Miranda Webb: Trauma, anarchy and perilous life on the run from Northeast Ohio to Mexico – Akron Beacon Journal

First of a two-part story.

Miranda Webb knew danger lurked when her dog started barking inside their Acapulco rental home in February 2019.

When she peeked out a window, Webb saw four teens outside a locked gate, throwing rocks toward the house.

Webbs boyfriend, Shane Cress, whom she met when they were students at Kent State University, immediately grabbed a Taser and a small handgun and headed outside to investigate.

She grabbed a machete, but before she could follow Cress and a friend down the driveway, she heard pop, pop, pop. One of the teens had opened fire.

The drug war Webb tried to leave behind in Ohio had caught up to her in Mexico.

Only this time, it wasnt Portage County law enforcement after her.

It appeared to be a Mexican drug cartel.

What happened in the years before and since is part of Webbs complicated journey to be free.

Free from the extended childhood trauma of her mothers drug dealing and addiction, which for years had the family on the run from a motorcycle club and Northeast Ohio police.

Free from mainstream society, where she never felt she fit in.

And free now, at age 29, to pursue a quiet life of crocheting, selling home-brewed kombucha and flying from a circus trapeze somewhere in Mexico.

Webb who is better known to many by her alias, Lily Forester worries less now about drug lords than being deported back to Ohio.

Shes been a fugitive since 2015 after she and Cress skipped bail on felony charges accusing them of making hash oil from marijuana at West Branch State Park near Ravenna.

Webb, who worked to reform Ohios marijuana laws when she led Kent States Students for Sensible Drug Policy, denies the allegations but could face more than 20 years in prison if convicted.

This is the story of Webb, her search for self-determination and what she lost and found along the way.

About the docuseries:'The Anarchists'

It is based on more than four hours of Zoom interviews with Webb in September, along with previous interviews shes given to others, news accounts, court records and the recently released HBO documentary series The Anarchists, which is partly focused on Webbs life in Mexico.

Webb was born into the drug war, she often says.

Her parents, Randal Webb and Michelle Jarvis, met because my dad liked to buy weed and my mom liked to sell weed, Webb said.

They didnt stay together. Randal Webb lived in Lake County, east of Cleveland and, until she was about 8 years old, Miranda Webb lived a tumultuous life with her mother in Lorain County, west of Cleveland.

Some of Miranda Webbs earliest memories are police officers lifting her, asleep, out of bed during overnight drug raids wherever her mom was living.

Id wake up and ask, Where am I? Webb said. Theyd tell me I was at a police station and that my mommys in jail and theyd give me a stuffed animal.

Webb also remembers her mom waking her up, saying they were going on adventure and fleeing into the night, leaving everyone they knew behind.

Webb later learned from her mothers journals that they were running from a motorcycle gang. Jarvis, she said, had been dealing opium for the bikers and owed them money.

They were coming to kill her and our family, Webb said.

Mom had two personalities, Webb said. Mom and Red, her drug-dealing name. Red was a reference to Jarvis long, naturally red hair.

Jarvis, who had five children, spent about seven years of Webbs childhood on the run.

By the time she was 8, Webb was sick, losing her teeth and diagnosed as malnourished. When Webb asked Jarvis if she could live with her dad, Jarvis considered it for a while, then crushed up a pill, snorted it and told Webb she could go.

Webbs mom got clean for a while and by 2010 had moved to Medina County, where she lived with two young sons in a house on state Route 18 between Montrose and Medina.

Just before Christmas that year, Jarvis ran out of the house and onto the busy highway during morning rush hour, saying she was being chased by demons.

Jarvis beckoned her boys to follow her. They didnt, but watched as one car hit their mother, then a second before Jarvis stumbled into the path of an oncoming semitractor trailer. The Ohio State Highway Patrol said Jarvis died later that day at Medina Hospital. She was 42.

An autopsy revealed Jarvis had morphine, oxycodone and tramadol in her system, Webb said.

