NAACP intervenes for Black Colfax resident who says property has been blocked with trees, traps

Tree trunk road blocks, hidden booby traps and more.

Attorneys for a Black foothills landowner are detailing the lengths she says her neighbor has gone to block her from accessing her Colfax property in an ongoing legal battle that will soon make its way to a Placer County courtroom.

The battle over Loggers Trail, the dirt road that leads to Dorothy Buckner’s property near Colfax, will be decided in May. That’s when Buckner and her neighbors, trustees of the Gareth Silyn Roberts Family Trust, will face off in Placer Superior Court.

The Roberts trust is using abandoned easement and adverse possession law to claim it has sole access to Loggers Trail. They claim Buckner hasn’t used the road that cuts through the Roberts’ property in years.

Claiming an abandoned easement and adverse possession — publicly taking neglected or abandoned properties as one’s own — would block Buckner from the home and property she has owned since the 1980s, she said.

“It’s unbelievable that my neighbor after all these years says I don’t have the right to use my road,“ Buckner said in an earlier interview. “I believe I have full rights to the road.”

Roberts’ trustees claim Buckner, now in her 80s, abandoned her easement along the foothill community’s Loggers Trail on the Roberts’ property and that Buckner’s property now draws vagrants, drug dealers and undesirable tenants.

But advocates say the trust is targeting Buckner, one of the few Black landowners in that corner of Placer County, to push her off of her Cape Horn property.

Buckner’s lawyer at the time said the trustees’ claims are “aimed at harassing her and compelling her to be kept out of her legally owned property and preventing her from using her legally vested land.”

In recent weeks, Buckner said the Roberts trustees are now using whatever is at hand — tree trunks dragged onto the dirt road, story-high brush piles, and hidden booby traps to waylay her workers’ equipment.

Attorneys for the Roberts Family Trust did not return several requests for comment.

Buckner and her family say the adverse possession claim is a calculated plan to strip her property rights. Buckner says this harkens back to old playbooks used to take land away from Black landowners, and local NAACP leaders agree.

Tactics like discriminatory banking and lending practices and abuse of eminent domain laws by local and federal government have been used to withhold or take away Black Americans’ land throughout the last century. Local NAACP leaders said legal standoffs like this one are “all-too-familiar (mis)characterizations that have been used for decades to legally strip land from African Americans and other people of color.”

“Using the historic practice of adverse possession, legal claims, and tactics that are often motivated by racism has caused the dispossession of land ownership by African Americans, and therefore has also impacted African American generational wealth,” Sacramento NAACP officials said in November.

Ownership of Loggers Trail

Buckner, a San Jose physician, has owned her Placer County property on Loggers Trail since 1985, court records show. The home has been both rental and family vacation getaway.

But things began to change in 2016, according to court documents. That year, the Roberts’ trust gated the Loggers Trail easement. The Roberts trustees and Buckner differ over the reasons why the gate was installed.

Buckner argues the 2016 decision to gate Loggers Trail was a joint one to stop trespassers from entering her property. The Roberts’ trust said it erected the gate to block Buckner from using the road, citing adverse possession well before the 2021 lawsuit that has the two sides in court today.

Buckner acquired title to her Loggers Trail property, including the Loggers Trail easement, by grant deed, in 1985, attorneys assert in court filings.

The alleged blockade also comes with potential financial consequences for Buckner.

Without the access along Loggers Trail, Buckner would likely be unable to sell or rent the property and the value of her property would drop by half of what she paid for it, lawyers said in the court papers, citing testimony from a local real estate agent.

Buckner’s property “will be virtually landlocked if the Equitable Easement is not granted, rendering it almost worthless without reasonable access to a public road,” the court documents continue.

In recent months, the battles between the Roberts’ trustees and Buckner have become more heated.

Representatives for Roberts’ attorneys last September accused a contractor working for Buckner of intimidating and assaulting a Roberts’ family member in an attempt to reopen the road. Roberts’ attorneys said the alleged September incident was a continuation of the conduct that led the family to block the road in 2016.

Tree trunks, hidden traps block access

Buckner filed complaints and photographs with Placer County code enforcement officials in early March noting the obstacles blocking Loggers Trail, the latest, a 14-foot high pile of brush in the center of the road.

Her attorneys, in their most recent filings, are calling the latest incidents tantamount to civil rights violations along with fire and safety hazards.

“Towing dead tree trunks onto the road, creating dirt mounds with a tractor and setting concealed booby traps constitute not only a flagrant violation of civil rights but also a reckless disregard for communal safety … and should not go unchecked,” Dale McKinney, a legal redress representative at the Greater Sacramento chapter of the NAACP, said in a declaration in support of Buckner filed February in the Placer courts. McKinney is now Buckner’s latest attorney.

“The use of such unlawful methods to specifically target a Black neighbor exacerbates the offense, turning it into a civil rights matter,” McKinney said.

Now, Buckner says she is afraid to go to the property by herself and says it’s difficult to get handymen, landscapers and other workers to her property because of the access issues. At least two people have been blocked by Roberts, she said in a recent interview.

“Things are going along fine, then somebody throws a monkey wrench and you wonder why,” she said.