Survival Homestead

I do have to wonder what the basis is for the cruelty to children charge…hopefully it’s not related to their lack of Gameboys or fashionable clothes…Leave this man and his family alone!

Source: The Augusta Chronicle

Ricky Cantrell had a heart-to-heart talk with Jeremy Long about his family.

It was the early 1990s, and the two men ran a struggling pulpwood business together and lived next door to each other in mobile homes on Georgia Highway 88 in Blythe.

Mr. Long had just had his third child, and he was already having trouble paying bills and taking care of the family to the point that the older children wore tight, raggedy clothes, Mr. Cantrell said. He told Mr. Long he needed to apply for government assistance.

Soon after that, a woman pulled up in the dirt driveway they shared, driving a big sedan that looked like an unmarked government car. Mr. Long got nervous and agitated, according to Mr. Cantrell.

He told his wife to take the children inside, then ordered the woman off his property.

“I think he got scared and shut it down,” Mr. Cantrell said. “That’s really what made us think, what in the world’s the matter with them?”

A lot of people wondered that over the years, and the question lingers in the wake of authorities discovering Mr. Long’s wife and 11 children living in a ramshackle house in Burke County with no running water or electricity.

Before his arrest Aug. 8, Mr. Long spent nearly two decades on the fringes of society. He took pains to keep himself and his family off the grid.

The children — ranging from 10 months to 18 years old — had never been inside a school classroom nor had a single vaccination, Burke County Sheriff Greg Coursey said. The only doctor they had seen was at their births in Augusta emergency rooms. Former neighbors said whenever a stranger passed by or looked their way, they scattered and hid.

Though he could easily have qualified for it, Mr. Long wouldn’t get on welfare or take food stamps. He didn’t have a valid driver’s license, and a prosecutor who handled his bond hearing said he left “no paper trail.” The caretaker of the abandoned house where police found the family said they were there without permission.

Mr. Long, 37, wouldn’t speak to The Augusta Chronicle last week when a reporter visited him at the Burke County jail, where he’s being held on a charge of second-degree cruelty to children. His wife, Christine, 38, didn’t respond to a letter requesting an interview. His attorneys with the Augusta Judicial Circuit public defender’s office also refused to comment.

However, interviews with former co-workers, business partners, neighbors and employers of Mr. Long dating back more than a decade paint a picture of a secretive man who worked hard as a talented jack-of-all-trades and cared about his children, but kept society and its government institutions at arm’s length.

That went for his family back in Louisiana, too.

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