Faithwalking in our Time: A Parent's Walk Through Hell and Back

By George L Martin

Faithwalking In Our Time is a candid autobiographical account of my battle with human injustice. My book begins with an old friend, now known as Deacon Jim, meeting me in an unlikely location--Grafton Correctional--during the summer of l993. From there I provide my account of the events that brought me unjustly into prison. I recount the difficu

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookTrail Publishing
• Release date: Jul 8, 2020
• ISBN: 9781951505455

George L Martin

George Martin, born in l935, grew up and still lives in Cleveland, Ohio. He takes the reader on a walk through life's significant experiences which led him into a place of 'other worldliness' not unlike the ancient, classic trip into the depths of hell and back.

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Copyright © 2020 by George L. Martin

Paperback: 978-1-951505-44-8

eBook: 978-1-951505-45-5

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

This is a work of nonfiction.

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Printed in the United States of America

Dedication

To parents who are journeying through hell while their family is destroyed; To those working for social reform and restorative justice; and To every soul searching for hope even while being imprisoned in fear and with failure.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Chapter 1. I’ve Come to Tell My Story

Part 1. In the Middle of It All

Part 2. The Legality of It

Part 3. Into Uncharted Waters

Part 4. My Roots—A Tribute to My Beginnings

Part 5. Value in Integrity

Part 6. How It All Started

Part 7. The Moment I First Knew

Part 8. Our Honeymoon

Part 9. The Love of Life

Part 10. Our Family Grows

Part 11. Warning Signs

Chapter 2. How Could This Happen To Us?

Part 12. Our Holocaust

Part 13. Timeliness of Speaking Out.

We Have Met the Enemy and He is Us.

Part 14. The Justice System

Part 15. My Desert Walk

Part 16. Hazing by the Parole Board

Part 17. Facts

Part 18. How I Got Into Federal Court

Part 19. I’m Caught In a Catch 22

Chapter 3. Some Insurmountable Obstacles Upon Getting Out

Part 20. Judge McMonagle

Part 21. Crippled and Looking at an Apparent Dead End

Part 22. Indigent

Part 23. Again, The Role of Will Power/The Help of Angels

Part 24. Treatment & Therapy at Mt. Sinai Hospital, Home, and At John Carroll University

Part 25. Alternative Medicine, Exercise, and Diet:

An Answer to Chronic Pain

Chapter 4. Christ Calls Each To Follow Him

Part 26. My Response

Part 27. Prison Ministry Preparation, Course Work at Notre Dame, Stephen Ministry & JCU

Part 28. Bringing Christ to Shut-Ins

(the imprisoned and the elderly)

Part 29. The Tri-City Consortium:

Receiving More Than I Give

Part 30. Helping Others as an

American Red Cross Volunteer

Part 31. Praising God with Heart and Tongue

Part 32. The Difficult Job of the Prophet Is to Remind God’s People of Their Mission

Addendum to Faithwalking 30 Years Later 2020

Epilogue

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

To Sally O’Freil English Dept./Writing Center, John Carroll U. for her untiring help with proofreading my manuscript.

To Naomi Barnett and Harvey Gittler who provided many practical suggestions and helped me avoid several editing pitfalls. Their generosity with time and encouragement helped me complete my project.

To Dr. C. R. O’Dell for permission to use his photo of the birth of a star in the Orion Nebula for my book and my website.

CHAPTER 1

I’VE COME TO

TELL MY STORY

Part 1. In the Middle of It All

It was one of those comfortable, late afternoon, summer days that seem to have the power to refresh the body and the mind. My mind was peacefully drifting, sometimes attaching to places miles away, as I slowly walked along the empty sidewalk cutting across the camp toward the chapel. In that frame of mind, I never noticed the person coming toward me from the walk that angled from the main gate.

All of a sudden a voice called out, George! What are you doing here? I immediately looked up to see a tall, thin, graying man in his early 50’s. The first thing I noticed about him was his Roman collar against a light blue shirt. And above that collar was the surprised face of Jim Petrus, greeting me with a big smile and then with an even bigger hug. Jim’s older brother John had been my classmate in grade school. A few years later, all three of us went to Benedictine High School along with thirty-seven other boys from our parish school. The parish boys’ club and its various activities had helped draw many of us together. That same camaraderie gave us a sense of belonging and pride as we pursued our education at a large, all-boys’ high school of 1200 students.

