Josh Wooten doesn't remember precisely when he met Adam Bollenback's mother, Cheryl. It was sometime in the 1990s. She repaired the upholstery of the used cars he sold at his shop near Inverness.
This was long before Wooten got into politics. And it was long before Adam Bollenback became a symbol of the way the courts often manhandle the mentally ill.
Bollenback, now 19, is downright famous. A cruel circuit judge in Citrus County, Ric Howard, made him so. Two years ago, Howard sentenced him to 10 years in prison for stealing a six-pack of beer from a neighbor's garage and then briefly slipping out of sheriff's custody.
The incident capped an adolescence of run-ins with authorities, said prosecutors privy to his juvenile record. Bollenback struck a teacher. He went after his mother with a baseball bat. He battered an employee of a juvenile facility. He stole from a school cafeteria. Then he stole the beer.
No doubt about it. Adam Bollenback was trouble. But maybe more important, he was troubled.
According to his mother, he suffered from the wild mental and emotional highs and lows of bipolar disorder. Having bipolar disorder is not a crime, although it can make you do crazy things. You do not get bipolar disorder because you have a character flaw or a bad upbringing or have made some lousy, malevolent choice in life.
Didn't any of that matter to Judge Howard?
Even juvenile authorities didn't want the judge to go hard on this kid. They recommended lesser punishments, as little as house arrest.
The judge insisted he wanted to keep Bollenback from a life of crime. He also said, most revealingly, that the sentence would break the young man's spirit.
Bollenback was back in court last Wednesday, seeking a new trial on grounds that his lawyer was incompetent. That's where Josh Wooten comes in. It is remarkable when a politician sticks his neck out on an issue that can't benefit him. Wooten is chairman of the Citrus County Commission, and he came to court to stand up for Adam Bollenback.
Wooten attended the hearing to honor his old tie to Bollenback's mother. But he also came because, since his election campaign four years ago, he has backed the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill of Citrus County, a passionate group of people who want the mentally ill to be better understood.
They are not criminal masterminds. But some act out, and break the law, when their illness flares.
The toughest law-and-order types will tell you that. Smart police departments - the ones that don't want to shoot people who are disturbed - know so and train their officers accordingly.
Law-and-order types also say that prisons are loaded with the mentally ill, because most of the old state hospitals that once treated them are gone.
So they land behind bars. But the same law-and-order types agree that's the last place the mentally ill belong. Prisons lack the facilities to treat them. Nevertheless, prison is where they go, and when they get into trouble again, prison is where they return.
"It doesn't matter if you're the most liberal person in the world and have compassion or if you're the most conservative person in the world and vote pocketbook issues," Wooten told me. "It's better to divert these young people so they quit going through the system."
Wooten takes victories where he can. (None was forthcoming from Judge Howard, who refused Bollenback's request for a new trial.) As of last week, Wooten said, the state gave Citrus and Marion counties money to house eight mentally ill kids - that's eight in two counties - rather than send them to prison.
Wooten was also pleased that Gov. Bush signed into law a bill that could keep more of the mentally ill out of prison by ordering them into outpatient treatment. It's worth noting that the bill was this year's top priority of the Florida Sheriffs Association.
According to his mother, Bollenback is getting psychiatric drugs in prison to control his bipolar disorder. But the question remains: Why did the system have to treat him like a criminal for him to get psychiatric help?
