Lacy Lary says he can’t express how frustrated he is about people coming to play on his land, where a high school party was going on Saturday before deputies came.
“I’ve just about given up that anything will ever be done,” he said. “I’ve called the Corps of Engineers many times, the sheriff’s department no telling how many times. They come out, but then nothing is ever done. It doesn’t stop. I believe if they really wanted to stop it, they could.”
People have been using his property — about 400 acres that includes a section of Pelucia Creek with two sandbars and a couple of waterfalls — for every imaginable vice for years, he said. Often they don’t take kindly to his asking them to leave.
“People have threatened me and my family and told me I don’t have any right to tell them to get off,” he said. I’m afraid to go down there without a gun.”
And he’s found all sorts of things after they leave — mostly piles and piles of garbage. But sometimes he finds needles and other drug paraphernalia.
Sometimes the objects found are even stranger. Each year, local high school students have an end-of-the-year party, he said. “After last year’s party I found a pingpong table. It was some sort of drinking game, where if a ball landed in a cup of alcohol the other side had to drink it.”
The drinking game is commonly called beer pong.
Lary said he did not know the students were there on Saturday until a friend coming to his house saw the crowd gathered. He called and said he saw the deputies and Highway Patrol. “We can’t see the area from our house,” he said.
This year’s party included a lot of drinking and some nudity, he learned from a young friend who attended the party for a while. “She told me there were some girls there with only a bra on, and things got pretty raunchy before she left,” Lary said.
The garbage generated by such events is huge, he said. “We take the tractor and a grader blade and pile it up. When the water on the creek gets high, it carries a lot of it off,” he said.
Lary said he was glad to hear that the deputies made the kids clean it up this time.
It doesn’t happen just once a year, Lary said: “It’s all the time.”
Posting the property hasn’t helped, he said. “The Corps puts up signs, I put up signs. They tear them down.”
The Larys — Lacy, his brother Bryant, and his mother Rosemary — own the land, first purchased by Lacy’s grandfather not long after World War II. There was a small creek on the property when he bought it. About 21 years ago, the Corps of Engineers took some of the land through eminent domain for a levee and expanded creek.
“We fought the Corps to get some payment for our dirt, which they used for the levee. Floyd Melton helped us, and we finally won,” Lary said. “Then they gave the land including the creek back to us, and we pay taxes on it.”
Lacy said he has liability insurance on his place, and he’s afraid someday someone will get hurt out there.
The Lacy Larys moved out on the land about 12 years ago, and he said he has had constant problems with the revelers. “My son gets tired of cleaning it up,” he said.
While he was standing on the levee discussing the problem Monday at dusk, a car pulled up with three young men inside. They drove down toward the creek and then turned around and left.
“See, they’ve won,” Lary said.
