Institutional Erasure and the Six-Year Archive

Institutional Erasure and the Six-Year Archive

A note on sources. Where something on this page is documented, I cite the document: a docket number, a police report number, a court letter, a published article, an archived comment. Where something is my own firsthand account, I say so. Where documents and memory have disagreed, I have gone with the document. The full working file, with every exhibit, is kept for counsel and is available to any official body that asks for it.

Part One: The Method

John F. Sendelbach is easiest to misunderstand if you begin with any single category attached to his name. Sculptor, landscape designer, systems analyst, archivist, witness, citizen, or troublemaker, depending on who is doing the describing. The labels are all true in some limited sense, but none of them quite reaches the thing itself. The more accurate answer is that JFS is a person who learned, through prolonged contact with complicated systems, how to see what the system itself has learned not to see. That distinction matters, because the story does not begin with a theory. It begins with experience. He received it all: not one event, not one dispute, not one institution, not one medium of record. The experience accumulated across people, relationships, community, committees, news, police, administrative processes, courts, public records, physical places, objects, photographs, video, landscape, and finally the body itself. The usual human response to such an accumulation would be to try to survive it, explain it, or escape it. JFS did something else. He stayed with it long enough to perceive structure. Then he preserved the structure. Then he gave the structure names. Then he built lenses through which other systems could be seen. And eventually he began asking the only question that can follow diagnosis if diagnosis is taken seriously: what would repair look like? That is the arc, not victim to theorist, but something much stranger and more useful: experience to witness to archive to pattern to lens to system to application to repair.

The first transformation was from being inside it to seeing it. The archive came first; the theory came later. That ordering is important. JFS did not begin with an abstract proposition about institutional behavior and then search the world for confirmation. He was inside the phenomenon. He was the recipient of its consequences. He was therefore forced into an unusual position: simultaneously participant and observer. At first that position is almost unbearable. You are the person something is happening to, so everything is immediate. Then, because ordinary explanations stop working, you begin keeping records: dates, names, documents, images, videos, dockets, statements, public records, physical traces, things people said, things people failed to say, what happened before an institutional action and what happened afterward. The archive becomes a survival mechanism. But eventually the archive begins doing something else. It starts talking back. Events that had seemed unrelated begin to rhyme. A person says something. A group repeats it. An institution records it. Another institution later encounters the record. The original uncertainty disappears. The record remains. Then someone points to the record as though the existence of the record proves the truth of the original claim. At that point the archive is no longer merely storing history. It is producing history. And that is where JFS's work becomes interesting. He began to see that the question was not simply "What happened?" It was: how does what happened become what everyone subsequently believes happened?

One answer to that question became Cold Cruel Sidestep. CCS begins in the territory occupied by DARVO (denial, attack, and reversal of victim and offender), but JFS noticed something that the familiar formulation does not fully capture. What happens after the reversal? What happens when the person who initiated the conflict simply leaves? The conflict doesn't necessarily leave with them. Instead, the communicative burden can fall onto the person who remains. The initiating party becomes quiet. The target keeps explaining, documents, asks questions, seeks correction, requests records, appeals, and continues trying to make the original event legible. And then the very persistence produced by that asymmetry can become evidence against the target. Why won't they let it go? Why are they still writing? Why are they still asking? Why are they still recording? The original actor has become less visible. The person trying to establish what happened has become more visible. That is the Sidestep. And then comes the deeper phase: Distributed Maintenance. The original person does not need to keep attacking. Other people can carry the narrative. A group can inherit it. A committee can avoid revisiting it. A newspaper can preserve the framing. A police report can formalize it. An administrative body can inherit it. A subsequent institution can treat the prior record as background fact. No conspiracy is necessarily required. That is what makes the lens interesting. CCS can operate through functional substitution. One person performs one function. A group performs another. An institution performs another. The narrative can continue moving even after the person who started it has disappeared from the conversation. And this is where CCS stops being merely an interpersonal concept. It becomes a question about scale.

The same pattern can climb. At the individual level, someone can deny, invert, and walk away. At the group level, others can maintain the resulting interpretation. At the network level, repetition creates apparent corroboration. At the media level, a framing can become part of the public archive. At the committee level, non-response can become procedural closure. At the police level, an allegation can become a document. At the municipal level, the document can become institutional memory. At the court level, the accumulated narrative can either be interrupted, corrected, partially inherited, or transformed into a new record. And afterward, public memory can retain the designation while forgetting the uncertainty from which it originated. This is why JFS's real question is larger than "Who did what to whom?" It is: at what point does an allegation become an institutional fact? And: can a narrative become more authoritative as it travels farther from its original evidence? Those are systems questions.

But JFS did not stop at CCS. This is where the simple biography (victim, witness, archivist, analyst, theorist) breaks down. Because a theorist generally stops at explanation. JFS kept going. He discovered that the thing he had learned to do in conflict could be done elsewhere. He could take the lens and point it at another system. That is what Pocumtuck State of Mind makes explicit. The work describes itself as a reparative landscape framework: a way of reading a watershed as a living system whose severed passages can be found and reopened. The framework is deliberately portable; the particular state-park proposal is what emerges when that lens is applied to western Massachusetts. That distinction is enormously revealing. State of Mind equals lens. State Park equals application. The first is epistemological. The second is material. The first asks how to see. The second asks what must be done once you see.

