
Joan Livingston has written a novel about the cruelty of small communities that decide, and refuse to un-decide. She lives here. She was editor-in-chief of the newspaper for the three years in which this happened to me. She is now a Buckland Select Board member, she is, at this writing, in governance. She did not answer my letters. She has written a book about it instead.
The Recorder gives her a feature review celebrating her empathy for ostracized outsiders. It has never published a correction for what it did to one.
II. Who I Was Before the Video
There is a particular cruelty in the architecture of public cancellation that its architects rarely acknowledge: it requires no engagement with the actual record of the person being cancelled. A thirty-year body of work embedded in the physical landscape of western Massachusetts, in granite, welded steel, polished stone cemented into public pavement, does not fit inside a Facebook thread. So the thread ignores it, and the institutions that should have known better follow the thread.
Let me tell you about the concrete, and then the zinc, because together they are the most compact illustration of how I move through the world, and of the precise nature of what was done to me.
A few years ago, my longtime friends sold the building they owned on the river in Shelburne Falls after the flooding devastated it. The Deerfield River had filled the basement chest-high with cold, diesel-black mud. I helped my friends for two days, shoveling it out. My own place was six inches higher and untouched. Six inches. I went anyway, because that is what you do.
A young man named Zack bought the building and opened a brewery. He named it Floodwater. I want to be precise about my reaction when I heard that name: I thought it was an act of profound inconsideration to the people the flood had actually destroyed. I kept that to myself. I gave him the benefit of the doubt. I helped anyway.
When his concrete crew arrived to pour the basement floor, eight, maybe ten men, I could see in sixty seconds that no one knew what they were doing. Wheelbarrows facing the wrong direction. Wet concrete hardening in the chute. Wet concrete does not wait. I stepped in. I reorganized the pour. And then I got on my knees and screeded the floor myself, for three or four hours, training Zack as I went, because no one else on that crew had ever done it.
Every keg of beer that Floodwater has ever served sits on a concrete floor I laid with my own hands.
What did Zack give me in return? My wheelbarrow back, caked in dried concrete. One of the cardinal sins of borrowing a tool. He never properly thanked me for the rowboat I'd loaned him for the under-structure work either.
But the concrete floor is only the first half of this particular story.
Later, when Zack was deciding what to do with the bar top, I immediately suggested zinc sheet. Context matters here. I had recently completed a commission for an architect, a kitchen countertop fabricated from pure zinc sheet, an almost unheard-of material. My father was a lifelong metalworker. He had never heard of zinc sheet. There is galvanized steel, which is zinc-coated, but pure zinc sheet is something else entirely, a rare, beautiful, living material that develops a natural patina over time, used in the finest French zinc bars and almost nowhere else in American fabrication. The architect knew about it. He knew the company that supplied it. It requires a specialized soldering technique, a special solder. I learned the method, completed the commission successfully.
I had leftover sheet. I offered it to Zack, gave him the supplier's name because he would need more than I had, and gave him a brief training on the technique, how to solder it, how to work with it, what it would become over time. He did it himself. It looked great.
The sentence that now needs to be said plainly: not only did I lay the concrete that every keg in that building rests on, I supplied the zinc, taught the technique, and gave away the knowledge that became the bar that every pint gets served across. The floor and the bar. I built Floodwater Brewing. Both surfaces. The foundation and the face.
I tell this not to settle a score with a brewer. I tell it because six months later, the same community I had served for eighteen years decided I was the problem, and the story of the concrete and the zinc tells you exactly how accurate that verdict was.
The professional record is worth stating plainly, because it is the answer to erasure. First public sculpture: the Crossroads Salamander at Cushman Common in North Amherst, 1998, first place from the Public Arts Commission. The Mill Canal Newt, 2003. The Minuteman Crossing Stone Plaza at UMass Amherst, hand-laid Ashfield schist, received the 2014 AIA Honor Award from the Western Massachusetts chapter. Brookie the Trout in River Works Park in Greenfield: ten feet of stainless steel cutlery donated by Franklin County residents, installed approximately one mile from the Franklin County District Courthouse where my attackers would be arraigned April 7, 2026. Old Diamondsides, a twelve-foot Atlantic sturgeon assembled from seventeen hundred salvaged utensils with hand-blown glass eyes, commissioned by the Culinary Institute of America, an active institutional relationship the 2020 campaign severed before its natural conclusion.
The Bridge of Flowers relationship ran from 2003 to 2020, seventeen uninterrupted years. The River Bench. The Trolley Gate. And the Black Stones of Africa: polished stones shaped to the continent, permanently embedded in the entrance fountain's stone inlay as a tribute to mason Paul Forth's biracial daughters and his partner's design vision. These stones were in the ground nine years before the 2020 petition called for my removal. When the Bridge of Flowers Committee installed an anti-racism plaque in June 2020, they placed it approximately three feet from the anti-racist installation they had asked me to build. They did not acknowledge this. They did not appear to have remembered it at all.
This is who I was before June 6, 2020. The record is specific. It is verifiable. It was available to every institution that would subsequently act against me without consulting it.
I also gave Joan Livingston a heart locket at some point in the years before everything fell apart. The kind of thing a neighbor gives someone he respects. She did not answer my letters.
III. June 6, 2020, What Happened Before the Camera Started
Every catastrophe has an origin point that looks, in retrospect, both inevitable and absurd. This one begins with a road closure nobody bothered to announce.
On June 6, 2020, a BLM demonstration was organized on the Iron Bridge without notification to the adjacent business owners whose livelihoods depended on the road being open. We were three months into the pandemic. Every one of us was already hurting from zero traffic. My studio at 44 State Street sat approximately four hundred feet from the bridge. I found out the road was closed when I couldn't get to work. I heard the noise rolling down the river and walked toward it. This was my legal right.
I turned my camera on and walked through the crowd, speaking to my camera, documenting the closure. I did not engage with anyone. I had not said a word to a single person.
