A black man is suing three white women for repeatedly calling the cops on him while he tended to his community garden. Marc Peeples, 33, claims in a lawsuit that the women lied to police from July 2017 to May 2018 to prevent him from working in the city park.
Peeples says for two years he has worked to make the garden blossom, and the women, Deborah Nash, Martha Callahan and Callahan’s grandmother Jennifer Morris, attempted to get Peeles “incarcerated or seriously injured by law enforcement,” according to the paperwork filed in Michigan’s Wayne County Third Circuit Court last week.
According to NBC in March 2018, the women met with officials at the Detroit Police Department and made several complaints against Peeples, who describes himself as an entrepreneur. One of the allegations was that Peeples threatened to burn down their homes and kill them.
In another incident filed in May 2019, Peeples says the women told police he was a convicted pedophile, which resulted in him getting arrested in front of home-schooled children he brought with him to the park to teach them about gardening.
The women also claim Peeples threatened them, which got him arrested and charged with stalking, an offense punishable with a year in prison. Judge E. Lynise Bryant reportedly said the women “should be sitting at the defendant’s table for stalking and harassment charges.”
Peeples is seeking $300,000 in damages, attorney fees.
“Since the trial went the way that it went, it actually has been a positive by bringing light to what I’m doing in the community,” he said.