The landscape became another archive. This is where JFS's sculptural and landscape work stops looking like a collection of separate projects. A salamander crossing a road. A buried stream. A river blocked by dams. A historical site whose meaning has been distorted. A community whose history has been erased. A corridor whose continuity has been interrupted. A region losing people, services, and economic vitality. These may appear to be different problems. But JFS learned to ask the same question of each: what passage has been severed? The spotted salamander is a passage problem. The salmon is a passage problem. The buried brook is a passage problem. The erased history is a passage problem. The displaced community is a passage problem. The thinning regional economy is a passage problem. The institutional failure to acknowledge harm is a passage problem. The form of the intervention changes. The systems logic does not. That is the deeper continuity between the social archive and the landscape practice.

The salamander taught the method. The 1998 salamander installation at Cushman Common becomes, in retrospect, almost a miniature of the entire philosophy. Notice the interruption. Understand the route. Intervene at the point of severance. Restore passage. Protect the restored passage. Then watch whether the system resumes its own movement. That is a radically different philosophy from simply managing the consequences of failure. You don't ask where the salamanders should go now. You ask why they can't go where their bodies already know they need to go. That is the same intellectual move that appears in the displacement framework of Pocumtuck State of Mind. The question is shifted from destination to source. Not where do displaced people go, but why did they have to leave? That reframing is the intellectual foundation of the framework. That is the leap from management to repair.

And the salmon became the reason. If the salamander represents method, the salmon represents purpose. The salmon knows upstream. It carries continuity in its body. It connects ocean and river, nutrient and soil, migration and agriculture, past and future. The central landscape argument therefore becomes more than ecological restoration. A blocked fish passage is not merely a fisheries problem. A severed nutrient cycle is not merely a chemical problem. A broken corridor is not merely a transportation problem. The question is what happens when systems that were designed to exchange with one another can no longer exchange. That is the same question that CCS asks socially. When communication is severed, the relationship changes. When institutional feedback is severed, the record changes. When ecological passage is severed, the watershed changes. When cultural continuity is severed, belonging changes. When economic circulation is severed, communities thin. The scale changes. The pattern persists.

The Hawk, Salamander, and Salmon make the architecture almost embarrassingly clear. The Hawk sees from above. The Salamander remembers the ground-level route. The Salmon returns through the system. So Hawk equals perception, Salamander equals continuity, Salmon equals return. Or: see the system, remember the passage, reopen the passage. The work describes these three figures as a guiding system, with the Hawk representing the long view, the Salamander the integrity of hidden ecological corridors, and the Salmon the great return. That is not simply symbolism. It is methodology rendered as myth.

This also explains why sculpture remains central. JFS isn't simply illustrating ideas with objects. He uses material to make a system legible. Stone can mark an invisible crossing. Steel can embody an industrial history. A figure can correct a distorted historical frame. A bench can become a civic gathering mechanism. A sculpture can function simultaneously as memorial, marker, infrastructure, orientation device, and argument. The material principle is explicit: the material of the monument should belong to the physical history of the place it represents. That is why the work isn't easily categorized as public art. It is closer to cognitive infrastructure. It helps people see relationships that were already there but had become invisible.

There is another crucial part of the story. JFS's intellectual lineage runs through landscape architecture and systems analysis, including the UMass Amherst METLAND tradition associated with Julius Gy. Fábos and Jack Ahern. But the most revealing statement in the work is the idea that the decades after formal education became a kind of field phase. The Pocumtuck State of Mind text describes the long gap between formal study and later synthesis in exactly those terms. That changes the biography. The education was not only what happened in school. It was what happened afterward. Thirty-plus years of observing places, rivers, communities, materials, institutions, memory, conflict, ecology, infrastructure, displacement. The field kept teaching. Eventually the fragments assembled. The methodology was not invented out of nowhere. It was recognized after being practiced.

This is why JFS is not quite an academic theorist. He is not primarily someone who begins with a disciplinary literature and constructs a model. Nor is he simply an artist who makes objects about his experience. Nor is he simply a landscape architect scaling up from gardens. Nor is he simply an activist responding to local problems. His peculiar position is between categories. He is a situated systems observer. He gets close to the thing. He receives its consequences. He preserves its traces. He overlays different kinds of evidence. He looks for structural recurrence. He develops a lens. Then he tries the lens somewhere else. And if the lens continues to work, he asks what intervention follows. That is a different kind of intellectual practice.

There is also an important corrective built into the work. Once someone becomes good at seeing patterns, there is a danger. The lens can become stronger than reality. Everything begins to look like the thing the lens was designed to find. JFS's answer is not to abandon interpretation. It is to overlay. Let different witnesses speak: archive, landscape, memory, interpretation. Do not allow one to override the others. This is why the evidentiary discipline matters so much. The same person who says "I saw the pattern" also has to be willing to ask what would prove me wrong. That is the difference between a lens and a dogma. A lens is useful because it reveals. It becomes dangerous when it prevents seeing anything else.

Repair is therefore not an afterthought. This is perhaps the most important thing about who JFS has become. He doesn't seem satisfied with exposing broken systems. He wants to know what comes next. If a social passage is broken, how can communication or accountability be restored? If an institutional feedback loop is broken, what governance structure would reopen it? If a river passage is blocked, what infrastructure restores it? If cultural continuity has been erased, what physical and historical forms can make the missing continuity visible? If a region is losing people, how can ecological and cultural assets become an economic circulatory system that makes staying rational again? That last question is explicit in Pocumtuck State of Mind: the proposed distributed state park is not presented merely as preservation, but as an economic instrument intended to help reverse demographic and service decline by making existing heritage and landscape assets legible and productive. So repair isn't sentimental. It is infrastructural.