Sonny Walters, a woman I had never met before in my life, approached me and got close. I was not wearing a mask; I have health conditions that preclude it, and I had not expected to find myself in the middle of a crowd of people who were themselves not socially distancing. I asked her to leave me alone. Clearly, more than once. She persisted. Joey Kotright was running a bullhorn call-and-response behind her, say something, the crowd screams it back, full volume, and the whole scene was already loud and chaotic. Walters would not stop. Approximately two minutes of sustained harassment, directed at a man who had said nothing to her and asked her three times to step back.
That two minutes is what Alouette Batteau's video does not contain.
As Walters continued and the noise built, Katherine Hennessey and several others joined in and pinned me against the east railing of the bridge. Trapped at the rail, surrounded, that is the moment, that precise moment of maximum pressure, when Alouette Batteau raised her phone and hit Facebook Live. The crowd saw the camera come up. And the crowd, apparently understanding that what they had been doing for the past two minutes did not look the way they wanted it to look, cleared out. They stepped back. The confrontation that had been physical a moment earlier went suddenly still.
That clearing is not in the video either. What viewers saw next, with no context for what preceded it, was a visibly agitated man in a suddenly quieter crowd. Once the space opened, I said what I said: "I'm not gonna be a slave to people like you." Then I turned and walked away.
They followed me.
I walked. They followed. When I realized I was being followed, I turned around. They got in my face again, trying to stop me from talking, trying to shut me down. Hennessey flagged the police at this point, the first time officers were formally involved, but the officers, who were standing nearby and had watched the entire prior sequence, did not come. I turned around and walked away again, another thirty feet down the bridge. They were still following. I turned around once more. More words were exchanged. And then they locked elbows, a physical human chain blocking the width of the bridge, and refused to let me pass.
Police officers stood approximately twenty feet away and watched. They did nothing.
All of this, the following, the blocking, the locked elbows, the officers watching, is on the video. The thirteen-minute video that Alouette posted to Facebook. The video that went viral and reached twenty-two thousand people. The video in which, if you watch the whole thing rather than the carefully cropped excerpt that circulated most widely, you can see Katherine Hennessey and her associates following a man who is trying to walk away, blocking his path, refusing to let him pass.
The next morning, Hennessey filed a police report. She was the victim, by her account. The video, all thirteen minutes of it, showed her committing the acts she was claiming I had committed. The following. The blocking. The refusal to let someone pass. That is the most devastating part of this, and it is the part that the narrative of "disruptor at peaceful vigil" was engineered to prevent anyone from looking at closely enough to see: the video documented their conduct, not mine. Misdemeanors, plural. Continued following, continued verbal assault, physical blocking. And then Hennessey filed the police report.
Bianca Cavanaugh-Green, eighteen years old and not present at the event, filed a Change.org petition within days: "Remove John Sendelbach's art from Shelburne Falls." It gathered more than 600 signatures in three days. Change.org removed it, for defamation and misinformation violations. That is a third-party institutional finding that the foundational document of the campaign against me was built on false content. Cavanaugh-Green later met me directly and told me I was "actually very kind and understanding. I just wanted to say this so that people knew."
None of this, the removal, the reason, the partial retraction, was reported by the Greenfield Recorder.
What the Recorder did report, on June 12, 2020, on the front page, under the headline "Artist's work in question following petition," was the petition's existence and momentum. The reporter, Mary Byrne, did not contact me for substantive comment. I "declined to comment" on the petition's existence, I was not asked about what happened on the bridge before Alouette started recording, about my thirty-year record, about anything that would have complicated the framing. My bench was photographed. My name was in the headline. I was the story and I was not in the story.
A second piece ran days later.
Joan Livingston was editor-in-chief.
On June 13, 2020, the same weekend, she published a "My Turn" column about the paper's COVID and BLM coverage. She praised her staff and closed with these words, which I have read more times than I can count:
"I want to emphasize the mistakes a newspaper, including the Recorder, makes in its coverage are public mistakes. And we own up to our mistakes. We also correct them. It is part of responsible journalism."
She has not corrected these articles. She has not answered my letters. She has written a novel about a community that refuses to correct its mistakes about a man it has decided to hate.
IV. The Machinery, And What It Actually Sounds Like on Tape
What happened after June 6 was organized, sustained, institutional, and, critically, documented on audio the institutions processing complaints against me apparently never requested.
On June 28, 2020, Katherine Hennessey made a recording. At timestamp 3:09, in her own voice, she told me: "I don't talk to KKK members either, but here we are." She applied the KKK label to me. On her own audio. In her own voice. She would subsequently claim, in sworn affidavits across multiple legal proceedings from 2023 through December 2025, that I had applied that language to community members, a complete inversion of the audio's direction. Every time she made that sworn claim, the recording that refuted it had existed the entire time. That is the definition of perjury. It recurred across four and a half years of proceedings without generating a single referral from any officer or court.
On June 29, 2020, on my own openly recorded video: "Yeah, I hate you. I really do. But, you know, there's nothing wrong with that. That's not against the law. I can hate you all I want." Brook Batteau delivered the phrase "quit your white whining", a racial slur, on the family's own audio. Alouette Batteau bum-rushed me from ten feet, closing to within two feet while her parents watched without reaction, and delivered the threat that would be executed five years later: "I know that I can get a restraining order against you if I want to. And I will." At timestamp 3:57 she added: "You'll know when I'm threatening you." She meant it as a promise. November 30, 2025 was the delivery.
These recordings are the Rosetta Stone for the entire subsequent six years. Every tactic that would define what followed is previewed in that audio, the HPO threats, the racial framework deployed as a weapon, the hatred declared openly while institutional machinery was simultaneously used to paint me as the aggressor. All of it on their own recording, in their own voices, because they did not believe anyone would listen carefully enough to matter.
Meanwhile, the institutional machinery was assembling around me without my knowledge.