I think she just gave up, Webb said.

Webb was 16 when Jarvis died and everyone started drawing parallels with her mother, comparing how they looked Webb had long, strawberry-blond hair and acted.

Webb said she loved her mother, but never intended to follow her path into addiction or hard drugs.

Kent State University, Webb thought, was her way out.

Webb paused midsentence the first time she saw Shane Cress.

It was around January 2012. They were both freshmen at Kent State, and Webb was leading a Students for Sensible Drug Policy meeting.

Nice hat, Webb told Cress, who was hiding his budding dreadlocks under a Ron Paul cap.

Webb and Cress were fans of Paul, a former U.S. congressman who ran for U.S. president as a Libertarian and as a Republican. Among other things, Paul was critical of U.S. fiscal policy, the war on drugs and, after the 9/11 attacks, the war on terror.

Later in the meeting, as the students were introducing themselves, Cress said he had just been released from prison and was a victim in the drug war.

That just like hooked me, said Webb, who also considered herself a victim of the drug war.

Webb opposed any drugs that could lead to the kind of addiction that ruined her mothers life. But she initially enrolled at Kent State to study botany because she wanted to learn how to grow marijuana.

Cress, it turned out, was years ahead of her.

The first week they started dating, he took her to his off-campus rental house. Outside, there was a huge garden.

That was his cover a hippie growing vegetables, she said.

But inside, hidden in the basement, were cannabis plants growing in tents.

The plants werent doing that well, Webb said, but Cress said he could teach her how to grow.

Webb didnt know it then, but the two had something else in common: Cress dad also died a violent death in Medina County.

Steven Cress, who had a bipolar disorder, shot and killed himself in 1992 after police burst into a room while he was threatening suicide, his family said.

He died three days before Shane Cress first birthday.

By the time Shane Cress was 2 years old, he began showing some of the same behaviors as his father, his mother, Judy Hlavac, said on The Anarchists.

When he was 5, she put an alarm on Cress bedroom door after he began nighttime rages, destroying things in the house as others slept.

Cress was soon diagnosed with a bipolar disorder, like his father, and as he grew older, he turned to marijuana for comfort.

At 17, he followed a girl to Oklahoma and was arrested after a landlord discovered Cress was growing weed in a closet.

A judge told Cress he could go to prison for life or go to a boot camp and then leave Oklahoma. Cress chose the second option.

At boot camp, officials shaved his head.

Cress didnt think they had a right to do that, Hlavac said in the HBO documentary. It changed him. He started becoming very anti-government.

A couple of weeks after Webb and Cress started dating, Webb tested out the new Rollerblades her dad bought her for her birthday.

She was skating between her Kent dorm room at Olson Hall and a convenience store when she underestimated how steep a hill was.

Webb crashed outside the psychology building and broke her jaw in three places.

Doctors wired her mouth shut for six weeks, and Cress made her smoothies for a week and took care of her weed needs to manage jaw pain.

Cress believed marijuana could help many ailments. In high school, he developed a special strain to help a friend who was shot in the eye with a BB gun after prescription medicine didnt help him.

He was also teaching Webb about Libertarianism, the political idea that the state should stay out of the private market and peoples private lives.

Its not actually that radical to believe that people should be free, Cress told Kent Wired in 2012 after taking over as president of the Kent Student Liberty Alliance. At the end of the day, the government is just a big gun that we use to point at each other, and thats why most of us dont like politics. Because its just a game to control the gun.

But being free, when it came to marijuana, wasnt easy.

When Cress Kent landlord discovered marijuana growing in the basement, he gave Cress five days to move out, Webb said.

Cress and Webb moved the operation to a friends house overlooking the former tire factories in Akrons Goodyear Heights neighborhood.

In the coming months, after about 18 months of college, they both decided college wasnt for them, and they decided to live their political philosophy full time by being self-sufficient and going off grid, disconnected from running water and electricity.