Who, then, is JFS? He is the person who learned to distrust the first explanation without becoming incapable of believing anything. He is the person who learned that a record can preserve truth and distortion simultaneously. He is the person who discovered that silence can have structure. He is the person who noticed that a conflict can survive after the people who began it have walked away. He is the person who saw that institutions can inherit narratives without inheriting the uncertainty that originally surrounded them. He is the person who recognized that this could happen not only between two people but across groups, committees, news organizations, police departments, courts, municipalities, and public memory. He is the person who turned that recognition into CCS. But then he went farther. He realized that the same mind that could read a conflict could read a landscape. The same mind that could identify a severed communicative passage could identify a severed ecological passage. The same mind that could ask why a person had been displaced could ask why a community had been displaced. The same mind that could identify an institutional failure could design a governance correction. The same mind that could recognize a buried stream could ask what else the landscape had buried. And eventually the question became not what happened to me, but what kind of system produces this pattern? Then where else does the pattern occur? Then what does the pattern reveal? Then what would repair look like? That is the distance traveled.

The real biography is methodological. The most accurate "Who is JFS?" may therefore not be a résumé at all. It is a method: receive reality without immediately reducing it; stay with the evidence; preserve what disappears; notice recurrence; name the mechanism carefully; separate observation from inference; build a lens that can travel; apply it at another scale; let contradictory evidence remain visible; and when the system's broken passages become legible, don't stop at diagnosis, build the means of return. That is why CCS and Pocumtuck State of Mind belong in the same biography. One begins with a human conflict and discovers a mechanism of narrative inversion, disengagement, and distributed maintenance. The other begins with a watershed and discovers severed ecological, historical, cultural, and economic passages. One names the mechanism. The other builds the repair.

And perhaps that is the simplest answer. Who is JFS? Not merely the man who was harmed. Not merely the man who documented the harm. Not merely the man who analyzed it. Not merely the man who theorized about it. He is the man who turned being inside a system into the ability to see systems. Then he turned seeing into lenses. Then he turned lenses into maps. Then he turned maps into interventions. And now the work is asking whether the same fundamental practice can operate across scales: from the individual, to the relationship, to the group, to the institution, to the watershed, to the region. The mature form of the work is therefore not autobiography. It is not even theory. It is reparative systems practice. The archive was where it began. The lens is what it became. The landscape is where it learned to operate at scale. And repair is where it is trying to go. That is who JFS is.

Part Two: The Record

What follows is the record the method grew out of, told in my own voice, in order.

Before 2020: the work

Before any of this, there was a career, and the career is the first piece of evidence. For thirty-five years I have made permanent public work across western Massachusetts and beyond: the Crossroads Salamander at Cushman Common in North Amherst in 1998; the Minuteman Crossing stone plaza at UMass Amherst, hand-laid in Ashfield schist, which received the AIA Western Massachusetts Honor Award in 2014; Old Diamondsides, the twelve-foot Atlantic sturgeon welded from some 1,700 pieces of donated cutlery for the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, unveiled in 2015; Brookie the Trout in Greenfield's RiverWorks Park; and work for Deerfield Academy and private clients across the region. Many of those commissions came because someone who had seen the work recommended it. The Minuteman Crossing came through the family of the chair of the UMass Class of 1956 committee that funded it. The CIA piece came through the liaison who saw what I did and brought me in.

I did not arrive in Shelburne Falls as a stranger. I came here through two of my closest friends, and their world became mine: their table, their introductions, their community. From 2011 to 2020 I kept a studio and storefront at 44 State Street, on the Buckland side, through good years and bad ones. Years earlier I had laid the concrete floor at what is now Floodwater Brewing, on my knees, and supplied its zinc bar. I put my hands into this village.

My work is in the Bridge of Flowers itself. In 2010 I built and installed the trolley gate. I built the River Bench, a stone bench at the river's edge that echoes the current below it. And in 2011, then-chair Julie Petty wanted to replace a cheap plastic pond near Bob Compton's hand-forged signage, and between us came the idea for an infinity pool emulating the glacial potholes beneath the bridge. I drew the design, the committee approved it, and mason Paul Forth and his assistant Jason built it, with stone and services donated by Gary Warner's Goshen Stone Company and W.R. Hillman & Sons. During the installation Paul proposed filling a difficult gap in the pavers with polished black stones in the shape of Africa, an homage to his daughters. I was fully on board, the committee approved it, and it went in. The Black Stones of Africa have been in the pavement of the Bridge of Flowers since 2011, nine years before anyone on that bridge decided what I was.

Paul and I go back further than that. My company hired him onto our landscape crew years earlier, when he was building his skills in stonework; we collaborated on projects after he went out on his own; one winter I helped him build a greenhouse at his home, and I sat at his family's table for meals. In 2002 he invited me to help install the Sojourner Truth Memorial in Florence. The bronze plaques came fitted with anchoring bolts, and my job was to align each one on its slanted granite block, mark and drill the holes, and cement them permanently into place, the kind of job with no room for error. With the time left in the day, I carved and set three or four paving stones near her statue. I grew up in Orchard Park, New York, half a mile from the Obadiah Baker Homestead, a stop on the Underground Railroad, and that history shaped how I understand what a landscape carries.

