With the winter’s first snowfall, Greg Smith said, he once again watched his front and back yards being turned into a snowmobile expressway.
On some days, up to 100 snowmobilers would travel at speeds of 60 m.p.h. through his property in unincorporated McHenry County, using his wide lot as a shortcut between frozen Griswold Lake and the public road.
Over the years, Smith said, sledders tore across his lawn, knocked down a fence and even smashed into his well.
So Smith, 38, decided he’d had enough. He spent Sunday roping off his property, stringing rope from trees or metal poles about 18 inches off the ground and marking the line with 6-inch pink fluorescent streamers.
“It just got way out of hand,” Smith said in an interview in his home Wednesday. “That’s the only reason we put it up.”
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He hoped that cordoning off his property would put an end to the snowmobile traffic. But instead, the very next day, his worst nightmare was realized.
Timothy Richard Moon, 17, a senior at McHenry East High School, was riding a snowmobile Monday afternoon to the home to take Smith’s daughter, Tanya, 17, out for a ride.
Apparently, Moon did not see the rope as he was cruising at a high rate of speed along the edge of Griswold Lake. The rope rose to meet his chin, tore off his helmet and broke his neck. He was pronounced dead at a local hospital.
“We had no intentions of hurting anyone,” Greg Smith said. “We had flags (on the ropes) everywhere. That’s why we don’t understand why he didn’t see it.
“Nobody is at fault, but it’s hard not to feel like you’re at fault.”
Snowmobilers say it is fairly common for property owners in open country to use ropes, rocks or logs to keep the sledders off their land near lakes, rivers, fields and trails.
But Moon’s death has focused attention on the practice, kindling a debate among recreation enthusiasts and landowners over private property rights versus public safety.
McHenry County Sheriff William Mullen said his office has completed its investigation, determining that Moon’s was an accidental death, and doesn’t expect to file any criminal charges.
But legal experts say that when it comes to civil law, the responsibilities of a landowner who erects a barrier become more complex because the situation involves such issues as intent and using reasonable care.
One attorney, Todd Smith of Power, Rogers & Smith in Chicago, said a landowner’s responsibility is found in common law.
The basic concept is that if people commonly utilize an area and the landowner wants them to stop, the landowner is responsible for putting up a warning. Negligence may come into play when a landowner fails to exercise care and sufficiently warn people of the change of status on his property, he said.
“If you know people are trespassing, you still have to exercise reasonable care for their safety,” Todd Smith said.
“It seems to me when someone puts something like that up-a thin line-he has a problem,” he said. “If you want to keep people off, you need a more substantial barrier.”
In a similar case, Todd Smith said, he represented a 21-year-old southwest suburban man who won a $1 million out-of-court settlement in 1990 from a Chicago Ridge manufacturer, after the client hit a cable stretched across his path while riding a three-wheel motorized vehicle behind the plant.
“He had been riding on the property a couple of times a week. There was no warning sign. He was never told not to use the property,” Todd Smith said.
Another attorney, Philip H. Corboy of Corboy & Demetrio in Chicago, said that under common law a property owner may use reasonable force to protect his property.
“The question is whether he uses reasonable force,” Corboy said. “If the intent was to harm someone, he’s in trouble. If you’re only doing it to warn the public, then you put up a sign, not a rope. That didn’t stop him either. It only killed him.”
But attorney Michael Pope, a spokesman for the Defense Research Institute, an association of defense attorneys, said a property owner like Greg Smith would have a defendable argument.
“Putting up a rope of some kind with appropriate markers-flags or ribbons-is a reasonable use of property,” Pope said. “The injured party must prove negligence.”
Organized snowmobiling clubs in Lake and McHenry Counties encourage sledders to follow designated trails and stay off private property. Trails have their own network of signposts and miniature traffic signs like “Stop” and “Caution Ahead.”
Snowmobile clubs commonly make arrangements with farmers and other landowners to allow portions of their land to be used as snowmobile trails, said Jim Walleck, president of the Broken Oar River Runners Snowmobile Club in Cary.
Some snowmobilers, like brothers Bob and Dave Hopp of Johnsburg, say the recreation can be a safe sport if sledders follow the rules of the trails, though they warn that some property owners lay rope, rocks and logs in roadsides and ditches alongside the trails to keep snowmobilers from straying onto their land.
But other snowmobilers, such as Dan Shafer, 20, and Ryan Rossman, 17, both of Oakwood Hills, say they occasionally sled through private property because it’s more convenient or safer route.
“Sometimes when you’re in a hurry, you don’t think,” Rossman said.
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State law requires snowmobilers to travel more than 10 feet from a public roadway, but sometimes the space is not available alongside a road, Shafer said.
“I’d rather go through their yard than get hit (by a car),” Shafer said. “When you go through someone’s yard, you go through it nice and easy. You don’t go 50.”