Farmer Who Cleared Out Crops To Build Baseball Field Goes Bankrupt, Loses Family, Arrested For Tax Evasion

DYERSVILLE, IA—After allegedly listening to voices in his head instructing him to clear out a significant portion of his crops to construct a baseball diamond, sources close to local man Tom Petrillo, 36, confirmed Friday that the deluded heartland farmer has since gone bankrupt, become estranged from his family, and been arrested for tax evasion. “It’s horrible; this was a guy struggling to keep his farm afloat in an extremely challenging economic climate, and the next thing you know he’s razing his one source of livelihood because the hallucinations told him to,” said neighbor Mark Drysdale, who recounted how Petrillo spent weeks tearing up his cornfield and spent thousands of dollars erecting a makeshift baseball stadium against the pleas of his friends, family, and creditors. “Now he’s locked up in jail for failing to pay his taxes, the bank’s foreclosing on his property, and his wife and daughter don’t want anything to do with him. All because of that fucking baseball field.” When reached for comment, authorities at the Dyersville Police Department said that Petrillo had recently been moved to a nearby psychiatric ward after being discovered naked and unresponsive in his holding cell repeating the nonsensical phrase, “If you build it, he will come.”