The Bridge of Flowers Committee held secret Zoom meetings in late June 2020 to coordinate the removal of my work. These meetings were organized by Kay Berenson, who is also a co-founder of the Greenfield Recorder. This conflict of interest, the woman organizing secret meetings to remove my commission also co-founded the paper covering the story, was never disclosed in a single Recorder article. No one from the committee called me. There was no hearing, no conversation, no attempt at due process. Seventeen years of professional relationship, ended by Zoom.
And on June 29, 2020, Sergeant Kurt Gilmore emailed Katherine Hennessey: "I've talked to John. It doesn't work." In plain institutional language: don't bother trying to resolve this through channels. That email, sent the same day the family recordings documented everything above, was the permission slip for everything that followed.
In the comment thread that formed beneath Alouette Batteau's video, the mob did its work. Death threats accumulated, "throw him off the bridge," "toss em over," "I'd love to punch him." Victoria Rolon wrote: "I would throw his camera in the water." Five years and five months later, Katherine Hennessey picked my still-recording iPhone off the pavement in front of Floodwater Brewing, walked seventy-five feet to the bank of the Deerfield River, and threw it in while the screen was lit. The mob imagined the ending in June 2020. The assault delivered it in November 2025. The thread is still in the archive.
Rhonda Anderson, Massachusetts Commissioner of Native American Affairs, a woman who had been a potential business partner at my studio nine years earlier, called me "toxic" and an "unhinged conspiracy theorist" in the thread, lending the weight of a state government title to a narrative she had not investigated. Janice Sorenson wrote publicly that she had "unfriended him years ago when Jewish people were his target of choice", a fabrication stated as settled fact in a public forum of twenty-two thousand people. In Western Massachusetts's progressive community, being labeled an antisemite is a social death sentence. She said it anyway. There is zero supporting evidence for that claim in any record anywhere.
In August 2020, under the community pressure generated by this campaign, I was asked to leave 44 State Street, a space I had occupied for nine years. I left voluntarily to protect my landlord's relationship with the community. My shop closed. The CIA commission pipeline, a $14,000 active institutional relationship, was severed by the summer of 2020. The economic targeting was not spontaneous outrage. It was coordinated. It ran.
V. The Courts, the False Charges, and What the Record Actually Shows
In March 2023, Katherine Hennessey filed a sworn affidavit claiming I had "homicidal tendencies" and would "try to hurt or even kill" her family. Officer Christopher Pettengill wrote the criminal harassment charge based entirely on her account, without ever meeting me. Detective Tucker Jenkins co-signed it. An emergency Harassment Prevention Order was issued ex parte on March 3, 2023. I learned of it when a process server arrived at my door. Three years of police reports filed against me. The first official contact from the department regarding any of those reports was a process server handing me an HPO.
If the department had genuinely believed I had homicidal tendencies, they would have come to my door. They went to hers and filed paperwork. The allegation was not taken seriously as a factual matter, it was used as the instrument to obtain the order.
On March 22, 2023, Judge Mazanec vacated the emergency HPO the same day I played him the audio recording of the encounter Hennessey's affidavit had described as containing a homicidal threat. The audio documented my actual words: "I will never get along with the likes of you." It documented Hennessey laughing throughout the encounter. The judge heard the audio and vacated the order immediately. This was the first of three findings of not-credible testimony against Hennessey by the same judge. It produced no perjury referral from the department. It produced escalation.
On June 6, 2023, three years to the day after the founding event, a clerk-magistrate at a show-cause hearing reviewed approximately one hour of evidence and found no probable cause for the criminal harassment charge. Jenkins sat in the room and watched the charge collapse exhibit by exhibit. He generated no referral. He took no corrective action. I spoke for the better part of an hour while she actively listened; I watched her body language shift as she began to understand the actual facts. She asked for the thumb drive of evidence; I got it to her the next day. By the end of the week I had the No Probable Cause finding in hand. The first time anyone examined the underlying evidence, the charge fell apart. The department continued as before.
When I later encountered Jenkins at a road race he was working traffic for, I asked if we could talk on video. He agreed. He confirmed on camera that he had never met me before the show-cause hearing. He told me I had received "due process.” I told him that a man cannot receive due process when officers have never come to interview him about a single one of the complaints filed against him. He did not appear to have a response to that framing.
In July 2021, Sergeant Gilmore had filed incident report 21-133-OF. In it, he wrote, in an official document, with his name attached, submitted to the department's files, that he had told Hennessey "I was not going to call Sendelbach because it hasn't worked in the past." A police sergeant, in official writing, explaining that he had decided not to contact the subject of a complaint not for any articulable law enforcement reason, but because previous contact had not produced whatever outcome he found satisfying. This sentence is the policy. It explains why eight reports produced zero interviews. It explains why every report collapsed the first time anyone looked at the evidence. The machine ran on one side's unverified account for years because a sergeant had put in writing that the other side would not be heard. Nobody above him said anything about that document.
VI. The Permission Structure and Its Architecture, The Cop Saga in Full
The sentence Gilmore wrote in 2021 did not emerge from nothing. It formalized a posture the department had maintained from the beginning. To understand what the Shelburne Police Department became in these six years, you have to read the personnel file alongside the case file. They are the same document.
Between 2020 and 2023, Hennessey filed approximately eight police reports against me. Not once was I contacted or interviewed before any of them. The first time the Shelburne Police Department communicated with me regarding any of those reports was when a process server handed me an emergency HPO on March 3, 2023, three years into the documented pattern. Every single one of those reports collapsed the moment anyone examined evidence. The department generated zero perjury referrals from any of the resulting judicial findings of not-credible testimony.
Detective Jenkins co-signed the March 2023 criminal harassment charge against a man he had never met, based entirely on the account of a complainant whose prior reports had all collapsed under evidence review. The report states in its own second paragraph: "It shall be noted that both Detective Jenkins and I were both aware of prior incidents between Mr. Sendelbach and Mrs. Hennessey." They drove to her residence carrying the accumulated weight of every unverified complaint the department had processed without interviewing the accused. The charge collapsed at show-cause when evidence was reviewed for the first time. Jenkins made no perjury referral and took no corrective action.
