Imagine living in an HOA neighborhood where there’s a community park that’s only for residents, and in order to access the park, you have to have a keycard. If a stranger claimed to be a resident who forgot her keycard, would you let her into the park or lock the gate behind you?

In this story, one teenage girl is in this exact situation, and she’s not sure if she made the right decision.

Keep reading for all the details.

AITA for not letting a random lady into my neighborhood park?

So I(18F), my boyfriend, and my sister went to my neighborhood park the other day near my house.

The park was just renovated a couple of months ago and a fence with a locked gate was put up to prevent homeless people, and people from the apartment complex across the street from getting in.

There are also cameras in the park. (The kids in the apartment complex ripped a children’s seesaw from the groud right after it was renovated before the fence was put up. And homeless people kept sleeping on the benches and park tables)

The HOA provides key cards to all of the residents of the neighborhood after you registered for them and paid for them.

One lady tried to lie her way into the park.

Anyways, as we we’re leaving the park to walk back to my place an unfamiliar lady pulls up in a car outside the gate and asks to be let in and claims to have left or misplaced her key card.

But then she immediately contradicts herself and asks how to get the key cards.

I explain that I’m not entirely sure as my parents were the ones to receive the cards but that I knew that you had to go through the HOA to receive them.

She then asks if I could let her in to let her child play.

She didn’t let her in.

I apologize and tell her that I don’t want to risk getting in trouble with the HOA as I don’t know their policies on people without keywords being let in unsupervised(you can have up to 2 guests per keycard).

She pushes a little and I reiterate what I had already told her.

She then relents and gets back into her car.

The three of us(my sister, Boyfriend, and I) then leave the park and close the gate behind us.

She’s not sure if she made the right decision or not.

This is when I get a little skeptical.

The lady hesitates and watches us leave before I see her leave the parking lot and then turns out of the neighborhood entirely and towards the apartment complex.

But still I can’t help but feel a little bit bad so AITA?

She doesn’t live there, so she doesn’t get to use the park. It’s that simple.

Let’s see how Reddit reacted to this story.

One person reassures her that she did the right thing.

Exactly!

Rules are rules.

This is a very good point.

There are good reasons the park is for members only.

If you liked this post, you might want to read this story about a teacher who taught the school’s administration a lesson after they made a sick kid take a final exam.