Prison, Texas and the Relief Society President

Editor's note: I realize this post looks (on the surface) like a bit of a commitment. Trust me, it is worth the read ... and if anyone deserves 5 minutes of a stranger's time, Barbara does.

While in Texas, we went to visit our dear friend Barbara. I asked Marco to write out her story. She is absolutely a modern day Job. Who else do you know that teaches the Young Women Values to inmates -- from the inside. Thank, Marco and we love you, Barbara.

The Story of Barbara

We met Barbara in 1996, when we lived in Holland. We had moved there for a job I had with an international court. At church, we met her family: her mom, Grace, had been the ambassador of Ghana to Holland, until there was a coup and the bad new government threatened to execute Grace if she returned, so they became stateless, and stayed as refugees in the Hague... The dad hightailed it out of there when the political winds changed. Grace was pretty much on her own, living on government assistance in a small apartment. Grace had three other kids younger than Barbara, two boys and a newborn girl. In their humbled situation, the missionaries found them, and they all joined the church.

Kira and Grace were assigned as visiting teaching companions, because Grace only spoke English. They became extremely close. Grace always wore flamboyant printed traditional clothing, and would cook African feasts. She loved parties and get togethers. We would all gather round and she would tell stories about the African trickster and hero Anansi.

Barbara was staying with a family in Utah, going to high school, but she didn’t like it much. She came home to Hollandfor the Summer in 1997 and we met her for the first time. She instantly became a member of our family. She babysat the kids and hung out a lot with us. When we left Holland for Washington DC, the plan was that Barbara was going to move in with Grandma Louise (Kira's mom) in Utah to finish school at Orem High, but the school district was going to charge several thousand dollars non-resident tuition, so plans changed and she went to Houston to live with her uncle and finish school there.

She was making plans to come to BYU after graduating from college but, then just before she graduated from high school Kira invited her to come live with us in Maryland and go to college and help her while she recovered from surgery and chemotherapy. And that’s what she did. She lived with us, went to school full time, babysat other kids in our house for spending money. She also met and baptized a boyfriend, Kenny, and after a couple of years in August 1990, they got married... in the temple in the morning, and a full-blown walk-down-the-aisle wedding at our church in College Park for his family afterwards. Kenny moved in, and they lived in our basement apartment. We still ate often together, and she took care of the kids when follow up chemo or bone marrow transplants or other setbacks required more help.

In the meantime, I was moving and fixing up the big Cynthia Warner house down the street, and when we moved over in September 2001, Kenny and Barbara stayed in our old house basement apartment while we rented the upstairs to somebody else. Then in 1993, we sold our little house and Barbara and Kenny bought a nice 3-br condo a couple of miles away in College Park. In 1995, Kira's cancer came back for the last time, so we moved to Utah to be by family. Barbara helped pack and clean the big house... and came to Utah to visit a couple of times.

In May 1996, Barbara graduated from the University of Maryland with honors, with degrees in International Business and Finance. She came out to see Kira one last time - and to talk about babies, because she was 5 months pregnant. After Kira died in July, we went to Maryland for a memorial service there. Barbara had just had her baby (Kendra) and Grace was there. Grace spoke at the service. Barbara got a job with an architectural design firm and made a good salary, Kenny stayed home with Kendra because his injuries from a car accident made it so he couldn’t work. They moved back into Kenny’s boyhood home in Takoma Park so Kendra could have a yard to play in, we kept in touch, all seemed well. In 2001 Barbara had another baby, a boy Mikey.

Just before Mikey was born, Barbara’s mom mentioned that she had a relative (distant cousin or something) who wanted to come to the US to visit, and would be interested in helping Barbara out with the new baby if she could stay at their house. Of course Barbara said yes, and “Auntie” came to stay. She stayed several months, made lots of friends, was called as a nursery leader in church, babysat friends of Barbara’s at Barbara’s house for spending money, and helped out with the new baby. When her visitor visa was up, Grace arranged for the return ticket, but Auntie started saying she didn’t want to go. She overstayed her visa, and would get mad when Barbara talked about her going back home. Barbara just felt like she couldn’t throw her out, so she stayed several more months with no visa.... And then one day Auntie just vanished. They didn’t know where she went, but they didn’t get too worried -- they figured it was none of their business.

Barbara came out to Utah for our wedding reception in November 2001 with her kids, Kendra 4 and Mikey 5 months. Barbara mentioned that she wanted to go visit Ghana, maybe move there, but Kenny wasn’t too excited about that. They had tickets for a trip to Ghana to visit that winter, but then just before they were supposed to go Mikey got sick. He had rickets (lack of vitamin D, which black kids sometimes get for lack of sunshine). He had broken some bones, they were so brittle, and was in the hospital for 6 weeks for the rickets. But then he picked up a hospital staph infection and got really sick, and was hospitalized even longer.