Officer Pettengill, who co-signed that same charge, revealed the double standard clearly in a separate incident the following spring. While I was lawfully parked and filming from inside my vehicle, a driver not associated with prior complainants passed, beeped aggressively, gave me the middle finger. I followed, on my normal route to work, to capture the license plate. The driver slammed on his brakes at the Conway Street intersection, nearly causing a rear-end collision, then exited his vehicle and approached my driver's window aggressively, recording me while I was trapped with no safe way to leave. I called the Shelburne Police. Pettengill responded, our first in-person meeting. He reviewed my video, acknowledged the driver's behavior was aggressive, noted the vehicle had an expired registration and an invalid inspection sticker. Then called me back to say he could not charge the driver without also citing me for "driving while filming." No charges filed against the driver.
Ten days later, Pettengill pulls the same driver over on Route 2. I observe from a legal distance. Instead of towing for the known violations, Pettengill allows roadside assistance to handle it and lets the driver leave. He then files an incident report that frames me as the aggressor, omits the driver's aggressive actions and illegal vehicle status, and fails to note that he activated his body camera without informing me, captured on my own recording. This is the same officer who co-signed a criminal harassment charge against me without ever meeting or interviewing me.
The Bridge Classic race day, August 10, 2024, provided perhaps the most public demonstration of the Permission Structure in daylight. When I attempted to seek basic redress from race director Michael McCusker on a public road, a legal act protected by the First Amendment, a volunteer escalated by threatening to destroy my reputation on Facebook. Chief Bardwell arrived and immediately threatened me with arrest for disorderly conduct. He did not address the volunteer who was hurling expletives and making public defamation threats. When I asked Bardwell to define "appropriate level", a reasonable question when threatened with arrest, the chief scoffed and walked away without answering. Simultaneously, Sergeant Gilmore physically moved his body to block my camera from filming the volunteer. I was thirty to forty feet away. Gilmore jockeyed position as the camera moved, then shook the volunteer's hand as the man drove away. This was not crowd control. It was deliberate obstruction of a citizen's First Amendment right to record on a public road, two officers, one target, two constitutional violations, on camera, in broad daylight, in front of witnesses.
The Walker letter is where the Permission Structure produced its most catastrophic failure. On September 6, 2024, Hennessey wrote a letter to my commercial landlord, Brad Walker, containing the sentence: "It's really only a matter of time before someone gets hurt." Walker forwarded it to the Shelburne Police Department. It was received by Detective Jenkins. He read it approximately twelve days late. He filed no report. He issued no warning. He conducted no interview. He took no action.
Fourteen months after that sentence was written, she hurt me. On a public sidewalk. In front of witnesses. More than thirty combined blows.
On October 16, 2025, I stood in front of Chief Bardwell at the Neighbors gas station on Mohawk Trail in active atrial fibrillation. My heart rate was near 180 beats per minute. I asked the Chief to feel my wrist. This exchange is on video. He said: "I don't want to." He then stated he "can't charge false police reports", a statement that is factually incorrect under M.G.L. c.269 §13A. He directed me to the Attorney General's office and walked into the store for coffee. Three days later, I went to the Massachusetts State Police barracks in Shelburne. Officer Sheerer witnessed my condition and called EMS. A Stryker LIFEPAK 15 cardiac monitor recorded my heart rate between 130 and 230 beats per minute. Officer Sheerer is a neutral third-party witness. The machine has no opinion. It simply records what it reads.
When I brought my concerns to the DA, I reached a victim advocate who listened for over thirty minutes and was genuinely empathetic. She said, paraphrasing: that's probably because Hennessey has been spreading these lies around town. She verified my point of view. Then she said Bardwell should probably be doing something about this, and punted the ball back to Bardwell, who told me I had received due process and did nothing.
Now consider the department's broader personnel record.
Former Chief James T. Hicks resigned in disgrace following sexual misconduct allegations. Paul John "PJ" Herbert, a part-time Buckland officer, spent thirteen years claiming combat service in northern Iraq, an IED strike, and survival when British Royal Marines were killed. He collected $344,000 in fraudulent VA disability benefits. He pleaded guilty in March 2025. He was caught by federal investigators, not local ones. Former officer Jacob Wrisley was convicted of possession and distribution of child sexual abuse material, some of it accessed on department devices while on duty, and sentenced to four to five years in state prison. Permanently decertified by the Massachusetts POST Commission in April 2025.
Detective Tucker Jenkins: co-signer of the false charge assembled without interviewing the accused. In January 2025, a separate investigation found that Jenkins had made 25 phone calls totaling 67 minutes to an 18-year-old female student at Mohawk Trail Regional School during a 30-day period and had deleted text messages related to those contacts. The Berkshire District Attorney's Office found the conduct exceeded professional boundaries. The school district terminated his position. A community petition calling for his removal from the police department gathered 218 signatures. Jenkins declined to be interviewed by DA investigators. Chief Bardwell publicly characterized the community's concern as "reckless spreading of reputation-wrecking rumors." The Select Board voted to retain him in a three-hour executive session.
On March 12, 2026, U.S. District Judge Mark G. Mastroianni denied qualified immunity to Detective Tucker Jenkins personally in Mlynick v. Town of Erving et al. (3:24-cv-30108), finding it plausible that Jenkins "provided misleading information" and ignored exculpatory facts to manufacture probable cause. The mechanism the federal court found plausible maps directly onto Report 23SHL-8-AR: two officers arriving "aware of prior incidents," building a charge from one side's unverified complaints, and filing without interviewing the accused.
Thirteen days after the federal qualified immunity denial, Chief Bardwell submitted a merit raise request for his "fantastic crew." The raise was approved. Select Board Chair Rick LaPierre described it as "well worth it."
That is seven names across the department's recent history. Seven. This is not a list of unrelated incidents. It is evidence that the environment that produced the Permission Structure has repeatedly failed to self-correct even when misconduct became visible to outside investigators, and that an institution rewarding itself above a standard it has not met is not inviting anyone to look carefully at the record.
