NASHWAUK, Minn. — The Minnesota Court of Appeals has backed a rural Nashwauk man who sawed his neighbor’s garage in half in a property boundary dispute.

A three-judge panel of the appellate court, in a 10-page decision released Monday, said Roger Weber was on his own property when he sawed the garage that apparently was half on his property and half on property owned by Mark Besemann.

“While we do not condone the manner in which respondent removed the portion of the garage, shed and lean-to located on his side of the property line, we conclude that in this case, respondent’s (Weber’s) actions do not constitute trespass under Minnesota law,” the three-judge panel concluded.

The ruling upholds a June 2015 decision by Itasca County District Judge Lois Lang in Grand Rapids.

Lang ruled that Weber doesn’t have to pay for effectively ruining the garage because it apparently had been built, decades earlier, half on property that he came to own.

Besemann bought a home on 1 acre in rural Nashwauk Township in April 2013 and found himself in the middle of a family dispute between Roger Weber and Weber’s sister, who had inherited the house Besemann later purchased.

The house Besemann purchased had been owned and lived in for years by Roger Weber’s father, Robert Weber. But after the elder Weber died in 2012, and the home passed to the sister, Roger Weber claimed that half of what had been his father’s garage was in fact built on 39 acres of adjoining property he had received from his father.

Sometime between April 22 and April 27, 2013, Roger Weber sawed the garage in half and removed the portion on his property. He took out a shed and lean-to as well and, Besemann claims, disabled the home’s septic system, which also was partially on Roger Weber’s side of the line.

Besemann, who was unable to get criminal trespass or property damage charges filed against Weber, instead filed a civil suit seeking $40,000 in damages.

The garage clearly was on the driveway that leads to the house owned by Besemann, but half of it had been on Roger Weber’s land all along, Lang ruled. And Roger Weber’s father never made any legal effort to claim the garage land was part of his property.

Simply because Besemann believed he had purchased and paid for the entire garage wasn’t enough. Lang summed up the case in the first paragraph of her decision.

“This case involves an acrimonious dispute between siblings following their father’s death, and the unfortunate consequences that followed when an unrelated third party purchased land from one sibling involved in the dispute, adjacent to land owned by another sibling involved in the dispute,” she wrote.