Jim couldn’t believe his eyes. Here we were, holding a mini-reunion, in the middle of the campus-like grounds of the state correctional prison at Grafton, Ohio in the summer of l993.

After receiving his bear hug I said, Well, Jim, I could ask the same question! What brings you to the inside of prison?

Jim answered, Deacon Don Lobdell asked me if I would be willing to give him a hand tonight by running the Wednesday night meeting for the Catholic community. That way I could meet some of the men and learn a little about how things are run, both here and at the honor farm.

Well, it sure is a surprise to see you taking your evening stroll inside here! I said.

What about you, George? I never thought I’d see you in a place like this! If it’s all right to ask, What brings you to Grafton Correctional?

Jim, I answered, it’s quite a story. How much time do you have before you have to set up for the meeting? Some of the biggest surprises in life come when you least expect them, and often from people you’d never expect them to come from.

After telling Deacon Jim how I had ended up in prison, he asked me if some day I ever expected to write about my encounter with the justice system. His personal experiences with the criminal justice system had come from others close to himself, who had related their unbelievable experiences with the justice system.

His first introduction was through a son-in-law. His second lesson was through his best friend from work – a friend of thirty years. Because of the experiences of those two men whom he knew to have uncompromising character, he had come to realize that our justice system is flawed and very capable of treating its citizens in cruel and unjust ways. He said, People need to hear your story, George, even if the average lay person finds it harsh and hard to believe.

Those were the first seeds planted for my writing this saga. And now, in l998, four years after I was released from prison, I was finally ready emotionally, physically, and financially to begin writing the story of one family man’s encounter with the criminal justice system in Cuyahoga County, Ohio.

A Dreadful Knock at the Front Door Late at Night

It all began one evening when I was confronted with the kind of nightmare every parent dreads. The local police came knocking at the front door about 10:20 P.M. one evening. They were looking for an Oriental boy who had escaped from their custody. They had just picked him up on another street along with a white boy and were about to bring them in for questioning concerning a series of house burglaries and car break-ins.

The Oriental boy had given them a false name and address. He had told them that all they had to do was go to his house and his father would explain that he had been sent to the corner store to get him some cigarettes. The detectives pulled into the driveway where the Oriental boy said he lived. When they went up the porch and knocked on the door, both boys made their break to get away. This is why the police now came to our house. They asked me if an Oriental boy, around thirteen or fourteen years old lived with us.

Yes, I replied.

Where is he now?

Upstairs, sleeping.

Has he been home all evening?

Yes.

Do you smoke cigarettes?

No, I don’t smoke anything.

They asked to speak with him.

Sure. I’ll go up to his room and get him now.

I went upstairs and knocked on the boys’ bedroom door. No answer. I walked in. The bed was empty. He was nowhere to be found. I felt like a darn fool. Now I had to go downstairs to tell those detectives and police officers that apparently I had not known that my son was not at home.

He definitely was not in his bed sleeping as I believed. I just couldn’t understand how he had slipped past my wife and me without our seeing him go late at night. Years later I was to find out that, just like Huck Finn, both boys regularly used the porch roof off their bedroom window to get over to a maple tree and climb down, coming and going from their bedroom any time of the night they wished. Their practice of leaving home late at night continued, even when they all slept in a two-story playhouse I built for them in our back yard. The police asked if I could bring the boy in the first of the week to answer some questions. I agreed that I would.

I made sure I was present with John at all times at the police station. I was flabbergasted at John’s attitude toward the police when they began questioning him. He acted as if it were one big joke and smirked as they related the problems the thirty policemen had had in pursuing him and his accomplice-friend, in the dark of night, after their escape on foot. One young officer was outraged by his attitude and moved to grab John. I stepped in between them to protect my son.

In looking back now I can see what a fool my son made of me and so many others every step of the way. Everything was a game of moves and counter moves for him. Reality and the consequences of his actions in real life never seemed to take hold in his mind. As often happens in cases of deceit, he started telling lies to cover up what he had been doing. His mother and I were the only ones to realize they were among numerous signs of severe emotional immaturity.

There was his refusal to go to counseling or wrestling practice or to come straight home from Heights High School. Prior to that he had refused to remain as a student at Benedictine High School. According to my son, he would be happy if only he could attend the same high school as his inseparable buddy. His thinking was that tuition money I was paying Benedictine was due him for the work he did for me. And he decided he could better spend it buying a dirt bike for himself.