VII. The Committee Saga, Seventeen Years and the Plaque Three Feet Away
My relationship with the Bridge of Flowers Committee began in 2008 and ran twelve uninterrupted years. The River Bench. The Trolley Gate. And the Pothole Fountain, designed with mason Paul Forth, incorporating the Black Stones of Africa: polished stones shaped to the continent, permanently embedded in the entrance fountain's stone inlay as a tribute to his biracial daughters and his partner's design vision.
Those stones were in the ground nine years before the petition called me a racist. The committee knew this because they commissioned it. They had stood beside it at plant sales and maintenance days and ribbon-cuttings for nine years. Then, in June 2020, the petition arrived, and the committee apparently forgot, entirely and simultaneously, that the anti-racist installation they needed to respond to had already been built by the man they were preparing to erase.
In late June 2020, the committee held secret Zoom meetings to coordinate the removal of my work. These meetings were organized by Kay Berenson, who is also a co-founder of the Greenfield Recorder. No one from the committee called me. There was no hearing, no conversation, no due process of any kind. Seventeen years of professional relationship, ended by Zoom. Committee member Ann Loftquist would later tell me to my face that the committee had "thrown me under the bus." I appreciated the honesty. It changed nothing.
The committee's response to the petition was to install an anti-racism plaque. They placed it approximately three feet from the Pothole Fountain. The fountain, my fountain, commissioned by this committee, incorporating the Black Stones of Africa, had been there for nine years. The committee's plaque did not reference the stones. Their public statement did not reference the stones. The Recorder photographed the plaque for its June 18, 2020 article. The published photograph was cropped to exclude the stones. A laminated sign, tacked up with thumbtacks, endorsing the "anti-racism spirit" of a petition since removed for defamation, was centered in the frame. My nine-year permanent anti-racist installation was cut out of the frame. That was not an accident of composition.
Chair Annette Szpila was quoted in that same article endorsing the petition and its spirit. At the August 2025 ribbon-cutting for the $3.2 million renovation, a once-in-a-generation civic event, speeches lost to street noise because no one had thought to bring a PA system, Szpila stated to my face, in the presence of a witness, that she had never made the quoted statements. The archived Recorder articles contain her direct quotes. This is documented denial of the public record, delivered in person, five years after the fact.
One year before the petition, the institutional climate had already been established. On August 26, 2019, committee member Joanne Soroka sent me an email, quoted here verbatim: "Get this through your head. I have not told anyone your personal information… If you slander me, mention me, accuse me or anything that resembles that, I CERTAINLY will get a restrain order against you… You don't know who you are fucking with… You are dead to me. Only when you call my name out, will I reawaken and I promise it will get ugly." I reported this to local law enforcement. No action was taken. Soroka remains on the Bridge of Flowers Committee at the time of this writing. This email predates the 2020 petition by a year and establishes the institutional climate into which the petition landed.
From June 6, 2020 through the writing of this piece: not one Bridge of Flowers Committee member has contacted me. Not an email. Not a phone call. Not a letter. During this period, I was falsely accused of racism in a petition the committee endorsed; I had my studio closed by the community pressure that followed; I sustained documented atrial fibrillation attributed by my physician to the harassment stress. Through all of it, the committee whose endorsement launched the cascade maintained total silence. This is not an oversight. It is a posture.
In 2024, Ann Loftquist informed me that my proposed permanent-style pieces for the Bridge of Flowers Art Show did not fit the bridge/flower theme. I withdrew the pieces and attended the show anyway. At least a dozen pieces on display had nothing to do with flowers or the bridge, directly contradicting the stated reason for rejecting my work. I accepted the exclusion without public complaint. The exclusion was arbitrary. The stated reason was not the real reason. The real reason was six years of institutional silence that had calcified into institutional exclusion, and no one in the room was prepared to say so out loud.
The $3.2 million renovation, completed in 2025, produced its own accounting. A contractor confirmed on-site in April 2026 that the Bridge of Flowers Committee had specified the soil type for the renovation without documented professional horticultural input. Wrong soil was specified. Remediation cost: approximately $60,000 in donor and public funds. No public accounting of the failure has been released. No committee member has been identified as responsible. The professional gardening staff, the people who know that bridge at root level, who could have prevented this, were not meaningfully consulted on the specification that failed.
The man who has tended that bridge for approximately twenty years is still the assistant gardener. The people who made the sixty-thousand-dollar mistake are still in charge. The Recorder ran two photographs and a caption about "laying groundwork." No dollar figures. No explanation. No accountability. Not even a question.
VIII. Floodwater, the Bar Top, and the Newspaper's Protection Racket
The double standard has been consistent enough that it functions less like a bias and more like a policy.
Floodwater Brewing, built on the concrete floor I poured, served across the zinc bar whose material I supplied and whose technique I taught, posted an image on Instagram of a cake that I and others found racially offensive. It received 34 likes. I said so publicly. Zack posted an apology which, according to someone with knowledge of the account's analytics, generated the most engagement the account had ever seen.
There was no article in the Greenfield Recorder.
No petition. No Bridge of Flowers Committee meeting. No front-page headline branding Floodwater a disruptor. No community mobilization. The Recorder ran two front-page stories about me for voicing opinions at a protest. It ran nothing about a brewery, operated by the son of its former editor-in-chief, posting a racially offensive image. The difference in treatment does not require a sociologist to identify. It requires only a calendar and a sense of proportion.
The HooPla incident is worse, because it involves a timestamp that cannot be coincidental.
On April 7, 2026, the Recorder published a large, glowing front-page feature celebrating the Winter HooPla art event's tenth anniversary. The article quoted and celebrated Katherine Hennessey as the beloved co-director, "keeper of the flame." Brook Batteau was photographed warmly at the event.
April 7, 2026 was also the day Katherine Hennessey and Brook Batteau were arraigned at Franklin County District Court.
Hennessey: Case 2641CR000158. Assault and Battery, two counts. Malicious Destruction of Property. Pretrial no-contact order.
Batteau: Case 2641CR000159. Assault and Battery. Same pretrial conditions. Same date.
