Submitted with My Turn: "The Soil, the Silence, and Six Years"
To: Dan Crowley, Editor, Greenfield Recorder
From: John F. Sendelbach, Shelburne FallsDate: May 2026
Dan,
I am submitting the attached My Turn piece for publication. Before you read it, I want to give you the context that explains why it exists — and why the Recorder is the appropriate place to publish it.
On June 6, 2020, I was filming an unannounced pandemic street closure near my welding studio on the Iron Bridge in Shelburne Falls when a group surrounded me, pinned me against the railing, and screamed at me within inches of my face. Before I had said a word, before any recording began, Katherine Hennessey was within a foot of me with clenched fists. Sonny Walters refused repeated requests to step back. The group blocked my path as I tried to leave. None of this was captured on Alouette Batteau's Facebook Live video, which went up at 10:41 AM and showed only my visible agitation. It received 20,000 views and more than 300 comments, including calls to throw me off the bridge and throw my camera in the river.
The Recorder ran two front-page articles amplifying the narrative of that video. I was never contacted for comment. The articles quoted Bridge of Flowers Committee Chair Annette Szpila endorsing the "anti-racism spirit" of the underlying petition. That petition was subsequently removed by Change.org for defamation and misinformation violations. The Recorder never reported why it was removed. The articles have never been corrected.
What followed was six years I would not wish on anyone.
The Shelburne Police Department processed eight false reports against me — filed by the same complainant — without interviewing me before any of them. Sergeant Kurt Gilmore's own incident report from July 2021 states he had decided not to contact me about complaints because "it hasn't worked in the past." He told Katherine Hennessey this directly. In writing. That is a documented policy of one-sided complaint processing. In 2023, Detective Tucker Jenkins co-signed a criminal harassment charge against me having never met me. The charge was dismissed after I presented approximately one hour of video evidence at a show cause hearing. Judge Mazanec had previously vacated a harassment prevention order after watching Hennessey's own account collapse against audio of the alleged "homicidal threat" — my actual words were "I will never get along with the likes of you" — while she laughed throughout the recording. That was the second time a judge found her testimony not credible. The third came in December 2025.
On November 30, 2025, on a public sidewalk in Buckland, Brook Batteau shoved me off a curb three times, punched me eight to twelve times from behind while a bystander pinned my arms, and Katherine Hennessey delivered ten to twenty additional blows including strikes that dislodged my glasses. I did not retaliate. She then seized my still-recording iPhone, walked seventy-five feet to the Deerfield River, and threw it in. She returned and delivered a second battery. A neutral eyewitness — Zachary Livingston, co-owner of Floodwater — retrieved my shoe and provided a sworn statement confirming the sequence. The morning of the same day, Hennessey had trespassed onto my rented property at the Neighbors gas station and given me a double middle finger while laughing before driving away. I called police within fifteen minutes. No trespass charge was filed. The cameras were never checked.
The following morning, while I was without a phone, Hennessey filed a harassment prevention order against me — the woman who had just beaten me and thrown my phone in the river, now claiming to be the victim. Judge Mazanec denied it with prejudice in December 2025 after reviewing the video evidence, stating from the bench that he did not believe her account. That was his third credibility finding against her across five years of proceedings.
On April 7, 2026, Katherine Hennessey and Brook Batteau were arraigned in Franklin County District Court. Commonwealth v. Hennessey (2641CR000158): two counts of Assault and Battery, one count of Malicious Destruction of Property for the phone. Commonwealth v. Batteau (2641CR000159): one count of Assault and Battery. Both pled not guilty.
Detective Tucker Jenkins, who co-signed the 2023 harassment charge against me without ever meeting me, was denied qualified immunity by a federal judge on March 12, 2026, in a separate civil rights case — Mlynick v. Town of Erving — involving an unrelated complainant. He is a named defendant in that case. Thirteen days later, Chief Gregory Bardwell submitted a request to the Shelburne Finance Committee for a 9.4% merit raise for his department, describing them as a "fantastic crew." The Town Meeting vote on that raise is May 1.
Chief Bardwell refused to feel my pulse during a documented atrial fibrillation episode on October 16, 2025, at the Neighbors gas station — on video. He said "I don't want to" and walked into the store for coffee. A state trooper called EMS three days later. The LIFEPAK 15 at the Massachusetts State Police barracks documented my heart rate at 130 to 230 beats per minute.