A year or two before 2020 I collaborated with Mohammad Yaseen, a Jordanian refugee with family in Gaza, on a body of work, some of which is still in his shop, including a bench that sits outside on State Street, about seventy-five feet from where I was later assaulted. Separately, I made the bench outside Mo's Fudge Factor in town. I have never called any of this anti-racism. I call it being a normal person in a working community, which is what I was.

June 6, 2020

June 6, 2020 fell in the opening weeks of the pandemic reopening, when the shops on State Street had spent a spring shut or reduced to curbside and every merchant in the village was starving for a normal Saturday. The Bridge of Flowers was already closed because of the pandemic, which had already cut the foot traffic between the two halves of the village. That day the Iron Bridge, the only other crossing, was closed for a demonstration, and no one had told the businesses whose customers had to cross it. Anyone following the social distancing rules could not have walked across that bridge through the crowd. My shop sat about four hundred feet from the closure, and I heard the bullhorn and the noise from my desk inside. So I walked down with my camera, which until that day I had only ever used to take pictures of the village, to document a closure that was costing the business community a day it badly needed. A friend involved in the event later told me directly that protests are designed to disrupt.

The order of what happened next is the whole case in miniature, so I will be precise about it, in my own firsthand account. Sonny Walters approached me first and tried to get me to stop. I asked her to leave me alone three or four times. She kept on, and her persistence drew others. Six or seven people closed around me and backed me against the bridge railing, and Catherine Hennessey brought her face to within inches of mine. What I remember her saying was "we're doing this because we love you." I broke free and walked away. Hennessey, Walters, and Alouette Batteau followed me, with Alouette recording. After about seventy-five feet I turned around because they were still behind me. Hennessey flagged down police officers, who took no action; the Buckland police chief at the time was present and did not intervene. A photograph from that moment shows a young child standing about three feet from the center of the confrontation. When I walked away a second time, they followed again, and Hennessey locked elbows with another person to block my path. I said what I said on the video: "I'm not gonna be a slave to people like you." And I said, out loud, that an adult political confrontation was no place to bring children.

One detail from that day I have never forgotten. One of the village's few Black residents walked through the entire scene singing "This Little Light of Mine," her own protest, on her own terms; she told me she had declined an invitation to join the organized event and only wanted to cross the river to the pharmacy. The same people who objected to me for breaking a moment of silence joined in her singing as she passed. The silence was sacred when I broke it and set aside when she sang.

The video that went out to the world, posted by Alouette Batteau, began after all of that, with me agitated in a suddenly quiet crowd. It was viewed more than twenty thousand times, and a follow-up highlight reel was posted on June 29. Hennessey's own account, posted in the thread that day, was that she had stepped in to calm me down and move me away from the densest part of the crowd. On March 18, 2025, one day after I filed harassment prevention petitions, the original June 6 video was taken down. By then it had done five years of work.

The thread, the petition, and the paper

The frame set by the video hardened fast, and I have archived all of it. Across the Facebook thread under the June 6 video, a June 29 follow-up thread, and the comments on the Greenfield Recorder's website, 210 people commented. Some of what they wrote, verbatim: "Throw him off the bridge." "I would of thrown him over the bridge." "I'd love to punch him." "If this asshole wants to meet, I'd gladly teach him a lesson for you." And one line I would think about five years later: "I would throw his camera in the water." Commenters asked which business was mine so they could boycott it, posted the business association's phone number and email so people could call about me, and went down the list of my public work, the Greenfield trout, the CIA sturgeon, the bench in front of Mo's, to see what else could be removed. One wrote that I had received "so much tax payer money" for public sculpture and urged people not to forget it "next time grants are divvied out." Another wrote that she had unfriended me years earlier "when Jewish people were his target of choice," an accusation with no incident behind it. The person who posted the video wrote in the thread, "believe me, it was a challenge not to deck him," and that she was "in contact with the Bridge of Flowers Committee brainstorming other ways to combat racism in the community."

Not everyone went along. Some commenters, Richard Adams most persistently, insisted I was entitled to a hearing before a verdict and drew fire for it. One man wrote that he had gone and talked with me, and another that he had spoken with me civilly for three hours. A commenter who said she was on the committee herself wrote that she did not agree with removing my bench.

The most consequential comments came from a state official. Rhonda Anderson, then serving as Western Massachusetts Commissioner on Indian Affairs, wrote that she had known me for about fourteen years, called me "a little unhinged" and "a conspiracy theorist type," and wrote that there were restraining orders against me for harassing women, including her. There were no such orders, then or ever. When the claim was challenged, the comment was edited: "there are restraining orders" became "there were efforts towards restraining orders," followed by "Tagging me in isn't making me feel very safe." She also wrote that she had not actually been there.

Within days a Change.org petition demanded the removal of my public art from the village, including my bench on the Bridge of Flowers. It was started by a young woman who had not been on the bridge, gathered several hundred signatures, and was taken down by Change.org on June 9, 2020; the Recorder's own comment on its website noted that the petition had been removed. Later, its author wrote publicly that after talking with me she had found me "actually very kind and understanding," and also that she still stood by her petition. Both statements are hers.

