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For the next forty-eight hours, Susette held vigil at LeBlanc’s side. When she finally ran home for a change of clothes and a shower, she bumped into Kathleen Mitchell’s daughter on the street. “Tell your mother that Timothy was in a car accident,” she said.

Soon word spread through the neighborhood that LeBlanc’s life was in the balance. Susette had cried so much her eyes were dry. Eventually, LeBlanc started to breathe on his own, and the doctors upgraded his condition. But they informed Susette that even in the best-case scenario LeBlanc would be permanently disabled. His speech would be slow, his memory limited, and his physical mobility severely restricted. Even with an excruciating physical-rehabilitation schedule, LeBlanc would never be the man he had once been.

Matt Dery was the first to check in on Susette. None of the other neighbors wanted to infringe on her privacy at such a sensitive time. “We don’t know what to say,” Dery told her.

Even Von Winkle stayed away. Whenever he experienced grief, he preferred to be left alone, so he figured he’d leave Susette alone.

When Scott Bullock got the news, he couldn’t believe it. He wondered, What else does this woman have to deal with?

37

GOD, WHAT HAVE I DONE?

Suing the city was the farthest thing from Byron Athenian’s mind when he had first gotten the notice that the NLDC had condemned his house. Self-employed, he had been doing auto-body work for twenty-three years. He had paid $39,000 for his house eleven years earlier and opened up a repair shop in the backyard, earning about $50,000 a year. It was just enough to support his three children and a granddaughter confined to a wheelchair. Just four years shy of paying off his mortgage, Athenian had agreed to join the lawsuit when his respected friend Matt Dery had.

Low profile throughout the case, Athenian first heard about Judge Corradino’s ruling when Matt Dery called with the news. “No good,” Dery told him before inviting him up for a beer and a celebration with the ones who had won.

Disappointed, yet even-tempered, Athenian had shown up at Dery’s house that night and partied with his friends. He had celebrated even harder after they informed him that they planned to appeal on his behalf.

But since then, Athenian had experienced the wrath of the NLDC. He had come home one day and discovered that dump trucks had unloaded tons of dirt on the street right in front of his house. Besides adding four feet in elevation to the roadway just a few steps from his front door, the dust was so overwhelming that it covered the inside of Athenian’s house. The first time it rained, the topsoil turned into a mud slide into his basement and first-floor living room. Besides flooding his house and snuffing out his boiler, the mud and water made it virtually impossible to get his granddaughter’s wheelchair from the house to the road.

For weeks the city refused to collect Athenian’s trash; that was because he no longer had a sidewalk to set it on on pickup days. The NLDC tore down his street sign and put up Jersey barriers around his property, giving it the look of an occupied territory. The agency even detonated dynamite on the neighboring lots it had obtained. The explosions caused the walls to crack inside Athenian’s house.

The more the NLDC harassed Athenian, the more the Institute for Justice became determined to win its appeal. To help build public support, the institute funded the formation of a grassroots-activism organization called the Castle Coalition. Dedicated to preserving homes from eminent-domain takings, the coalition launched a Web site and organized a candlelight vigil in the Fort Trumbull neighborhood on the eve of the hearing before the Connecticut Supreme Court.

December 2, 2002

Supporters for the homeowners packed the small courthouse gallery to hear Bullock and Berliner argue their appeal. The plaintiffs sat together, in a show of solidarity. Susette left LeBlanc’s bedside at the hospital to attend. There was no way she would miss the opportunity to