Caso Lever S01E03: 'The Misadventures of Jason Lever''

Jumping ahead a bit...to my most recent face off with our extraordinarily accident-prone neighbour Jason Lever. (I never promised a strictly chronological approach to this plot.)

Here he is, maskless, waving his mobile in my face — in front of my property and thus in violation of my medidas perimetrales — presumably attempting to intimidate me into scurrying back indoors or either doing or saying something he might subsequently be able to use against me. He achieved none of the above. 

A bit of background...

In 2014, at a time when both Lever and I were out of Guatemala, his then girlfriend put up some security lights along the front of their property. Yet for some reason she decided that it would be just fine for this installation to continue over the property line and onto the surface of our external wall. 

At the time my wife came out and spoke to the contractors from a firm most Antigueños are familiar with, and their response was, predictably, something along the lines of 'Only obeyink orderz’. 

Lever soon returned from his mining gig and so she then had the opportunity to interrogate him personally on the matter. 

Rather than apologising and offering to rectify this inexplicable 'mistake' as soon as possible, he boasted rather brazenly that his plan was to continue all along the front of our facade. (The old POTUS45 ploy of never backing off, only doubling down.)

This was possibly the most memorable early example of the one-sided lamppost-pissing contest that we have been subjected to here almost from the get-go. 

Although she undoubtedly felt disrespected, my wife let this one go as it occurred a couple of years before Lever’s attitude and behaviour towards her would turn a terrible corner, and there did at the time seem to be a shared interest in external illumination. 

This was also a year or so before we successfully petitioned the Muni via our neighbourhood COCOPRE to put up proper lighting along the street outside. It was also V’s last direct contact with Lever for three years. 

Given subsequent events, I really ought to have removed these intrusive security lights myself ages ago. 

However, I have been repeatedly told by both our lawyers and the authorities that they ought to remain in place, not least as part of an extensive body of evidence relating to a pattern of apparently purposeful encroachment by Lever. 

So, when on Wednesday January 20 this year I spotted a builder up a ladder against my external wall, attempting to remove the little iron cage containing the security lights with a power tool, I came up quickly behind him and insisted that he desist and replace anything he had already removed from the surface of our property. 

It was the same bloke that had been caught and filmed trespassing cuerpo entero inside our property just over two weeks previously on the 4th of January. 

On both occasions he had apparently waited for me to leave home before commencing his trespass, but this time I had only moved off up the road with my dog and had an unobstructed view. He chuckled awkwardly at my challenge and fled off back to the Levers’ house. 

Soon Lever himself was out with his recording device, plus a small canister in the same hand he was gripping the phone, which I am going to have to presume was mace/pepper spray. He had seemingly come out in such a hurry that he’d not had time to hide it in his handbag.

Meanwhile, my wife had spotted the developing confrontation on our security cameras and went up to the terrace to make sure we had our own recording of any harsh words exchanged. 

Lever’s play was very simple and really rather disingenuous: the lights and their cage were his property and had been installed entirely by accident on our wall. Though again, no apology. 

He must really take me for one of the biggest fools that ever walked this earth. Suppose I choose to forget those earlier exchanges about this encroachment — going back over six years — I suppose I could just about concede that it might be possible for someone of near record-breaking cluelessness to affix a piece of ironwork on our exterior wall ‘by accident’. 

But this particular installation had required work on both sides of our wall, including cabling that ran behind it across the property line, through our wire fence and over the top of the internal dividing wall. 

Lever makes the point abundantly clear himself.  'It was connected to my power...and, so, what’s your problem?’. 

He does have a disarming knack for incriminating himself.

My problem is surely this. Inside my home, someone knowingly ran an electric cable from a hole they made in our front wall over our side wall and into Lever’s property which remained hidden for years behind our border foliage. 

By definition, this could never have been done as an honest mistake, and I fail to see how it might have been achieved without physical trespass. 

The illegal nature of this activity would have been blindingly obvious to the person undertaking it, no matter how clueless they might otherwise have been. 

If any person I had employed had been responsible for an error such as this, I’d have been in a real hurry to correct it and make amends. Not wait six years, and even then only try to remove the intruding device as part of a wider cover up connected to Lever’s denuncia in September 2020 which falsely accused me of a similar delito. 

The earlier trespass made by the same builder into our home followed my disconnection of the electric cable and was almost certainly undertaken in order to remove any remaining internal evidence of the offence. 

Fortunately the fiscales at the Ministerio Público were provided with relevant images long before either incident, plus a report made by an independent technical expert on the range of other electrical installations he witnessed along the length of the Levers' side of our internal wall. 

Anyway, I'd surely be forgiven from concluding here that Lever seems to be indicating that we in turn can attach whatever we like to the outside of his house just so long as we have no qualms about making the utterly bogus and plainly moronic claim that we have no idea where the division is. 

Yet, as ever, what he is really saying is that he did and will continue to do whatever he likes. It's all too obvious that he derives insolent gratification from such transgressions. 

The serially-unfortunate Australian's pileup of mishaps now includes mistakenly using a water supply that didn't belong to him, attempting to empty his pool into our drains, unknowingly registering his utility bills and other corporate accounts to our address etc.

Thanks to the aforementioned malicious and mendacious denuncia made against us as a sort of legal blocking tactic by the Levers in September 2020 — consisting of allegations that even an eight year old would have been able to pull apart — I now know more than I used to about a Guatemalan statute that goes under the name of perturbación de la posesión. 

In this land the pavement outside one's home is usually considered private rather than public property. Lever didn't quite step onto our banqueta, but his employee did — in fact this individual put a ladder on it and used that to ascend our external wall with a drill. 

He was thus caught on camera in the act of trespass for a second time, having received a strong ticking off and verbal warning the first time back on January 4, which was captured on video. 

So let's be clear that there really can be no excusing this subsequent 'accident', an invasion that inevitably followed two previous goofs relating to an undesirable hole in our front wall. 

Meanwhile, Lever was invading my personal space, outside without a mask, apparently attempting to intimidate me sufficiently to drive me away from the front of my own home.

For an individual already under investigation for violent incidents against both me and my wife (indeed I have been assigned police protection as a result), this is not a good look, particularly as he appears to have had a chemical weapon in his hand.