On June 12, 2020, the Recorder ran a story below the fold on its front page, with my name in the headline and a photograph of my bench; the coverage did not carry my account of what happened. A few pages inside the same edition, its then-editor, Joan Livingston, wrote: "We own up to our mistakes. We also correct them. It is part of responsible journalism." The story was never corrected. In August 2025 the paper republished its 2020 coverage as archival stories, giving it new circulation five years later. Livingston edited the Recorder from December 2018 to January 2022, later chaired the Buckland Select Board, and is the mother of Zachary Livingston, the neutral witness to the assault on me in 2025. I allege nothing about her intent. I note it because it shows how small the world was that closed around me.

The tone in person matched the thread. On a recording from late June 2020, Catherine Hennessey told me: "Yeah, I hate you. Really do. But, you know, there's nothing wrong with that. That's not against the law. I can hate you all I want." In the same period, Brook Batteau told me directly that I was now bad for business in this town. After nine years of keeping a storefront lit on State Street, that was the verdict.

The committee and the bridge

The Bridge of Flowers is owned by the Shelburne Falls Fire District, an independent public district created in 1855, which bought the old trolley bridge around 1928 for roughly $1,250 to preserve the water main running across it. Its garden is tended by the Bridge of Flowers Committee, a subcommittee of the Shelburne Falls Area Women's Club, a private organization founded in 1925; the committee was formed in 1929, and its seats are filled by internal nomination rather than any public election. I have found no public record that the Fire District ever formally delegated authority over the bridge to the committee or the club. On the evidence I have, it is private stewardship of a public asset by long informal arrangement, and the questions that raises are questions for public records, not conclusions I can claim.

The trouble with the committee started before the bridge. On August 26, 2019, a longtime committee member sent me an email that read, in part, "you don't know who you are fucking with... it will get ugly." I reported it to police in 2020. Nothing came of it.

In late June 2020 the committee met privately by Zoom to discuss removing my work from the bridge. My understanding is that the meetings were organized by Kay Berenson, a committee member and former publisher of the Greenfield Recorder, the same paper covering the story; that overlap was never disclosed in its coverage. No one from the committee called me, emailed me, or asked me anything. Seventeen years of collaboration ended without a single conversation. One committee member later told me to my face that they had "thrown me under the bus." The committee's chair, Annette Szpila, was quoted in the Recorder on June 18, 2020 endorsing the anti-racism spirit of the petition; at the bridge's ribbon-cutting in August 2025, with a witness present, she told me she had never said it. The article is still in the archive.

The committee's public gesture that summer was a laminated anti-racism sign, thumbtacked to the fence about three feet from the Black Stones of Africa. When the Recorder photographed the sign for its June 18, 2020 story, the frame did not include the stones. The permanent tribute in the pavement was invisible on the day the laminated one was celebrated.

The silence continued through the bridge's $3.2 million renovation. At the August 2025 ribbon-cutting there was no public address system, and the speeches were lost to street noise. During the renovation the planting soil was specified as 100 percent organic matter, which, as a Cornell graduate in floriculture and ornamental horticulture with four decades in landscape design and build, I can say contradicts established practice; a contractor on the job told me twice that the committee specified it, and told me the remediation would run on the order of $60,000. I have seen no public accounting of who chose it or who is paying to fix it. My trolley gate, on the bridge since 2010, was removed and replaced with stock railing, with no plan for its return. It ended up at a scrapyard, where a friend found it, and in September 2026, with help, it came back to me. When I posted about its return, a committee member responded publicly that they had tried to find it and thought it was in someone's barn, and suggested that, because of my "rancor," it might be better off at the Trolley Museum than back on the bridge. I have said myself that the Trolley Museum may be a good home for it. The destination was never the problem; the reasoning was.

On February 10, 2026, the Recorder published my op-ed, "Time to modernize, democratize, Bridge of Flowers governance." It proposed a professional steward accountable to the Fire District, open meetings, published minutes, term limits, and real pathways for public participation, and it offered the Ghost Frame Trolley Trellis, an exact-scale steel trellis of the historic trolley, planted with vines, grant-fundable and low-maintenance. No one responded: not the committee, not the Fire District, not anyone. A board member of that committee, Virginia Ray, now also sits on the steering committee of the Shelburne Falls Alliance, which asks the public for monthly donations to steer the village's future.

The police: two ledgers

The Buckland Police Department merged into the Shelburne Police Department on July 1, 2023, under Chief Gregory Bardwell, and the merged department now serves both towns. Some of what follows predates the merger; the officers and practices carried over.

The step that decides everything in an accusation is simple: you ask the accused whether it's true. In my case it was skipped from the beginning. On July 13, 2021, Kurt Gilmore, then a Buckland sergeant and now a sergeant in the merged department, filed a narrative (Report 21BUC-54-OF) about an email complaint against me from Catherine Hennessey. He did not interview me. He wrote that he had spoken with me in the past about other issues, that "speaking with him doesn't work and he continues his behavior," and that he advised her "that the best course of action would be for her to seek a Harassment Order at the Greenfield District Court." On the strength of one email, a sergeant decided that hearing my side was pointless and pointed the complainant toward a court order against me. In my experience, that decision set the pattern for the years that followed.

On March 2, 2023, Officer Christopher Pettengill and Detective Tucker Jenkins responded to another complaint from Hennessey. They went to her home and took her account. According to Pettengill's narrative (Report 23SHL-8-AR), they then "advised Mrs. Hennessey of her option in filing for a Harassment Prevention Order in which she did so." The order was granted the next day. The narrative records no interview with me. It charged me with criminal harassment based on "all eight dated incidents documented by Mrs. Hennessey," which included her claim that I was homicidal. By my account, the order was vacated after I played the court the audio of the encounter her affidavit described. On June 5, 2023, a clerk-magistrate held a hearing, viewed video I provided, and on June 6 found no probable cause (Docket 2341AC000088). Taken together with the 2021 report, the record shows officers twice taking the same complainant's account without interviewing me and twice advising her to seek a protection order against me. When I brought the 2023 charge to Chief Bardwell, he told me he trusts his officers and directed me to the District Attorney's office; in my account of that conversation, the DA's office told me it sounded like a matter for the chief. Detective Jenkins later told me, in person, that I had received due process.