The Recorder celebrated the defendants on its front page on the day their criminal charges were made public. The same paper that ran front-page coverage of my attendance at a protest, without interviewing me, without correction in six years, chose the day of the arraignment of my attackers to celebrate them as community pillars.
You cannot make this up.
IX. November 30, 2025, The Body Keeps the Score
I want to be clinical about this, because the facts are clinical enough.
The Walker letter had arrived fourteen months earlier: "It's really only a matter of time before someone gets hurt." That sentence was in the possession of the Shelburne Police Department. Jenkins read it approximately twelve days late and did nothing. Brad Walker, my landlord, the letter's recipient, declined to evict me and offered to pay for professional mediation. Hennessey refused. She was offered an exit from the escalation she had written down. She declined it and continued toward the endpoint she had already committed to paper.
The morning of November 30, Hennessey drove onto my new rented property at State Street (now there BECAUSE of her tortious interference with Walker) without invitation or legitimate purpose. She drove past the store entrance to the far end of the lot where my van was parked and screened from the street. She executed a peace sign, then a double middle finger, mouthed profanity, repeated the sequence, and sped away laughing. I called police within fifteen minutes and made a reconstruction video documenting the property layout and her path.
Sergeant Gilmore arrived after the assault, days later, he took a statement, walked the property line, reviewed prior bodycam footage from the unnamed responding officer, filed no trespass charge, checked no cameras.
No consequence in the morning. No deterrent by the afternoon.
At approximately 5:32 PM, at 40 State Street in Buckland, Brook Batteau charged out of Floodwater Brewing and shoved me hard with both hands off the curb to the pavement. He jumped on me from behind and began punching. Katherine Hennessey exited the brewery right behind him. A second individual grabbed both my elbows from behind and pinned my arms. With my arms pinned and my ability to protect myself eliminated, Hennessey struck me repeatedly in the head and face, thirty or more blows. I did not retaliate. I screamed for help. Eight to ten adult bystanders stood on the sidewalk of a village street in early evening. None of them intervened. The permission structure that had operated institutionally for six years had also operated socially.
My iPhone had fallen to the road during the initial shove as I crashed into the icy puddle. The screen was still lit. It was still recording.
Hennessey bent down after beating me, picked it up, walked approximately seventy-five feet to the bank of the Deerfield River, and threw it in while the screen was lit. I watched the lit screen arc into the water from thirty feet away. Victoria Rolon had written "I would throw his camera in the water" in June 2020. The mob imagined this in the comment thread. The assault delivered it five years and five months later.
Hennessey then walked back and resumed striking and kicking me from behind. The second battery occurred after a deliberate pause that included a seventy-five-foot walk to destroy evidence. She did not flee. She returned. This is not incidental to the assault. It is the assault's most legally significant sequence. Kicking anyone while wearing a shoe, called shodfoot, is considered assault with a deadly weapon. I doubt Sgt. Gilmore has ever heard the term.
Zachary Livingston, co-owner of Floodwater Brewing, handed me my shoe. He then asked Brook Batteau why he had pushed me. Batteau's response, given voluntarily and immediately to a neutral witness: "You don't understand, John has been after my family for five years." Livingston said: "But you still shouldn't have pushed him."
This exchange is documented in Livingston's sworn statement to Sergeant Gilmore, dated December 9, 2025. Batteau's admission is a confession. He did not claim self-defense. He offered accumulated grievance as moral authorization. What he calls "being after his family for five years" is six years of me demanding that his daughter remove a defamatory video she posted in June 2020.
Here is the detail that should stop everyone who has followed this story: Zachary Livingston is Joan Livingston's son. The editor-in-chief who presided over the articles that helped launch this campaign, who told me on the street that the articles couldn't be taken down, whose institutional silence enabled six years of what followed, her son became the key neutral witness for the criminal prosecution of the people her paper helped protect.
That is not a coincidence I invented. That is the structural irony that emerges when a record has been maintained with sufficient precision.
That same night, before completing his own criminal investigation, Sergeant Gilmore suggested to the assault defendants that they seek Harassment Prevention Orders against me. His own summons report (25SHL-47-AR) uses the word "suggested." He coached the people he would later charge with beating me to pursue civil protection against me, before he had finished writing up the beating. Three courts had already denied my petitions for protection, each starting fresh, none with access to Judge Mazanec's three prior findings of not-credible testimony against the same people. On April 7, 2026, the day of the arraignment, the day the Recorder celebrated the defendants on its front page, the Commonwealth requested and the court imposed a stay-away and no-contact order as a condition of bail. The judicial system formally acknowledging, in binding legal terms, a risk the Shelburne Police Department had spent six years declining to assess.
X. The Cardiac Record, What the Machine Cannot Erase
There is a category of evidence that institutional harassment campaigns cannot manage: the body of the person being harassed.
A police department can decline to preserve camera footage. A court can start fresh with each new proceeding. A Facebook video can be removed the day after legal exposure arrives. But the body records what it experiences with a fidelity that no institution controls and no deletion can reach.
The Stryker LIFEPAK 15 cardiac monitor has no opinion about this case. It reads the electrical activity of a human heart and reports the number. On October 19, 2025, at the Massachusetts State Police barracks in Shelburne, it reported a heart rate of 130 to 230 beats per minute. Officer Sheerer was present, called EMS, and is a neutral third-party witness. The photograph of the monitor exists. The number is the number.
Three days before that reading, Chief Bardwell encountered me in documented atrial fibrillation at a gas station on the Mohawk Trail. I asked him to feel my pulse. He said: "I don't want to." He then stated, incorrectly, under Massachusetts law, that he was unable to charge false police reports, and walked into the convenience store for coffee. This exchange is on video. The state trooper called EMS three days later. The chief called for a medium regular.
Atrial fibrillation was formally diagnosed in 2021. My physician attributed its onset to the sustained stress of the documented harassment that began in June 2020. The American Heart Association is unambiguous: repeated AFib episodes are self-reinforcing, each one lowering the threshold for the next, the heart progressively learning that electrical chaos is its default state. Untreated cases reduce life expectancy by five to ten years.
