Sylvia Kordower-Zetlin doesn't fit the typical graffiti tagger profile. The retired art teacher lives in a brownstone on New York City's Upper West Side, and she's 82 years old.
Police still arrested the elderly woman for "making graffiti" on June 22 after she spray-painted her neighbor's fence that separates their properties on West 113 Street, according to New York Daily News. It was the latest incident in a property dispute between Kordower-Zetlin and her neighbor Arlo Devlin-Brown, the newly appointed chief of the Public Corruption Unit in the Manhattan U.S. attorney's office.
"It's an ongoing dispute," said Assistant District Attorney Justin Chung at the criminal court arraignment on Aug. 13. "The defendant was going onto what the complainant believes to be his property and refuses to stop coming over."
Devlin-Brown put up the fence to avoid any more confrontations with his older neighbor, but the octogenarian claims that fence "partially" rests on her property.
"The fence is on my property - 2 feet onto my property," Kordower-Zetlin told the Daily News. "I had two separate surveys done, and they both show that where he put the fence is in my yard. Even the fence man said it was on my yard."
She had her son-in law Jonathan Reiter represent her in court. He called the allegations against his mother-in-law "absurd."
"My client was completely in the right," Reiter said. "The fence is actually partially on the defendant's property and she marked that fence... to prevent the complaintant from acquiring prescriptive rights by adverse possession of her property."
Devlin-Brown's wife Daniela Kempf accused Kordower-Zetlin of constantly harassing her family and making their lives "hell."
"She takes pictures of us whenever we come outside," Kempf, a professor at Barnard College, told the Daily News. "She gets on a ladder (and) yells, 'Bastards! Bastards!'"
Kordower-Zetlin isn't a stranger in the courts. She sued a number of contractors last year over alleged problems on some remodeling and renovation jobs, according to the Daily News. She also sued the city for not maintaining the vacant lot next to her property. She claimed it caused "water, debris and tree roots to enter" her lot.