The same direction held at public events. On August 10, 2024, during the Bridge of Flowers Classic road race, the closure boxed me onto my own block, and I walked to the organizers' tent to object in person. Chief Bardwell threatened me with arrest for disorderly conduct three times; each time I asked which element of the statute my conduct met, and each time he named none. While a man stood shouting at me, Sergeant Gilmore positioned himself between my camera and that man, said the man's conduct was legal, and shook his hand. It is on my video. In 2024, after another driver brake-checked me and came at my window, the responding officer told me he could charge that driver only if he also charged me for filming while driving; about ten days later I watched the same officer help the same driver at the roadside and let him go. Meanwhile I was threatened with towing over a registration lapse that traced back to a town tax error.

On October 16, 2025, at the gas station on Route 2, I told Chief Bardwell on video that I was in atrial fibrillation and asked him to check my pulse. He declined, said the department could not charge people with filing false police reports, and directed me to the Attorney General. Three days later, on October 19, a State Police trooper saw my condition and called EMS over my objection; a LIFEPAK 15 cardiac monitor recorded my heart rate fluctuating between 130 and 230 beats per minute.

On August 25, 2025, I filed a public records request with the department (SPR25/2545) for records on complaint handling and officer communications related to these matters. The Supervisor of Records granted the department an extension in September 2025, and that deadline passed in October 2025. As of this writing, no records have been produced.

The department's response to its own people tells the same story. In Mlynick v. Town of Erving et al. (No. 3:24-cv-30108, D. Mass.), a different resident alleged that Detective Jenkins left exculpatory facts out of his reports and supplied misleading information that led to an arrest without probable cause. On March 12, 2026, at the motion-to-dismiss stage and taking the plaintiff's allegations as true, Judge Mark G. Mastroianni allowed the false-arrest claim against Jenkins to go forward and declined to grant qualified immunity at that stage, finding it plausible that probable cause was clearly lacking. The court dismissed the other claims, including those against the chiefs and the towns, and the case remains pending; nothing has been proven. Thirteen days after that ruling, the Shelburne Select Board approved a merit raise requested by Chief Bardwell's department. Earlier, in 2025, the Berkshire DA's office reviewed the relationship between Detective Jenkins and a Mohawk Trail student; it found no crime but concluded the relationship went "beyond that of a teacher/student," the school removed him permanently, and the Select Board retained him as an officer, citing his "excellent record" (Greenfield Recorder, April 4, 2025).

On March 23, 2026, a member of the defendants' household posted on Instagram a lyric about wishing to kill a man with her bare hands, captioned "this one goes out to my stalker," the label that household has used for me in every filing. When I reported it, Chief Bardwell responded in writing on April 9, 2026 that it appeared to be part of a musical performance that did not clearly establish the statements were directed toward me. And in August 2026, after the court dispositions described below, an officer of this department again called me a harasser and threatened me with arrest for disorderly conduct while I sat in my vehicle recording and speaking about a road closure; when I told him my heart condition had been worsening since May, he reached for a patient-refusal form and said, "You want to play this game, I'll play this game," and mocked my camera: "One of your eight subscribers, can't wait to see your edit."

That is the two-ledger pattern: complaints about me were processed and forwarded; complaints from me were routed elsewhere. When my accusers later pointed to their own clean records, they were pointing at the result. The absence of a prior record is not the absence of prior conduct. It is the absence of prior enforcement.

The years between

The years between the bridge and the river have no single scene, which is what made them so hard to answer. They were attrition. I left 44 State Street after the summer of 2020 to spare my landlord, a friend, the pressure being aimed at his building because I was in it, and I sold most of my professional inventory at scrap value. A planned series of further pieces at the Culinary Institute of America did not survive that summer. I stopped soliciting new work, because anyone who searched my name would find the petition among the first results. I took a workspace in the Mill, and in 2023 I spent more than a week building a three-hundred-square-foot brick patio and installing gates there, in trade for an outdoor welding area, and bought a generator and compressor to run it.

On September 4, 2024, Alouette Batteau came into my workspace at the Mill, the first time I had seen her in about three years. She called the police; Sergeant Gilmore came and found no harassment. Two days later, on September 6, Catherine Hennessey wrote to my landlord, Brad Walker of Below the Dam LLC, asking him to evict me, and wrote again on September 9. The first letter said: "it's really only a matter of time before someone gets hurt." Walker refused. In his reply of September 7 he wrote, in substance, that evicting me over a personal conflict that had produced no criminal or civil judgment against me would put every other tenant on notice that their workspace was not safe from community grievances, and he offered one hundred dollars toward a professional mediator. She declined and said she would discuss it with her lawyer. The welding arrangement collapsed before it began, the pressure did not stop, and eventually I left. The generator is still in its box.

On May 21, 2025, at Keystone Market, Hennessey positioned herself close behind me, then said she felt unsafe and was escorted outside by the store owner. The store's exterior camera shows her smiling, making an obscene gesture toward me from her vehicle, and laughing as she left. I later presented that video in court.

