Auburn tree poisoner Harvey Updyke gets ordered back in court for not paying restitution
The man who poisoned the oak trees at Auburn’s Toomer’s Corner because he was upset that the Tigers beat Alabama isn’t paying his court-ordered restitution.
Harvey Updyke, the infamous Alabama fan who called into the “Paul Finebaum Show” to confess his crime, was ordered to pay approximately $800,000 in restitution to Auburn for his 2010 actions. And he’s paid just $5,000 of that total and, per the Lee County District Attorney, has been skipping payments recently.
Prosecutors recently served him at his residence in Louisiana with an order to appear in court in October to explain why he is failing to pay what he’s supposed to.
“Harvey Updyke has never left my radar. We have been keeping an eye on his payments or more specifically, his non-payment, and he has made exactly two payments for a total of $200 in the past year. Because of that, we have been looking for him for close to a year, and we finally found him,” explained Lee Co. District Attorney Brandon Hughes.
In case you were wondering, it would take 4,000 years to pay off $800,000 at $200 a year with no interest. But Updyke has actually upped his payments in recent years. As of September 2014 he had only paid $99 of the total. Progress!
Updyke was sentenced to six months in jail in 2013 for poisoning the famous trees, which had to be cut down because of the lethal herbicide Updyke applied to them. Auburn kept the trees up for as long as they could before cutting them down and then replaced them with new trees in 2015.
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Nick Bromberg is a writer for Yahoo Sports.
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