The triggering events in this record are specific, dated, and traceable to specific actions by specific people.
September 4, 2024: a one-month episode triggered within twenty seconds of visual contact with Alouette Batteau entering my workspace, before conscious processing was complete. The body had learned to recognize the threat before the mind finished processing the recognition.
October 16, 2025: Bardwell at the gas station. Three-day episode.
November 30, 2025: the assault. Cardiac emergency followed.
March 11–12, 2026: at an HPO hearing before Judge Powers, a bailiff shouted directly into my disclosed hearing-impaired ear. Powers watched without intervening. When the resulting disorientation appeared as difficulty communicating, Powers editorialized: "that doesn't help your case." I declared active atrial fibrillation in open court. No response. A six-day episode began. It did not resolve until March 17.
On March 23, 2026, Alouette Batteau posted lyrics wishing to kill a man with bare hands, captioned "this one goes out to my stalker! teehee wish i was joking." A named collaborator commented "hope they d!e!!!!!" The post triggered another atrial fibrillation episode. As of the writing of this piece, that episode has not fully resolved.
"Stalker" is not a generic word in this record. It is the specific and exclusive label applied to me in every sworn affidavit, HPO petition, police report, and piece of live court testimony filed by this family across six years of proceedings. Chief Bardwell's April 9, 2026 written response, copied to the Northwestern District Attorney, classified the post as "part of a musical performance" that "does not clearly establish that the statements are directed toward you specifically." He did this without reference to the six-year documented pattern of this family stating intentions and then delivering on them.
The Walker letter predicted the assault. The assault produced a cardiac emergency. The June 2020 mob wrote about throwing the camera in the water. She threw the phone in the river five years later. The body kept the score the department refused to keep.
These people have been shortening a life, measurably, for six years. That sentence is not rhetorical. It is the direct implication of the American Heart Association's guidance applied to the documented cardiac timeline. The equipment has no motive. The numbers don't change based on who asks.
I did not tell Joan Livingston any of this on the street when she told me the articles couldn't come down. I am saying it now.
XI. The Newspaper's Architecture
The Recorder's two June 2020 articles were the seed from which everything else grew, and they were not accidents of coverage. They established the frame, disruptor, bad actor, threat to the community, within which every subsequent institutional decision could be made without re-examining the premise.
Mary Byrne's June 12 article ran my name on the front page, beneath a photograph of my bench, without asking me anything that would have complicated the framing. I "declined to comment" on the petition's existence, but I was not asked about what had happened on the bridge before Alouette started recording, about my thirty-year record of anti-racist public work, about the Black Stones of Africa sitting nine years in the pavement three feet from where committee members were being photographed endorsing the "anti-racism spirit" of a petition. I was the story and I was not in the story.
The conflict of interest at the center of that coverage was never disclosed. Kay Berenson co-founded the Greenfield Recorder. Kay Berenson organized the secret Zoom meetings at the Bridge of Flowers Committee to coordinate the removal of my professional work. These two facts existed simultaneously and were never named in a single article. When I encountered Berenson on Bridge Street some time later and politely asked why she had acted without ever reaching out, she called the police. The pattern, once again: provoke, get response, weaponize. She had given a lecture on "fake news" as Recorder publisher. She had never met me. She did not appear to notice the relationship between those two facts.
The articles went inaccessible for a period, then returned in August 2025 when the Recorder redesigned its website. They were reissued as "newly-added archival stories", fresh URLs, fresh search indexing, fresh reach. Five-year-old defamatory characterizations given a new publication date and a new audience. Anyone Googling my name for a commission finds them. This is not the archive behaving passively. This is an active republication without correction.
I have written approximately ten letters to the Recorder. Dan Crowley, the current editor, has not responded. Joan Livingston, now a Buckland Select Board member, has not responded. When I ran into her on the street several months ago, she told me the articles were in the archives and couldn't be pulled down, demonstrably false, they were inaccessible for years before being reissued. She told me she had been in cancer treatment when the articles ran, and that someone else had been doing the editing. I believe her about the cancer and I am sorry she went through that. The letters she did not answer were written after treatment. The paper she returned to lead, expanded her role at, and praises in her retirement announcement never published a correction.
She has since written The Unforgiving Town, a novel whose plot is, the reviewer's own description, about a man who served his time, came home, wanted only to live quietly, and was ground down by a community that refused to see him as anything but what it had decided he was.
She is now a Buckland Select Board member. She sits on the body that oversees the town whose police department personnel are named in active federal civil rights litigation. She has not corrected the record from either chair.
The reviewer marvels at her empathy. The review was published in the paper that has never corrected what it did to the man her novel is about.
XII. Joan Livingston, The Accounting
Joan Livingston's retirement announcement in the Recorder is a warm self-portrait. She describes leaving "for the second time". She praises her colleagues. She promises readers her column will continue. She does not mention the articles that ran under her leadership without interviewing their subject, or the letters that subject sent requesting a correction, or the neighbor to whom she gave a polite answer on the street while the articles continued to damage his livelihood.
I am going to state the obvious, because the obvious is sometimes the only honest move: Joan Livingston wrote a novel about what happened to me. I do not know if she knows this. I do not know if the parallel is an act of conscience working through fiction, or a coincidence so complete that it constitutes a different kind of failure. Her Al Kitchen served 17 years in prison. I have been in this town since 2008, eighteen years, nearly the same span, served for a manufactured crime rather than a real one, without ever being charged with anything that survived a single evidentiary review.
What I know is that she received the emails. She lives in this town. She was the editor when the machine was assembled. Her son is the key neutral witness for the criminal prosecution of the people her paper helped protect. And she has not said so.
The reviewer marvels at her empathy. The review was published in the paper that has never corrected what it did to the man her novel is about.
XIII. The Town, the Novel, the Mirror
Al Kitchen, the fictional pariah of Holden, wanted only to fix his grandmother's house.
