I had just got a new vehicle, and it was a manual stick shift, on June 10'th. I haven't ever driven with a stick before and a friend came up in a couple weeks from St. Louis to help me learn.

He drove the vehicle to the countryside, and I was trying to find the right abandoned field my cousin said we could use to practice 4 wheel drive on, since the spring rains ruined all the crops and the field was bare.

We turned at the wrong hill, and went on to wrong person's property, where my vehicle got stuck in mud. We spent 10 hours trying to dig it out before giving up, and having to walk through mud to the main road and got a ride back to town from a neighbor lady. She gave me her number to help with things, but when I tried contacting her to get the land owner's number to apologize, she never responded.

The police came by later, with a ticket, saying I would have committed Vehicle Abandonment if I didn't get my Jeep out within 7 days. My neighbor heard about the issue, and volunteered to drive me out to the location where the Jeep was, to pull it out, and instead of being in the field, it had been pulled out and left by the roadside. I called the police, and asked if there was anything I needed to do, and they said there wasn't. So my neighbor drove my Jeep back and I drove his truck with automatic transmission, since I was too nervous to try driving a manual transmission for the first time.

Now, I got a court notice for committing Criminal Trespass real property, when there wasn't a no trespassing sign up on the land anywhere where I could see, and afterwards with neighbor, I didn't enter the property at all, and just stayed in the truck. The paperwork says I committed the act at or around May 10'th, when it was June 21'st that the vehicle got stuck.

Is there any advice for how to handle this?