WASHINGTON — Jennifer Jennings couldn’t believe her eyes when she looked outside her home Saturday morning.
A peach tree, cherry tree and two fig bushes were all removed from the front yard of her property on 18th Street Northeast before 8 a.m.
“Walked out the house and the trees were gone," she said.
Jennings knew something was wrong, so she reached out to the property’s owner she rents from.
"My husband bought the house right when we first started dating and planted the trees," said the home's owner, Maddie Doucet, who hoped the trees and bushes that her husband planted five years ago would grow alongside her family. “We always kind of planned to come back here to raise our kids. We just had a baby, so we’re moving back here next summer.”
Doucet said security video provided by neighbors shows a van driving away from the home with tree branches in the bed.
“The peach tree produced a lot of fruit and the cherry tree had just started fruiting this year," said Doucet.
After finding her trees chopped down, Doucet decided to canvas her neighborhood.
"Decided to walk around the streets looking for our address twins to see if that was the mistaken address, mistaken worker and noticed the trees chopped down here. Some of the neighbors a few doors down happened to be walking their dog by, so we asked, 'hey did you see any work being done in this yard today?' and they said, 'yeah actually this morning this was completely overgrown, and they came and cleared everything out.' We talked to them about who was doing the work, and everything seemed to kind of match up."
It was an unoccupied home a block away from hers with the same address number, but finding this home’s owner, who may have hired a landscaping service, has been a challenge.
“They’re registered LLC in D.C. and Virginia, but of course they’re inactive in one jurisdiction and defunct in another one so there’s no phone number we’ve been able to find," Doucet said.
She is hoping for some compensation to replace the trees and bushes, or at least some accountability.
"I think the most disappointing thing was just once the landscaper realized he made a mistake, he never came back and that’s the part that’s really hard to understand," Doucet said. "It’s a pretty big mistake and to just go on and act like nothing happened is kind of upsetting."
The mistake could end up costing Doucet a few thousand dollars to replace the lost trees.
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