My atrial fibrillation onset in 2021. My physician attributes it to sustained stress. I am 59 years old. I have two permanent installations on the Bridge of Flowers — the Pothole Fountain with the Black Stones of Africa, and the bench — both of which remain in place. The Bridge of Flowers Committee has not communicated with me once in six years.
I am telling you this not to relitigate the past in this letter. I am telling you because the Recorder is not a neutral observer of these events. The Recorder published the founding narrative without contacting me. The Recorder covered every ribbon-cutting and planting day at the Bridge of Flowers for six years without once reporting on the governance structure that just produced a $60,000 soil error on a $3.2 million renovation of a publicly owned landmark. On May 12, 2026 — the day after the town meeting where the police merit raise was on the agenda — the Recorder published two photographs of the bridge with captions beneath them and called it groundwork.
The attached My Turn is not a complete account of what I have described above. It is a focused, documented piece about the Recorder's specific role in a pattern of institutional cover that is now a matter of public court record. It is 700 words. It meets your submission standards. It is accurate and I can document every claim in it.
You should publish it because it is true, because your readers have been given an incomplete picture of events that affected a community member's livelihood and health over six years, and because the alternative is to continue being part of the pattern the piece describes.
I am available to discuss this at any time.
John F. Sendelbach
Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts
My Turn: The Soil, the Silence, and Six Years
By John F. Sendelbach, Shelburne Falls
On May 12, the Greenfield Recorder published two photographs of the Bridge of Flowers with captions beneath them. That was it. No dollar figures. No explanation. No accountability. Just a feel-good image of a man planting flowers on a freshly remediated bridge bed, and a headline about laying groundwork.
Here is some groundwork the Recorder left out.
The soil specification for the Bridge of Flowers' $3.2 million renovation was made by the Bridge of Flowers Committee — a private subcommittee of the Shelburne Falls Area Women's Club — without documented professional horticultural input. The wrong soil was specified. The remediation cost approximately $60,000 in donor and public funds. No public accounting of that 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 in the photograph has worked on that bridge for approximately twenty years. He is still the assistant gardener. The people who made the sixty-thousand-dollar mistake are still in charge.
I mention this not to embarrass anyone personally. I mention it because the Recorder's choice to run two photographs and a caption — rather than a story — is not an editorial judgment. It is a continuation of a six-year pattern of institutional cover that has cost me my livelihood, my studio, and documented episodes of atrial fibrillation attributed by my physician to sustained stress.
In June 2020, the Recorder published two front-page articles amplifying a Change.org petition that accused me of racism without contacting me for comment. The petition was subsequently removed by Change.org for defamation and misinformation violations. The Recorder never reported why it was removed. The articles remain uncorrected.
One of those articles included a photograph of the Bridge of Flowers committee's response to the petition: a laminated sign, tacked up with thumbtacks, endorsing the "anti-racism spirit" of a petition that had just been pulled for defamation. The photograph was framed so that the sign was centered in the image. Cropped out of the frame was the Pothole Fountain — a permanent installation I designed in 2011 with mason Paul Forth, which includes the Black Stones of Africa embedded as a tribute to his biracial daughters. The stones had been there for nine years. No one on the committee had publicly acknowledged them. Three feet away, a plastic laminate was photographed as the bridge's statement on race.
That was not an accident of framing.
I have had exactly zero communications from any Bridge of Flowers Committee member in the six years since those articles ran. Zero. I have two permanent installations on that bridge. My bench is still there. My fountain is still there. The Black Stones of Africa are still in the pavement, still doing the work the committee claimed, in 2020, to be responding to. They have never been publicly acknowledged. There has never been a correction, a phone call, or a letter.
The Recorder has covered every ribbon-cutting and planting day in the interim. It has not covered the governance structure that made a sixty-thousand-dollar soil error. It has not reported on the term limits that don't exist, the open meetings that don't happen, the professional credentials that are not required, or the fiduciary questions that arise when a private subcommittee makes capital decisions of this scale on a publicly owned landmark without documentation or accountability.
A community newspaper's job is to tell people what is actually happening, not to provide caption service for institutional self-congratulation. The Bridge of Flowers is a genuine civic treasure. The volunteer labor that sustains it is real and significant. The man who has tended it for twenty years deserves recognition that goes deeper than a front-page photograph taken the day the committee needed good optics.
The soil is fixed. The governance is not. The record has not been corrected. The silence has not been broken.
I am breaking it now.
John F. Sendelbach is a Shelburne Falls artist, horticulturist, and landscape designer. His public work includes the Pothole Fountain, the Black Stones of Africa, and the bench on the Bridge of Flowers.