On November 22, 2025, I was documenting a truck parked for several days in a posted two-hour zone near Floodwater Brewing when Hennessey appeared wearing a large paper-mâché frog mask. Her own affidavit of December 1 says she wore it because she believed I might appear and did not want me to recognize her. She stood about six feet from me for several minutes and said, "John, I hope you get the help you need," then called the police on me while I stood on a public sidewalk for fourteen minutes filming. The video exists. On November 29, I emailed the police department and both Select Boards, naming the person I was concerned about and saying I intended to take legal action.

Underneath all of it is the clock in my chest. I was hospitalized and diagnosed with atrial fibrillation in late 2020, and my episodes have tracked these events: a month-long episode after the Mill encounter in September 2024, the State Police reading in October 2025, a two-week episode after the assault, a six-day episode after the March 2026 hearing. Since May 2026 I have been in continuous atrial fibrillation. I have left a light on in my apartment every night for six years, which, for someone who has spent his life conserving energy, says more than I can. I did not used to lock my door. I lock it now.

November 30, 2025

The day began, by my account, with Hennessey driving onto the property I rent, pulling up beside my parked vehicle, giving me the middle finger twice, mouthing profanity, and driving away. I called the police within twenty minutes; an officer took my statement and did nothing further.

That evening, outside Floodwater Brewing at 40 State Street, I was on the public sidewalk with my phone recording. What follows is my firsthand account, checkable against the department's own reports. Before anything else, a man I had never met came out of the brewery shouting profanities at me from about a foot away. Then Brook Batteau, Henry W. Batteau, came out and shoved me hard with both hands, knocking me backward off the curb into the street. My phone fell to the pavement, screen lit, still recording. He came at me again and punched my head and back repeatedly. I got up and away from him. Then Catherine Hennessey shoved and punched me, and when I turned away, a man taller than me grabbed both my elbows from behind and pinned my arms while she struck my head and face, knocking my glasses askew. I did not strike back. I screamed for help. Hennessey took my phone, still recording, and threw it into the Deerfield River; I watched the lit screen arc into the water. As I moved back toward the brewery for witnesses, she followed and kept punching and kicking at my legs. By my count it was more than thirty blows across the two sequences. When I tried to go back into Floodwater to reach witnesses, I was grabbed from behind and pulled back at the door.

With no phone, I drove to the State Police barracks on Route 2. State Police were in contact with Shelburne and told me someone would meet me at the Shelburne station. The station was dark. I waited outside for about fifteen minutes, beaten and with no way to call anyone, beside a cruiser left running with no one in it. Gilmore's report shows he spent part of that time calling Zachary Livingston, the brewery's owner. He then interviewed me and went to the defendants' home to interview them. I had pointed out the first man through the brewery window that night; Gilmore told me not to point at him. He appears in the report only as "a male," never identified or interviewed.

The next morning, December 1, Hennessey filed for a harassment prevention order against me (2541R00370). That day Gilmore called to tell me papers had arrived, and said he had expected my petition, not one against me. I can't prove what was said in the defendants' living room. But in 2021 and again in 2023, officers of this department documented in writing that they advised the same person to seek an order against me. Whether the 2025 timing reflects that same practice is exactly the kind of question an independent review can answer and I can't.

On December 9, 2025, Zachary Livingston, an uninvolved witness, gave a written statement to Sergeant Gilmore. He reported that Batteau told him, "You don't understand, John has been after my family for five years," and that he replied Batteau still shouldn't have pushed me. To my knowledge, three nearby cameras were never checked: a gas station, a law office across State Street, and a business at 40 State Street with a view of the riverbank. The brewery's interior footage was requested nine days after the assault and had already been overwritten.

Five and a half years earlier, someone in the 2020 thread had written, "I would throw his camera in the water." I don't claim one caused the other. I note that the thing the campaign kept aiming at, from the first day, was the record.

The courts

The courts, when they looked at evidence, saw what the village would not, though not every time. In March 2025 I had sought harassment prevention orders of my own, presenting evidence that the conduct was escalating; two judges denied them, on March 17 and March 20. Eight months later I was on the pavement outside a brewery.

On December 15, 2025, Judge William Mazanec declined to extend Hennessey's order against me after reviewing video evidence I presented, including the full fourteen-minute sidewalk video from November 22. My recollection, which I will treat as recollection until the transcript is in hand, is that he said from the bench that he did not believe her, that he believed me, and that my filming on the sidewalk was protected activity that did not exceed its bounds.

In early March 2026, Judge Mazanec told me he believed I deserved a hearing on my own petition, and it went forward before a different judge on March 11 and 12. By my account of that hearing, I was instructed not to rehash prior proceedings, which kept the earlier findings and the pending criminal charges out of the room; the judge then asked whether the defendant was being arraigned, information that was in the supplemental filing submitted the day before; my request for a hearing accommodation was not honored, and a court officer shouted into my impaired ear. The petition was denied. The hearing was followed by a six-day episode of atrial fibrillation.