Even family summer camping had become a bust for him. He ended up playing with a Ouija board all night long and getting dead drunk with two other teens during family camp at Camp Christopher. He refused to accept counseling from his mother or father or the camp staff because camp was stupid and we were all dorks. I thought I could reach my son through various activities and with tough love. I sat him down and told him his life was in a crisis mode.

I tried to explain to him that events of the past few years indicated the need for a strong, positive approach. And part of his program would be separation from his blood-pact brother until he got his act together with school work, counseling, and sports.

That talk came the evening after the police had visited our home. I wasn’t able to initiate it sooner because he never came home till the next morning and my wife thought talking to him would be a waste of my time in his condition. After that session in the kitchen John went upstairs and quietly took an overdose of aspirin in order to put an end to it all.

I called medical emergency, which rushed him to University Babies and Children’s Hospital. The intake person acted rather peculiar, I thought. Not at all like the treatment I was used to during the hundreds of times my wife and I had taken our eight children to our pediatrician over the preceding eighteen years.

Much later, I was to learn that the State of Ohio had ordered those treating attempted teen suicides to handle them as incidents of sexual abuse. The mass application of this mandated law without proper training is a perfect example of discharging a double-barreled shotgun in a crowded room of people in order to get a rat racing for its hole.

This questionable practice quickly spread to many parts of our country.

Our son John was transferred from the Emergency Room at University Hospital to St. Luke’s Hospital, for recovery and for six weeks of treatment in their psychiatric department.

When John was finished with his psychiatric treatment at St. Luke’s, Dr. Wolfenson, his attending physician, felt that John should be returned to his home.

When John rebelled against that professional prognosis and advice, he received the full backing of the county caseworker, Vera Perkins Hughes. It was she who decided to take John into the protective custody of the Cuyahoga County Children’s Services.

History has many warnings against totalitarian governments and the real dangers they pose for every generation. Many of us are old enough to remember why our ancestors fled tyranny in other parts of the world. We are only too aware that the impossible could happen in America just as easily as it happened over there.

Hundreds of children are needlessly removed from families each week, says New York University law professor Martin Guggenheim. Some will be far more seriously harmed–whether physically or psychologically- than if state officials had never heard of them. Everyone agrees that the safety and welfare of our children must be paramount. Still, experts say we can help kids who need protection and prevent families from being torn apart. Some 450,000 children live in foster care. Did they all need to be removed from their homes? Under current law, social workers have an incentive to put children in federally-funded foster-care programs because the programs that keep families intact don’t get anywhere near the same financial support.

The key is to reverse the financial incentives," says Richard Wexler, author of Wounded Innocents: The Real Victims of the War against Child Abuse.

Even the popular newsstand magazine Readers Digest picked up on this self-serving tendency and stated, ...then the foster-care population will drop dramatically. (When Parents Become Victims, Readers Digest, April, 1993.)

In 1991, the cofounders of VOCAL (Victims of Child Abuse Legislation), George and Leslie Wimberly, stated that a large portion of the problem can be traced to a lack of training and the nature of the system which is based on funding involving a head count. How epidemic is this parent abuse? The Sacramento, California hotline was averaging 100 calls a day. The year before, they had tracked 554,000 calls on abuse. Of these, 16 per cent were deemed legitimate enough to warrant in-depth study. Of those 16 per cent, only 13 percent made it to court. Certainly far too many cases of child abuse. But the total figures also raise a red flag about the potential for false accusations against parents. (When Parents Are Falsely Accused. Panel CS650, Focus on the Family, 1991.

Our own children were taken and interrogated by a psychologist of County Children and Family Services without the protection of a parent or legal counsel. Supposedly, this was carried out for the good of the children. Yet, in the end, all our children were victimized by an impersonal system, the very system that was created to protect their needs.

I was too unschooled to question whether what this county agency was doing was an act of unconstitutional aggression against my family’s basic rights. The county even threatened my wife, the mother of my children, that she would lose all the children unless she divorced me.

For the first year and a half prior to John’s trial, the family members were forbidden to speak to him. Officials promised him food, clothing, shelter, college, and a job in order to win him away from his family.

Dateline NBC, October 8, 1999, featured a special on Alienation Syndrome which played a major part in two different highly-publicized court custody cases. In both instances, custody was awarded to fathers who had previously been accused of sexual abuse and/or rape of their own children.

