The only threat Sharles has ever made, Bob says, is to get national attention: "He went to the Office for Civil Rights and he started a website, but the county makes it sound like he's going to machine-gun everybody."

Sharles wasn't always like this — obsessive about his case and paranoid, staying up nights to scour documents and write e-mail after e-mail about every minute detail as if it were a smoking gun, imagining that everyone in Jefferson County is conspiring against him. He knows he sometimes comes off as crazy. He knows that no one believes that before April 8, 2004, the day the Jefferson County Department of Human Services got involved with his family, he was a mellow, laid-back guy — shy, even. When this is all over, he says, he hopes he might get some of that old Sharles back.

Sharles and Rebekiah Johnson's children were taken away for nearly four months in 2004.
Sharles and Rebekiah Johnson's children were taken away for nearly four months in 2004.
The family celebrated Shakalel's first birthday at home in Illinois last month.
The family celebrated Shakalel's first birthday at home in Illinois last month.

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Bob believes that Sharles's behavior is in direct response to the way his family was treated by the system. Bob's experienced some of it himself. "I don't have any personal stake in this except that Sharles and Rebekiah and the children are my friends now, and I just despise what's happened to them," he says. "I am really offended that my county, where I have lived for 35 years, has behaved in the way it behaves, because I think this whole thing has been one injustice after another. I've heard county attorneys say things that were untrue, and Sharles lose his rights without defense. My county did that.

"He beat the county in a D&N action, and it looks to me as if instead of somebody saying we were wrong and we probably shouldn't have done that...instead of that, they were bad losers."

Sabo doesn't want to sound like a conspiracy theorist, either, but she says she doesn't see how the ongoing case against Sharles could be anything but retaliatory. "At some point," she remembers, "I told Sharles, 'This has become personal. You guys are cleared. The judge said you'd been done an injustice. You should be done.' Something really personalized this. Is it just that they couldn't stand that this man stood up to them, had his facts straight, had records — that they'd never had to deal with an intelligent parent who was like that, who wasn't so scared that they wouldn't fight back?

"Maybe I'm jumping to conclusions, but geez, what is going on here?"

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