I wanted to run my studio. Make metal and stone sculptures. Help my neighbors lay concrete floors and shovel out their flooded basements. Supply the zinc and teach the technique and give away the knowledge freely. Give gifts to people I respected. Speak my mind, loudly, on camera, on a public bridge, at a protest I had every right to be at.
Al Kitchen ends up dead. His cousin is the only mourner.
I am still here. My heart runs irregular. My nine-year studio tenancy is a memory. The CIA commission is gone. Two people who beat me in November 2025 signed pretrial no-contact conditions on the same day the newspaper that helped brand me a pariah in 2020 celebrated them on its front page.
The reviewer writes that "what starts as interesting gossip can become destructive." In Shelburne Falls, the interesting gossip was a thirteen-minute video that started mid-scene, after two minutes of documented harassment were edited out, posted by a woman who had just spent those two minutes making sure the confrontation happened before she hit record. The destruction is in the cardiac records, in the court filings, in the pretrial conditions of release, in the closed studio, in the unanswered letters, in the articles that were republished in 2025 with fresh reach to make sure anyone Googling my name for a commission would find them.
The central difference between Al Kitchen's story and mine is the one that cuts deepest: Al Kitchen was guilty of something. He robbed a bar. He killed a man. The community's response was disproportionate and cruel, but it was not invented from nothing. It had a factual anchor.
My guilt was manufactured. Entirely. By a video that began mid-scene. By a petition removed for defamation. By a comment thread full of fabrications stated as settled fact in front of twenty-two thousand people. By a police sergeant's email that gave a campaign against me its institutional blessing. By two front-page newspaper articles written without interviewing me, under the editorial leadership of a woman who had just written in print that responsible journalism means owning your mistakes and correcting them.
The town in The Unforgiving Town is called "unforgiving" because it will not forgive a man who actually did something.
The town I live in manufactured the thing it refuses to forgive.
XIV. Why This Matters Beyond One Case
The mechanisms described in this piece are not exotic. They are the standard operating procedures of institutions that were never required to apply their policies equally to both sides of a dispute.
One-sided complaint processing requires no malice. It requires only the absence of correction, a sergeant who writes a policy in a report and no one above him who reads it critically, a committee that holds Zoom meetings without minutes and no one external who asks to see them, a newspaper that amplifies a petition without reporting its removal and no editor who calls for a follow-up.
Evidence expiration by inaction is not a conspiracy. It is the predictable result of a department that has never been required to canvass cameras within a defined radius, never been required to document its canvass, never been held accountable for the gap between what existed and what was preserved. The three cameras on November 30, Neighbors Gas Station, Crystal Visions, the law office across State Street, were not lost through bad luck. They were allowed to reach their natural expiration dates because no one required the work.
HPO coaching as neutralization strategy is not unprecedented, but it is particularly brazen when it appears in an officer's own summons report. Gilmore coaches assault defendants to file civil orders, three courts deny the victim's petitions each starting fresh from the framing the coaching established, and the Commonwealth imposes the stay-away at arraignment, retroactively confirming that what three courts declined to provide was warranted all along.
The Walker letter, the October 16 dismissal, the November 30 assault, and the March 23 post are what a permission structure produces when it is allowed to run its full cycle. Every step was predictable. Every step was predicted. None was prevented.
The body kept the score the department refused to keep.
What this piece documents is not a series of individual failures. It is a permission structure, named, written down, followed for years, and the cascade of harm that permission structures produce when left uninterrupted. The July 2021 Gilmore report is the key document: a sitting sergeant writes that he will no longer contact the complaint subject. That sentence became the operational policy of the department for the next four years. One sentence. Official letterhead. Never retracted.
Joan Livingston has written a novel about the cruelty of communities that decide, and refuse to un-decide.
She lives here.
She was the editor.
She got the emails.
Her son is the key witness for the criminal prosecution of the people her paper helped protect.
She is now a Select Board member.
She has not corrected the record.
She has written a book about it instead.
John Sendelbach is still here. His bench is still on the Bridge of Flowers. The Black Stones of Africa are still in the pavement three feet from the anti-racism plaque. The zinc bar top at Floodwater, the metal he supplied, the technique he taught, the supplier's name he gave away freely, is still being served across. The concrete floor he poured on his knees is still bearing the weight of every keg. His heart still runs irregular. The articles are still up.
The Unforgiving Town is available for $14.99, independently published, 248 pages.
The correction would be free.
John F. Sendelbach is a metalworker, sculptor, and resident of Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts since 2008. He is the creator of the Stone Spring bench and the Black Stones of Africa at the Bridge of Flowers, the Minuteman Crossing Stone Plaza at UMass Amherst (2014 AIA Honor Award, Western Massachusetts chapter), Old Diamondsides at the Culinary Institute of America, and numerous public art installations throughout Franklin County. The complete documentary record is available at johnsendelbach.com.
A note on documentation: Every factual claim in this piece is supported by documentary evidence: audio recordings in the defendants' own voices, police reports, court dockets, judicial findings, pretrial conditions of release, medical records, email records, sworn statements by neutral witnesses, Change.org petition records, and newspaper archives. The Hennessey pretrial conditions (Case 2641CR000158) and Batteau pretrial conditions (Case 2641CR000159), signed April 7, 2026 at Greenfield District Court, are public court records. The LIFEPAK 15 cardiac monitor photograph is a medical record. The June 28, 2020 audio documenting Hennessey applying the KKK label to Sendelbach, in her own voice, on her own recording, exists and directly contradicts sworn affidavits filed in four subsequent legal proceedings. The Recorder articles were published June 12 and 15, 2020, bylined Mary Byrne, and remain accessible at recorder.com. The Joan Livingston "My Turn" column was published June 13, 2020. The August 2025 republication followed the Recorder's website redesign. Zachary Livingston's sworn statement to Sergeant Gilmore is dated December 9, 2025. The Gilmore non-contact policy appears in official incident report 21-133-OF, dated July 13, 2021. All of this is verifiable. None of it has been corrected.
