In Marina Simes' view, what happened to the trees around her Rancho Palos Verdes home is a crime.
In Eva Wildey's, it was a crime that the 27 towering pines, peppers and cherry trees blocked her husband's panoramic view of Abalone Cove and the Pacific beyond.
So Wildey allegedly sent her own tree-trimmers onto Simes' property to lop off the tops of the trees that for years had obscured Thomas Wildey's magnificent ocean vista.
The pruning last Dec. 15 so angered Simes that she has sued the Wildeys for infliction of emotional distress, trespassing and "injury" to the shortened trees.
The dispute along a quiet stretch of Sea Cove Drive, across the cove from the Palos Verdes Peninsula's famous Wayfarer's Chapel, is proof that there is often more than one point of view when it comes to preserving view points.
Simes, 93, said she and her late husband planted the trees around their low-slung, glass-walled oceanfront home 40 years ago. So aside from the shade, there is the sentimentality involved.
"It broke my heart to see them cut; it really did. How could anybody have done such a cruel thing?" Simes said. "It's almost unbelievable."
The unauthorized pruning took place on a day that Simes was away from home, running errands with daughter Pamela Simes Fleming and helping a quadriplegic friend decorate for Christmas.
"We could see that the trees were missing coming down the street on the way home," Fleming said. "My mother started crying. Sixty-foot-tall trees had been cut down to roof level. A notch was cut in a row of trees out by the street."
Eva Wildey declined to comment on the pruning or the lawsuit. Her husband did not return messages left for him at their home or at the Rolling Hills fire station where he works as a Los Angeles County Fire Department captain.
But Eva Wildey allegedly admitted commissioning the cutting, first in a phone call to Fleming and then in a handwritten note to Simes the day after the pruning occurred.
"Mrs. Wildey called at 9 the next day and said, 'We cut them down to give my husband his dream -- an ocean view,' " Fleming said.
The note, allegedly signed by Eva Wildey, accepted responsibility for the chopping and pledged to restore the trees. "The Wildeys are responsible for the costs attendant to fixing or replacing the trees," the note states.
Simes said that at her age, that's a meaningless promise.