He finally got better, but they never got to Ghana. Then in May 2002, Barbara called me and mentioned that some of her friends had been getting calls from the FBI, asking strange questions about Auntie, and asked if I had any advice. I told her I couldn’t guess what it was about, and not to worry about it, since I didn't think they could be in trouble for Auntie overstaying her visa. And then one day, the FBI showed up at their house, broke down the door, and arrested both Barbara and Kenny, and charged them with slaveholding. Apparently Auntie had been told by some Ugandan friends (in the church) that if she wanted to stay in the US, she just had to claim asylum. Apparently she found some scumbag lawyer who told her that to get asylum she would have to claim that she would be killed if she went back to Ghana. So she made up a story about Grace having sent her to Barbara as a slave, and that Grace had locked up Auntie’s kids in cages in her basement in Ghana, and threatened to kill them if she didn’t work for Barbara. Unbelievably the FBI and INS and Justice Department were in the mood to believe this crazy story, and they brought charges.

I still couldn’t believe it would go anywhere. It was obviously too crazy. I told them not too worry, the grownups would eventually take over and see that the Auntie story was a flimsy lie. Barbara and Kenny got a really good criminal defense lawyer in DC, and he told them the same thing. The government offered to settle for something like $40,000 and a felony conviction. But she didn’t want to settle because she didn't want to plead guilty to something she hadn’t done. Her lawyer told her not to worry, they would win at trial. That seemed right to me. So they went to trial. The whole ward came and testified about Barbara’s character (she was in the Relief Society presidency when she was arrested), about how Auntie seemed happy and was an active member of the congregation. Friends of Barbara’s testified that they saw Auntie at home and around town. Kenny’s mom mentioned going on shopping trips with her. Her baby-sitting clients said they had paid her for babysitting. I testified about how Barbara was just showing Auntie the same generosity that we had tried to show Barbara when she lived with us. But Auntie got on the stand and wept and wailed and talked about how Barbara would make her kneel before her and serve her coffee every morning and if it wasn’t just right she would throw the coffee on her and beat her. (Of course Barbara never drank coffee). And she said that she was forced to spend two hours every Sunday in a small room with small screaming children, for no pay. (Of course, she had accepted a calling a church as a nursery teacher). There was no evidence on the government’s side except the hyperbolic testimony of Auntie, who clearly had every reason to lie, and phone records showing that Barbara often called her mother in Ghana (proof of conspiracy). The whole circus was so silly, but the trial went on for several days. I never seriously thought she could be convicted of anything, but to our horror, they convicted both Barbara and Kenny of slave-owning and conspiracy. Kenny got three years house arrest. Barbara was originally assigned 8 years hard time, but the judge reduced it to 5 years. It was so outrageous, that the lawyer was enthusiastic to file an appeal, but the judge said that if she appealed, the prosecutor would insist on reinstating the 8 year sentence if the appeal failed. She decided the risk was too great, and she went off to Tallahassee Federal Prison.

And I pretty much lost my faith in the American justice system. The whole thing was a fraud from the beginning to the end. The prosecutors must have know it. They actually gave a green card to Auntie and her sons (who never were held in a dungeon on Grace’s basement – though the US government never bothered to check that their house doesn’t even have a basement, much less a dungeon). We wrote letters, we had contacted congressmen and senators, contacted other DC lawyers and former prosecutors, contacted people in the Church. Nothing could be done. The government for some reason needed this conviction as some kind of post 911 proof of getting tough on foreign bad guys, and they did whatever they needed to get it. So, now... I don’t believe anything I read about anybody accused or convicted of a crime anymore.

Meanwhile, what happens to kids in a situation like this? After a few months of not very functional living at home with Kenny, who wasn’t allowed to work or leave the house, and his Mom, who had to work, Barbara decided the kids would be better off in Ghana with Grace. Liz volunteered to take them to Ghana, so after one last trip to see their mom in Tallahassee (with a side trip to Disneyland), Liz flew to Accra with Kendra and Mikey, just before her senior year in high school -- the same age Barbara was when she first started taking care of Liz and her sisters. (Liz’s misadventures of getting stranded in Addis Ababa at the end of that trip are a tale for another day).

The tragedy of false imprisonment of a young mother with small children would be bad enough. But in Tallahassee Barbara started having problems with her eyesight and started getting headaches. The prison medical system ignored her for a long time, but finally she got so see a specialist and then one day, with no advance notice, she was taken into surgery. Turns out she had developed a brain tumor. The good news was that the tumor is “benign” which means it isn’t cancer that will spread throughout her body and kill her. But nothing that is growing in your brain is exactly benign. The bad news was that the surgery was brutal and sloppy, missed much of the tumor, and she didn’t heal very well. So eventually she was transferred to Ft Worth, to a federal Medical prison. There they redid the surgery, the right way the second time, and have followed up with some very high-tech “cyber-knife” treatments that we hope have removed the threat.

And through all this, Barbara has remained calm, faithful, and good natured. I don’t know how she does it. She is the most faith-filled person I know, and has more patience than I can imagine. She’s got about 6 more months to go on her 5-year sentence. She will be deported after she is released, and there are horror stories about post-release deportation proceedings taking 2 or 3 more years. We are hoping at least to help her avoid that nightmare, and get her released and sent home to Ghana as soon as her sentence is up.