- This is even beyond Jerry Springer-level drama
We all got our own family problems. But do you think that your mother would try to kidnap your 4-year-old daughter? Neither did Jade Green.
Lawrenceville, Illinois
FBI has been investigating Angela and Jack Howser (Mrs. Green’s mom and step-father) involvement in Mrs. Greens’ arrest. Even more surprising is the possible involvement of the local sheriff’s office and police. Mr. and Mrs. Howser own and run a successful newspaper that influences a huge part of the southwest countryside of the state. The police said that they influenced by Mr. and Mrs. Howser, to arrest Mrs. Green. “It’s like being in a nightmare. You know it’s not right. You know this can’t be done, but the louder you scream the fewer people hear you,” said Josh Green, Mrs. Greens husband, to Dailymail.co.uk.
It Actually Started In 2014
In September of 2014, Mr. and Mrs. Green had been married for 4 months and decided to move out of the family home. They moved nearly an hour away, taking their then-4-year-old daughter. Mrs. Howser was furious that Jade took her beloved granddaughter away, so much so she threatened to post nude selfies of Jade in their family owned newspaper, the Disclosure. Later, when brought to court, Jade’s step-father thought it would be a good idea to blow up the pictures into posters and display them in the courtroom in order to embarrass her further. Mrs. Howser said that Jade had sent the pictures to a former boyfriend, who sold the pictures to her mother.
Why?
“Jack and Angela (Mr. and Mrs. Howser) like to have control, and having my daughter controlled me. For us to leave and get a place of our own was a pivotal point for them. To gain control they needed to take her,” Jade told DailyMail. Jade was a reporter for the Disclosure, until six days before her departure, when her parents fired her.
Mr. Howser said that it was because she wasn’t producing enough. “We told her, you’re going to have to step it up or you’re going to have to go.” He said that he and his wife hope the warning would “shock her into some reality, get her back on track.” Mrs. Green closed her bank account, but not until several days after giving her mom a 2 hundred dollar check to help her mom cover the Walmart bill. That was when the Howsers came up with their plan.
The Plan.
Mrs. Howser waited until they left, and went to cash the check, knowing the account was shut down. When it bounced back, she got her daughter arrested on the felony charge of passing a bad check. The Howsers then brought in the Police Chief James White, who arrested Jade and let the Howsers take her little girl, who was referred as E.W. Knowing there would be trouble if Mr. Green was home, as he was her step-father and had the right to look after her or designate his own mother to take her, the Howsers waited till midnight, when he was on his graveyard shift as a security officer.
It Wasn’t All Smooth Though
When Police Chief White went to raid the house, two of his officers refused. They said that they wanted nothing to do with taking that child. “He said they were going to wait for Josh to go to work and then they were going to give the child to Jack and Angela Howser,” said Officer Ryan Curtis. Officer Curtis said that he and Officer Jimmy Lyle pulled up the relevant statute on the police computer. They told Chief White: “you can’t just arrest someone and give the child to someone else. You have to consult the parents and say, ‘Who do YOU want the child to go to?’”
This Gave Chief White Second Thoughts
Chief found that the warrant for Mrs. Greens’ arrest wasn’t in the usual system but had been faxed over by prosecutor Quick, a former college classmate of Mrs. Howser’s. When pressed to continue the arrest, Chief White had Mrs. Howser call Lawrence County Sheriff Russell Adam, who had fired Mr. Green years earlier for a courtroom incident in which he was accused of leaving a murder suspect alone with a judge after he had gone to help a woman who fell. Sheriff Adams agreed to take over the case.
Chief White
“It was a sad situation. I came to the same conclusion as my officers, that we shouldn’t be involved in it, we shouldn’t be taking her child out of the house. That’s the reason the Sheriff was the one that took everything over, I tried to stay out of it,” said Chief White. The Sheriff’s lawyer said that “as far as the Sheriff is concerned, the case has been resolved and so there is nothing to comment.”
Quick’s First Name Was Not Released
Quick told DailyMail that he had no clue Mr. Green was at work. He admitted that he had gone to college with Mrs. Howser, but that he hated both her and her husband. “Their paper was nothing but a gossip rag which destroyed some people’s reputations. If the upshot of this is that they had to fold the paper, then I am glad. Jack and Angela Howser are awful people.” Quick said that the midnight raid was two days before Sheriff Adams almost lost the re-election. “I have always thought that he did this because he did not want bad stuff written about him so close to the election.”
While It Didn’t Take Long For Her To Get Out, It Wasn’t The End For Mrs. Green
Mrs. Green got out on the 300 dollar bail not long after being arrested. Mr. Howser made a separate claim the following morning. He said that Jade had failed to return a cellphone memory card containing the home phone numbers and all of the newspaper’s contacts. Despite the fact that the card held little value and he had other copies of the contacts, he said that he was worried she’d misuse the numbers. She was arrested again, only the bail was 500 dollars. While Mr. Howser was doing that, his wife went to the courthouse in Saline county to take out an emergency order of protection to prevent Mrs. and Mr. Green from seeing their daughter. It took them 16 months to get their daughter back. Though that wasn’t the end of their troubles…
Other Cases
“One time they had us arrested for unlawful communication with a witness, our daughter! It was the only visit we had had with her in five months and it was after the judge said we could speak with her. Then that was dismissed two or three weeks later. I spent a week in jail and Josh spent two weeks in a cell with people he had arrested when he was a police officer,” said Mrs. Green.
The Court
The State Police were considering kidnapping charges against the Howsers. However, their superiors told him to drop the case so it could be dealt with by the Attorney Registration & Disciplinary Committee. At the end of the trial, the Greens were rewarded 250,000 dollars for emotional and mental pain, 100,000 dollars for loss of companionship, 120,000 attorney’s fee and 500,000 dollars in punitive damage. The Howsers are also facing a huge sum to compensate the Greens. The Howsers, of course, fought this. They appealed three times saying that there was not enough evidence to support the decision, the judge should not have excluded certain facts about the Greens, and that a 970,000 dollar reward was too high. However, the judges were having not of it, saying: “We reject all of the Howsers’ arguments.”
The Court Asked How The Howsers Were Going To Pay The Fee?
“We will go back to court and try to conclude the collection process,” said Mrs. Greens lawyer Kent Heller. However, Mrs. Green replied saying that they were wealthy enough. “The newspaper was in 13 counties. They made enough money to be able to get six attorneys throughout this process.” Mrs. Green said that after getting a combined 75,000 dollars from Sheriff Adams and Quick, she had no idea how big the reward from her parents was going to be.
Five Years Later
Mrs. Green said that she hasn’t spoken to her mother at all these past five years, and doesn’t plan to ever again. “I don’t want anything to do with her, I don’t care what she does in her life, I just want her to stay away from mine.” E.W. is now nine-year-old and thriving, though Mrs. Green said that she had to see a therapist. “She was in counseling for quite a while just learning to be a little girl again.”
The Greens still live in Lawrenceville, though not in the house that this all went down in. “We talk about moving out all the time. In Lawrenceville, the police think they can do whatever they want to do and get away with it. It’s not a comfortable town,” said Mrs. Green. Mr. Green is now a police officer at the University of Vincennes, just across the Indiana border. They now have a 1-year-old son.