A small Magnolia tree can still be a pretty big tree. The normal magnolia trees around hear are three or four times taller than the houses.

I don't think that we can know everything about the incident, but I gathered from the article that the police did not charge her for calling the kids monkeys. Her crime was disorderly conduct. She, by her own admission, went directly to the kids and ordered them to get out of the tree right in front of their parents. That is a pretty disrespectful thing to do even without the monkey comment which amounted to rubbing salt in the wound.