Ebony Conner, a single mother of five in Cahokia, Illinois, near St. Louis, arrested and briefly jailed for failing to mow her lawn and clean up her yard. She was not even issued a ticket prior to the arrest, and the only explanation she was offered was a complaint from the Village of Cahokia. 
 
 “I understand I violated a code. But take the channels, give me a ticket first, make me appear in court. I know there’s gotta be channels other than if you don’t cut your grass, I’m arresting you,” Conner told a local CBS-affiliate. 
 
 Conner is not alone in being arrested for failing to mow her lawn. Earlier this year, a 70-year-old woman in Prichard, Alabama was also arrested for not mowing lawn, except the citation she received was for a property she no longer owned. A 75-year-old woman in Riesel, Texas was issued a warrant for her arrest after she was accused of not responding to a letter to appear in court for her failing to mow her lawn. 
 
 In Pagedale, Missouri, where IJ has filed a class action lawsuit, there has been a similar abuse of municipal code enforcement. In Pagedale residents can be fined for things like chipped paint, mismatched curtains, and walking on the left side of a crosswalk. In 2013, nearly 20 percent of the city’s revenue came from fines and fees, producing a profit-incentive for law enforcement. From 2010 to 2014, the number of non-traffic tickets issued to residents increased by 495 percent. ||||| A 28-year-old Florida woman was arrested and charged with four counts of negligent child abuse without bodily harm after police observed her four children playing in a park without supervision. When the mother, named Ashley Richardson, arrived at the scene to retrieve them, she told officers that she had been at been at the local food bank and was not expecting to be away so long. 
 
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 A police officer said she first noticed the children playing alone in Lake Maude Nature Park in the small city of Winter Haven during the early afternoon of Tuesday, August 12. She was eventually waved down by the kids after the eldest, age 8, became caught in a swing meant for toddlers. The officer called in the fire department and the boy was eventually unstuck. 
 
 Police say that, upon requesting the children's address, the kids initially would not answer, though, when asked again, they gave an address less than a half mile away and said that they had left the house earlier that morning. Approximately 2.5 hours after police first spotted the kids, Richardson arrived, informed officers that she had been held up at the local food bank and was arrested on the scene. 
 
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 The Winter Haven Police Department has already received public backlash for the arrest, leading Police Chief Gary Hester to state: 
 
 "Six, seven and 8-year-old kids are not equipped to be left unattended, I mean period. I met some pretty mature 6, 7, 8-year-olds but you don't leave them unattended. I guess the question we should be asking is this 28-year-old mother, should she be left unattended. Doesn't look like she's mature enough to be a parent. She's being supervised today in the county jail. Hopefully she learns her lesson." 
 
 For the record, I spent far longer than 2 and a half hours unattended in parks throughout my childhood and my parents were never scolded by law officials or told that they needed to "learn a lesson" through jail time. Then again, my folks are middle class and white, so they're not exactly the police department's target demo when it comes to this kind of things. 
 
 Richardson's arrest echoes other recent, highly publicized incidents: In July, Debra Harrell was arrested for letting her daughter play in the park while she worked a shift at McDonald's and, just shy of five months ago, Shanesha Taylor, a homeless mother of two, was arrested for leaving her children in the car while attending a job interview. 
 
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 A Missouri woman who authorities say was held against her will and kept in a wooden box for months earlier this year was found dead with her teenage son on Thursday — just three weeks after escaping from her alleged captor. 
 
 Police in Clinton, Missouri, said Sandra Kay Sutton, 46, and her 17-year-old son Zachary Wade Sutton were found dead of apparent gunshot wounds early Thursday morning at the home of a family member and that Sutton's former boyfriend and accused kidnapper is a suspect in their deaths. 
 
 Authorities are searching for James B. Horn, 47, who has been on the run after authorities in Sedalia, Missouri, charged him with kidnapping, armed criminal action and unlawful use of a weapon in an incident involving Sutton on April 30. 
 
 The Missouri State Highway Patrol SWAT team and local law enforcement surrounded Horn's home in Sedalia earlier Thursday afternoon, but were unable to find him upon entering, Sgt. Bill Lowe of the Missouri State Highway Patrol told NBC News. 
 
 Authorities were also searching for Horn in abandoned homes in the area, after an officer found Sutton's car near a local hospital. Surveillance video showed an unidentifiable person walking in the direction of the abandoned houses, Clinton police Lt. Sonny Lynch said at a news conference. 
 
 Sgt. Lowe said authorities had searched and cleared at least two abandoned homes in the area and have not found Horn. He is considered armed and dangerous. 
 
 "All of our searches came up empty, so we aren't currently aware of where he is now," he said. 
 
 Just three weeks ago, officers responded to a report of a woman who said she had just escaped from a male who was had been keeping her captive for months, officials said. 
 
 The woman said that she had been kept against her will since January, and had been imprisoned in a wooden box at the residence. 
 
 Sedalia Police Department Chief John DeGonia told the Sedalia Democrat that Sutton said her initial relationship with Horn "began as consensual, but it eventually led to 'you can't leave.'" 
 
 Sutton was able to escape and run to a neighbor's house for help, according to the release. Upon checking the residence, police say they found a large wooden box at the home, and that the suspect had fled the scene prior to their arrival. 
 
 Horn is a registered sex offender who served time in prison in an unrelated kidnapping and sexual attack, according to The Associated Press. He served roughly three years in prison in the early 1990s for a kidnapping and rape in Tennessee, according to the AP. 
 
 He also served a nearly 13 year sentence for kidnapping and abducting his estranged wife in 1997. He was released from custody in 2011 and his probation jurisdiction was transferred to Missouri in 2012. 
 
 On Thursday at around 4:30 a.m., Sutton and her son were found dead by their family members, who had left the night before to go to work, Lynch said. 
 
 Lynch said Sutton had not sought an order of protection against Horn and authorities did not know she was staying with relatives in Clinton, but that Horn had an outstanding warrant for his arrest in the alleged kidnapping incident. 
 
 "The real driving factor in these deaths is absolutely not the victim," he said. "It's who victimized them and we believe it's Mr. Horn."
– An Illinois woman with five kids was arrested July 7 and briefly thrown in jail for an offense that the town of Cahokia obviously feels strongly about: not mowing her lawn, the Week reports. Single mom Ebony Conner tells KMOV she was verbally warned by a municipal code-enforcement officer back in June and also told to get rid of garbage and broken-down cars from her driveway—but she thought she had more time to fix things, and she definitely didn't think she'd be hauled off to jail. "I understand I violated a code, but … give me a ticket first, make me appear in court," she says. "I know there's gotta be channels other than, 'If you don't cut your grass, we're arresting you right now.'" Conner says she hails from Wisconsin and has spent time in St. Louis, Mo., and she'd never heard of such a thing in either place. While she was detained (cops say she was held for about a half-hour in jail), her five children remained at home, with just a code enforcement officer patrolling the outside of her house, Conner says, adding, "I said 'I don't trust him. I don't know him at all.' … And they still hauled me off." She says she would've cut her grass by hand if she had known her long grass was an arrestable offense. The Institute for Justice lists similar cases that some consider to be an abuse of municipal code enforcement, including those in the town of Pagedale, Mo., where residents can be slammed with fines and tickets for such offenses as barbecuing in front of one's house, having mismatched curtains, and walking on the left-hand side of a crosswalk. (Postal workers mow residents' lawns in Finland.)