Chapter 2: Before the File Was Opened

Table of Contents

Preface

Chapter 1 — The First Arrest
Early rupture, authority, and the beginning of resistance

Chapter 2 — Before the File Was Opened 
Gifted education, faith, discipline, and early legitimacy

Chapter 3 — Becoming a Problem
Work, exhaustion, collapse, and the cost of visibility

Chapter 4 — Learning the Language of Power
Courts, probation, jail, campaigns, and proximity to decision-makers

Chapter 5 — The Apprenticeship
Training, mentorship, restraint, and learning how power actually works

Chapter 6 — Staying Power
Policy victories, documentation, long-term impact, and avoiding burnout

Chapter 7 — Why I Never Left
Containment, bad actors, ethical boundaries, and knowing when to walk away

Chapter 8 — What the Media Gets Wrong
Narratives, incentives, misinformation, and pretrial risk
Legal Note: Pretrial Publicity, Jury Pools, and Media Risk

Chapter 9 — The Record vs. the Narrative
Why documentation wins when attention fades

Chapter 10 (Epilogue): — What Remains

Author’s Note

Principles — Staying Effective Without Burning Out

Chapter 2: Before the File Was Opened

Before there was a case number attached to my name, there was a reputation.

I grew up in the Extended Learners Program—ELP—the place schools put kids who test well enough to justify extra attention but not enough to excuse them from normal expectations. Gifted, but not indulged. Smart, but expected to behave.

Standardized tests were easy. Top one percentile, year after year. The kind of scores adults like to bring up at conferences, as if numbers can predict character. I didn’t think much about it. Intelligence felt incidental, not special—just something that made school move faster.

Church moved slower.

Every week in 8th grade, I sat through confirmation classes at the United Methodist Church in Milo, Iowa. We were taught structure, discipline, and certainty. What we weren’t taught—at least not well—was how to handle unanswered questions.

I asked about the Book of Revelation. About contradictions. About symbolism that didn’t quite line up with the confidence of the adults explaining it. The answers never landed. They were rehearsed, circular, and final in a way that discouraged follow-ups.

Faith, I learned early, was permitted—but curiosity had limits.

Outside classrooms and pews, I worked.

I got my first job at fourteen, watering plants at the Milo Garden Center. It wasn’t glamorous. Hose in hand. Rows of hanging baskets. Summer heat. Repetition. Responsibility. I showed up, I listened, and I didn’t complain.

I stayed there for ten years.

Over time, I became a supervisor. I trained new employees. I ran landscaping crews. I learned how to manage people older than me without posturing. We built retaining walls. Cut clean edging. Planted heavy, expensive trees that required planning, leverage, and trust.

We worked for wealthy clients—bank CEOs, doctors, people whose time mattered more than money. Their expectations were precise. Mistakes were visible. You learned quickly that showing up late or cutting corners didn’t just reflect on you; it reflected on whoever put you in charge.

Some clients were public figures. Sports reporters. Media personalities. I remember Andy Fales in particular—not for anything he said, but for what he did while talking. As he interviewed people in their gardens, he had a nervous habit of compulsively plucking weeds from the soil at his feet, tossing them aside without breaking eye contact. It was unconscious. Human. A reminder that everyone carries their own tics into positions of authority.

Work grounded me.

I captained the soccer team. Learned how to lead without dominating. Learned when to speak and when to let momentum carry things forward. At nineteen, I became the youngest college soccer referee in Iowa history, enforcing rules for players older than me while pretending authority wasn’t awkward when worn too early.

Responsibility came before rebellion.

At sixteen, I attended Tom Harkin’s annual steak fry in Indianola. I shook Bill Clinton’s hand there—one brief moment, one practiced smile, one reminder that power often feels strangely ordinary up close. During the Democratic primary, I attended the caucuses for John Edwards, believing—naively, as it turned out—that decency and effort still mattered in politics.

Adults described me as smart. Hard-working. A good person.

I believed them.

I earned a large scholarship, four year internship, and a guaranteed job post graduation from Principal Financial to study Management Information Systems at Iowa State University—an IT degree focused on systems, efficiency, and structure. I liked things that worked logically. I liked frameworks that could be tested and improved. Nobody from my school district had gotten such a large scholarship in years, I was told. I was expected to succeed at University even though 80% rural graduates fail at University – 100% of my high school friends, all in the advanced ELP program, failed University.

That computer program instinct—to understand systems from the inside—would later become inconvenient.

My first arrest arrived into that life without warning.

The charge said I sold marijuana.

I hadn’t.

What I had were text messages—messages offering to share marijuana I already possessed with a friend who had ADHD and wanted help studying for finals at Iowa State. He didn’t like how Adderall made him feel and wanted cannabis to use to study instead. No money changed hands. No transaction occurred. Intent, however, was enough.

That was my introduction to how law translates context into liability.

I lost my driver’s license as part of the misdemeanor marijuana conviction at nineteen.

At the same time, I was required to drive roughly five hundred miles a week for work and court-ordered obligations. I did it anyway. There was no alternative. You learn quickly how flexible rules become when survival requires it.

I was sent to rehabilitation.

Not for alcohol. Not for crack. Not for heroin. For marijuana.

The rehab counselors told me—quietly, off script—that marijuana wasn’t really my problem. Then they played videos about crack addiction. People unraveling their lives in ways that had nothing to do with mine. It felt less like treatment and more like theater—ritual punishment disguised as care.

One counselor, a woman assigned to my case, was more direct than the rest.

She told me my problem wasn’t drugs.

She told me my problem was my parents.

She said they should be in counseling with me. That whatever was happening in my life couldn’t be addressed in isolation. That systems—families included—don’t break one person at a time.

I tried.

My mother refused to attend counseling.

That was the end of that recommendation.

Probation didn’t end my questions. It sharpened them.

Before my probation for that first arrest was even complete, I testified at medical marijuana hearings held by the Iowa Board of Pharmacy in the fall of 2009. I wasn’t dramatic. I wasn’t reckless. I spoke carefully, citing evidence, policy, and constitutional limits.

I also filed something far more dangerous than public hearing testimony.

I demanded a religious exemption from probation drug testing, asserting my rights as a Rastafarian under the Constitution.

That argument—measured, documented, and sincere—landed me on the front page of my hometown newspaper, The Indianola Record Herald. The article was written by Aaron W. Jaco. My name was suddenly public again, this time attached to something the system didn’t know how to quietly process.

They didn’t revoke my probation.

They discharged me early.

That distinction matters. Revocation is punishment. Discharge is retreat.

By the time probation ended, the story others told about me no longer matched the person I had been—or the one I was becoming. The “good kid” label had evaporated, replaced by something harder to define and easier to control.

But the record was already incomplete.

It always is.