An intro... of sorts (Part 2)

We spent a total of six months in Corvallis, Oregon - home of the Oregon State Beavers and Dad's alma mater. Grandmother ended up dying at the end of the fifth month (April 2002). About one month into our stay Justin, who was fourteen at the time, became too belligerent for Mom to handle so he was sent to the Indianapolis Training Center (ITC). He stayed there for the extent of our time in Oregon, except for the last 2 weeks when he was brought back to help pack up Grandmother's house. At that point there was nothing that could be done about him. He would leave after he woke up around noon and not come back until 2-3 am. No one knew what he was doing or how to make him stop.

Mom and Dad went to see Billy G. on the way back to Ohio because he was at ITC when we went through Indiana. He told them to disown Justin and leave him there where they would take custody. This obviously wasn't really an option.

We got home in early May 2002 and had the summer from hell. Justin was awful! He had finally had enough of the legalistic totalitarian rule and brought so many contraband items into the house. He started carefully with his music with bands like Good Charlotte, but he quickly graduated to death metal and bands such as Slipknot and Static X. He would insist on blasting this throughout the entire house when Mom and Dad were gone. At this point he was the oldest child at home except for in the summer when my older sister would come home from college, but she worked most of the time. As a result of this, there was no one at home to make him stop. He quickly spiraled down into occultism. He was a legitimate member of a coven. I have no idea how he got attached to it, but he was apparently in pretty deep. None of us knew about it until after the fact. He turned 15 that summer.

My parents were going to put us all (the younger four) into a private Christian school that fall, but I had always heard how sinful any school was so the concept terrified me and I cried and they ended up only enrolling Justin. He did well academically, but continued to spiral out of control at home. There was a minimum of one screaming fight between him and Mom and /or Dad every day.

In March of 2003 he attempted to hang himself in our backyard and then spent two weeks in the psych ward. Mom and Dad finally decided that they had to do something about him and sought out a counselor who specialized in demonic possession. My parents, my older siblings (the ones who knew about that specific problem) and I all believed that he was possessed. There was no other way to explain his sudden change in behavior. He had always been stubborn and violent (I have scars that will attest to that), but he was usually repentant and would try and make it right after the fact. This became not the case at all, so Mom and Dad called in a Christian counselor who specialized in that kind of thing.

It took almost a month for things to finally start to settle down, and during this time I was left all day, alone with my 2 younger siblings, and anywhere from 2-4 of the woman's special needs foster kids. I was 12, almost 13 at the time. (While I was ok with it at the time, I don't think that it was the greatest idea to leave an adolescent girl alone with kids who had severe handicaps and give her the instruction, "don't interrupt us unless it's a matter of life and death.")

After that we didn't do anything else organized with ATI, but me and my younger siblings were still homeschooled. I graduated having been homeschooled k-12, but they put my younger brother part time into the same private school that Justin had been in at the beginning of 10th grade. He graduated from a real high school - the first of this generation as he likes to remind us constantly.

So, that is the abridged version of why we aren't in ATI anymore. There's much much more, which I will eventually get into.