In the winter of 2014, a friend hooked them up with a house on the east side of Cleveland.

Instead of overlooking old rubber factories, this house off Pershing Avenue overlooked an industrial valley of steel mills.

Many of the surrounding houses had been abandoned or torn down years ago as Cleveland shed blue-collar union jobs.

Webb and Cress spent what money they had on solar panels and a generator. They heated the house with a wood stove and gathered rainwater from the roof to cook and drink.

When spring came, they built a garden, planting seeds in moldy bales of hay a farmer didnt want.

Webb said the garden thrived, with a dozen types of tomatoes, cucumbers, kohlrabi, beans, corn and any other vegetable that would grow in Northeast Ohio.

At the same time, Cress took a job building stages at Jacobs Pavilion in The Flats to bring in extra money.

Locals thought we were crazy, Webb said.

But things were going fairly well, she said, until the house was condemned.

Webb and Cress were still committed to living off the grid, but wondered if it might be easier if they joined a larger community instead of going it alone.

In January 2015, they moved out of the Cleveland house, which has since been torn down, and made plans to move to Detroits Fireweed Universe City, where artists, anarchists and others had reclaimed a block of abandoned houses in a particularly rough section of that city near 7 Mile Road.

Webb and Cress picked a vacant house well-suited for solar panels and a garden plot and returned to Northeast Ohio a couple of weeks later to pack up the rest of their stuff at a relatives house in Portage County.

Whoa, look who we have here, a Portage County sheriffs deputy said when he saw Webb and Cress at West Branch State Park near Ravenna in the summer of 2015, Webb said.

Webb said she recognized the deputy from their Students of Sensible Drug Policy meetings in Kent, where he was apparently working under cover.

No one trusted him, Webb said, because he always said he was trying to launch a similar student group at the University of Akron, but it never materialized. The Portage County Drug Task Force did not respond to messages.

Webb explained to him and two other officers that she and Cross were on their way back to Fireweed in Detroit when they stopped at an empty house at the park to let out their dog.

Webb thinks she might have escaped with a ticket for trespassing that day ifCress wasnt so cocky, filming everything, including the search of her car.

My car was like the Mary Poppins of weed, Webb said. But instead of a bag, it was a car and they just kept pulling out thing after thing. My bongs and my pipes and a case of butane and some weed that had already been blown, meaning the marijuana had already been drained of its THC.

Webb said she tried to persuade officers to let them go on their way, explaining that they were headed back to Fireweed where they intended to form a legal marijuana business under Michigan state law.

But deputies said the couple was using butane to manufacturing hash oil, a concentrated form of marijuana often referred to as dabs.

They held Webb and Cress in the Portage County Jail, and a grand jury in August 2015 indicted each of them on several felony charges, including the illegal manufacturing of drugs and trafficking in marijuana.

Cress family bailed them out and tried to persuade them to stay.

But Webb and Cress decided to run.

They first headed back to Fireweed, where they knew they could find work. When that ended, a relative convinced them to head to Oregon, where she said they could make a few thousand dollars doing trim work during the marijuana harvest.

They thought that would be enough to pay their way into Mexico, where they hoped theyd be safe from Portage County authorities.

Webb and Cress found a ride-sharing service to Oregon on Craigs List.

They arrived in Oregon just before Halloween 2015 and discovered it was the end of the cannabis growing season.

Webb and Cress found a little work, but were paid in weed, not cash, which had little worth in an area saturated with marijuana, Webb said.

Many people there went by aliases, and thats where Webb was reborn Lily Forester. Cress was already calling himself John Galt, the name of a character in Ayn Rands Atlas Shrugged, and a hero for many Libertarians.

Some of Cress family sent them $700 to help, and they used it to buy an old, canary-yellow pickup truck and started making their way toward Mexico, panhandling for gas money along the way.

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Miranda Webb: Trauma, anarchy and perilous life on the run from Northeast Ohio to Mexico - Akron Beacon Journal