Apparently, some judges are beginning independently and circumspectly to scrutinize the power that alienation can exert over impressionable children. In reality, what our son received from the court was freedom to have no place of his own as well as the freedom to call no place home. Complete freedom with no responsibility to anyone or anything.

From what I have seen within our prisons, this same freedom from responsibility is typical of our state’s incarceration system. Similar freedoms can be found within prison systems across our nation. Ohio, however, has led in a modern-day slave trade, especially victimizing African-Americans.

Part 2. The Legality of It

In Our Society Once an Accusation of Sexual Abuse

Is Made, the Accused Is Guilty, Forever.

The legal part of my story began when an accusation of sexual abuse was made against me by our adopted son. It was made at a time of teenage experimentation and rebellion. This accusation of sex abuse started an unbreakable chain of events.

Today, whenever the system prevails in its unique way of handling such accusations, it always ends in family tragedy. There are many reasons people/children will say things to hurt each other; especially if they are angry, immature, or naive. However, in the minds of those running the criminal justice system, there is only one reason for such an accusation.

These individuals believe that being overzealous in their work is a virtue that somehow frees them to abuse proper procedures and manipulate victims in order to win legal cases.

I can recall the trial prosecutor in my case saying, I will do whatever it takes to win. I am sure my rebellious son saw the prosecutor’s bravado as a promise of personal liberation from any responsibility on my son’s part for his past or for what he was about to do.

At fifteen, my son was motivated by a desire for uninhibited freedom, freedom from lots of things, especially from control by anyone over any aspect of his life. Unknown to his parents, he had been abusing both alcohol and drugs. He soon came to a point where all he was capable of feeling was his need for total freedom to pursue whatever habits and desires dominated both him and an inseparable buddy. But no one within the system volunteered to brief him on the far-reaching consequences of his plan if things didn’t proceed as they usually do, through the usual plea-bargain practice, or the subsequent grief that would be inflicted upon the entire family. His actions were destined to bring deep emotional pain into the lives of every individual within his family as the prosecutor’s team prepared to take advantage of his full cooperation.

Part 3. Into Uncharted Waters

My wife and I had spent over forty years in school studying, learning, and preparing ourselves as professional educators. We had carefully observed the lives of our parents’ and grandparents’ families and we believed their religious practices would provide a bridge of wisdom between the past and our children, who represented the future. But nothing we had learned or respected ever provided a hint of what we were about to encounter.

What It Is Like to Face a Stacked Deck

I would say the first factor that made for an uneven playing field for us in l989 was America’s view on handling of teenage rebellion. Raising children has always taken the varied resources of an entire community: Hence the saying that became popular years later, It takes an entire village to raise a child.

So I was unprepared for and uneducated about the devious ways with which the latest approach had discarded the traditional sources for supporting the family and now often it turns against parents when they try to discipline their children. As parents, we were condemned when we tried to control what had always been considered destructive teen attitudes or activities. The recent condescending attitude often evolved into a general attitude of children being untouchable in their rebellion against an older, supposedly less tolerant generation that presumably was being too strict with its children.

The second factor making the playing field uneven for us as John’s parents came in the form of a hostile county caseworker. Such a caseworker was Vera Perkins Hughes who was on the Rape Hotline Intake switchboard the day the hospital phoned in their report. It was unfortunate for us because Vera never bothered to hide her animosity and hatred for me, a suburban white male.

She wrongfully assumed two things: White people cannot possibly know of the special needs of any minority person, and no white male can ever be trusted to have personal integrity, especially when dealing with an accusation of sexual abuse.

She went about her work with the zeal of Saul of Tarsus in his early years of persecuting Christians. Nothing deterred her from her agenda. Perhaps she thought she was doing good and righteous work. She also was part of that group of black social workers who were becoming politically active in the 80’s. One plank in their agenda was to prevent all biracial adoptions because no white couple could make fit parents to any child of color.

The other plank in their agenda encouraged the actual breakdown within any family that already had adopted trans-racial or biracial children with statements like white parents can never meet the unique cultural and emotional needs of a black child. Or even worse, you don’t need to obey those people since they’re not your real parents anyway.

These are things I was to hear only after I went to prison. Such negative influence introduced into the life of an adolescent already experiencing confusing growing pains