An elderly man is facing a $300 fine for littering in a story that will have your blood boiling. The 86-year-old had been sitting outdoors in Lincolnshire, England. That's when a leaf flew into his mouth.
Doing the reasonable thing, he spit it out.
"As I was sitting there, a gale blew a big reed into my mouth," he recalled to the BBC. "I spat it out, and just as I got up to walk away, two [enforcement officers] came up to me."
"It was all unnecessary and all out of proportion," Marsh said, per the BBC. They charged him with a $334.50 fine, which they later dropped to $200.70. Adrian Findley, a county councillor who works as a representative for Reform on Lincolnshire County Council, said it's not the only complaint he's heard of.
Littering Fine For A Leaf
"[Enforcement officers] are taking it too far. ... There needs to be discretion about how they [enforcement officers] issue fines," he told the outlet. "If it looks like a genuine accident, then give people the opportunity to apologize and pick it up."
East Lindsey District Council (ELDC) disagreed with this. They backed up the enforcement officers over the littering charges. The organization insists that officers would "only approach individuals who have been seen committing environmental crime offenses." But Marsh's story seems to disagree with this. How can it be littering if it was a leaf?
The organization also said officers were "not targeted at any specific demographic." But again, this doesn't address the main problem with the story. It was a leaf.
In a Facebook post, Marsh's daughter, Jane Marsh Fitzpatrick, reflected on the incident.
"Dad, who has walking difficulties but does his best to walk every day around the boating lake, inhaled a small leaf that made him choke," she wrote. "Dad has severe asthma and a heart condition, [but] he managed to cough up the leaf and spit it out. (Just the leaf)."