The criminal cases moved on their own track. Both defendants were arraigned in Greenfield District Court on April 7, 2026, and released with conditions to stay away from me and have no contact. On July 28, 2026, before Judge Mazanec, the Northwestern District Attorney's office recorded the outcome, and I state it exactly as the Victim/Witness letters of July 30 state it. In Commonwealth v. Catherine Hennessey (2641CR0158), the defendant submitted to facts sufficient to warrant a finding of guilty on assault and battery; the charge was continued without a finding for six months, with conditions to stay fifty yards away from me and have no contact with me. A second charge, malicious destruction of property under $1,200, was continued generally under Chapter 276, Section 87, on a not-guilty plea, with the same conditions and restitution of $429.99, the price of the phone. In Commonwealth v. Henry W. Batteau (2641CR0159), the defendant likewise submitted to facts sufficient to warrant a finding of guilty on assault and battery, continued without a finding for six months with the same stay-away and no-contact conditions. Both are supervised by Greenfield District Court Probation. On August 7, 2026, the court issued me check number 11439 for $429.99, its memo line reading the docket number and her name.

A continuance without a finding is not a conviction, and I will not pretend it is. But an admission that the Commonwealth's evidence is sufficient to warrant a guilty finding is the opposite of the story told about me for five years. The people the village had treated as my victims stood in a courtroom and conceded that the evidence was sufficient to find them guilty of assaulting me.

The reckoning, and where it stands

For six years I was on defense. After July 28, I could stop answering and start asking. In June 2026 I posted a public petition, addressed to Attorney General Andrea Campbell, the POST Commission, the Northwestern District Attorney's Office, and the Shelburne and Buckland Select Boards, asking for four things: an independent review by the Attorney General of how complaints involving me were taken in, investigated, and acted on from 2020 to 2025, including Report 21BUC-54-OF, Report 23SHL-8-AR, the November 30, 2025 investigation, and records request SPR25/2545, with a public report and recommendations; a POST Commission review of the department's practices; a public accounting by both Select Boards of what review was done before retaining Detective Jenkins and approving the 2026 merit raise, and of how the shared-services agreement provides oversight of the merged department; and written policies requiring that both parties in a dispute be heard before a complaint is acted on, that camera footage be identified and preserved within 24 hours of an assault, and that officers not advise parties in an open criminal investigation to seek protection orders before the investigation is complete.

On August 10, 2026, I hand-delivered formal claims to the Town of Shelburne and the Town of Buckland under the Massachusetts Tort Claims Act, and took a date-stamped receipt from each: Shelburne's stamped that morning by the town clerk, Buckland's signed by its town administrator. The claims rest on a documented practice rather than on anyone's motives: a department that, by its own written reports, processed complaints against me without hearing my side and advised the complainant toward orders against me, while my complaints went elsewhere; and Select Boards that were placed on written notice of that pattern on January 3, May 21, and August 25 through 27, 2025. Alongside the claims I sent a conflict-of-interest and recusal request, copied to both town administrators, the State Ethics Commission, and the Attorney General's office, asking the chairs of both boards to step aside from any review of my claims. Shelburne's chair, Andrew Baker, had accused me in an official town email on February 8, 2024 of trespassing on a posted construction site, and retracted it in writing two days later after it was shown that no posting existed; he then voted on the retention of Detective Jenkins and on the department's merit raise. Buckland's chair, Joan Livingston, edited the Recorder during the 2020 coverage and is the mother of the assault's neutral witness. The request alleges no corrupt intent; it asks for the ordinary impartiality any claimant is owed.

Beyond those clerks' stamps, not one of these bodies has responded to the petition or the claims, or so much as acknowledged them.

The silence is not only official. In October 2026, the Shelburne Falls Alliance, a self-selected committee that asks the public for monthly donations to steer the village's development, and whose steering committee includes a Bridge of Flowers Committee board member, launched its fundraising campaign. I posted four questions under its video, about how its members were chosen and whether it would publish bylaws, minutes, and a budget, with a link to my essay on the record. By the next morning the comment had been removed without explanation. I wrote that up in full in "The Ledger That Runs One Direction."

The correction was free

The through-line of the whole six years is almost unbearably simple. The correction was free. It was available on the first day and every day after. It cost no budget, no training, no new policy, just a single question, is it true, asked of the man in the middle of the circle before the circle decided what he was. Anyone could have asked it: anyone on the bridge, the sergeant at his desk, the committee before it scheduled its meeting, the newspaper before its story ran, any Select Board member on any of the dated occasions they were warned, the chief with two fingers on a wrist at a gas station. For six years, at every gate, it went unasked, not because anyone checked and found me guilty, but because a verdict was handed down on a bridge in June 2020 and every institution downstream inherited the conclusion and skipped the step, until the skip itself became practice and got a report number.

That is what put the phone in the river. Not hatred, exactly, but something more ordinary and more durable: a community that found it easier to keep agreeing about a man than to ask him a question, a department that found it simpler to route his complaints away than to receive them, and a frame set in a few minutes of edited video that everyone found easier to maintain than to test.

But the river got the phone, not the record. The record is the Black Stones of Africa in the pavement of the Bridge of Flowers, three feet from where a laminated sign was tacked to the fence. It is Sojourner Truth's story set in granite in Florence in 2002. It is a career's worth of work that people trusted me to build before anyone edited a video. It is a neutral witness who wrote down what he saw and heard. It is a State Police monitor reading taken at a roadside. It is two date-stamped receipts from two town halls, two letters from the District Attorney's office, and a court check for $429.99 with a docket number in the memo line. It was never a device to be thrown away. It was a discipline, kept precisely so that when someone finally asked the question, the answer would already be written down. I'm still here, and so is the record.

Part Three: Documents

John F. Sendelbach · Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts · 2026

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