Here is a story by Emily Romero, a lady who also escaped Reeves’ cult. Below I will share a list of links to her vlog that she made about it, and a story she emailed me and that I copy/pasted into this blog post. She gave me permission to share this information on this blog.

Escaping Nebraska Part 1:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iEpaJtzxck8

Escaping Nebraska Part 2:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J65SLrcENPE&t=297s

Escaping Nebraska Part 3:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=miZVJrVVvcQ

Escaping Nebraska Part 4:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6G2FmJLl-0

Escaping Nebraska Part 5:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQyhuSl-ZGE&t=331s

Her story in written form:

As you read the following account I hope you will keep an open mind. There are other parts to this real life story that are not mine to share. I hope one day the full story comes out and all of Reeves victims will come forward. 
Having graduated high school I was looking to go to school, get away from home but also stay out of debt. I hadn’t really decided what I wanted to do with my life, so when I saw the Reeves family presenting their “college” at my home church during Capital Connection, I was intrigued. They offered a work scholarship where you could work at their daycare and pay for your classes with the money you earned there. 
My parents eventually agreed to let me go to college halfway across the county in Nebraska. The decision was not made lightly but looking back now, maybe it was. I was so excited to be venturing out on my own. There were a few things I was trying to put behind me and I honestly thought going to this college would give me the fresh start I was looking for. 
After settling me into my dorm room my parents had to make the long trip back home. We all cried as we said goodbye outside of the church/college building. I went back inside to the dorm area of the college and went to my room, content to collect myself and have some quiet time before I socialized with the other girls. 
Not two minutes went by before I heard a knock on my door, and I was told that unless I was getting dressed or sleeping that I was not to be in my room. I quickly apologized and sat out in the shared living room space with the other girls. For the first few weeks I struggled with learning all of the unwritten rules that I was to live and work by. Between work, school and church responsibility, I was kept very busy and not one hour was left unaccounted for most days. 
I’ll take some time now to list out all the rules I can remember.
0. No phone calls allowed unless someone else is physically present while you’re talking. 0. Your phone must be turned in to the dorm supervisor at night where she will check your phone.  0. You must give access/passwords to any and all social media accounts.  0. You must have a countenance of “joy” at all times. 0. It’s not a rule but there were cameras at every exit in the dorms and in the church so Reeves could know where we were at all times. 

Once we gave Reeves our social media passwords he sat down with his two sons and judged all of our pictures and posts.( I know this because he bragged about it in the service) The next service he called me out while preaching for showing my shoulders in one of my pictures on Facebook. He asked me what type of ungodly attention I was trying to get with wearing “clothes like that.” And then he went on to question publicly how I was raised. 
Over the course of time I was there he would imply and then outright say my family wasn’t good and that they hadn’t raised me right. He always tried his best to destroy my relationship with them. During Thanksgiving I was not allowed to call them all day and my phone wasn’t given to me until after all the church’s activities were done. It took me sobbing publicly in the auditorium for them to let me call my family. 
In the first week that I was there I received a letter from my ex boyfriend. I had specifically asked him not to contact me at all while I was there but he did anyway. The letter was pretty upsetting so I went to my room to put it away to read in detail later. My dorm supervisor, *Karen*, unbeknownst to me had went right away to go alert Reeves to a potentially “wicked” letter I had received. She came back to the dorms and demanded that I give her the letter. I told her that it was private and that I’d rather just throw it away later after I had a chance to read it in detail. 
She later went into my room and took it to Reeves. That’s really where everything went downhill. In the letter my ex boyfriend had put some pretty crazy stuff. (on purpose to get me in trouble, he knew I was going to a very conservative college) and Reeves used that letter against me for months. Referencing things in it to me and others. 
He called me into his office one time and I refused to go alone and requested that Karen go with me. It was a very strange meeting. He told me he knew I was attracted to his son and that it was “flattering” but that since I was Hispanic, that would never work out.
I had never expressed any interest in his older son, in fact I was happy for my fellow dorm mate and friend for dating him. What was most upsetting about that meeting was the fact that he had implied I was less of a person than a fully Caucasian person. In fact, when they first met my parents and I, they assumed I was my mom’s daughter from another marriage. They were shocked that my very brown Dad was in fact my biological father. I called my mom, in front of all of the girls, sobbing because he had made me feel so unworthy and frankly like some type of mutt. 
Another time all of us girls were talking about marriage and boys and one of the girls said something like “I hope *Ezra is there at the conference, he’s so nice.” And Reeves daughter said “He is, but you know that would never work.” I asked why it wouldn’t and it was then that they revealed that because Ezra was black and the other girl was White, they could never get married. Reeves is definitely supremely worried about these types of issues, if you catch my drift.There is also in existence a video of the reeves daughter dressed in black face and an Afro playing a slave in one of their church plays. Okay, I’ll just stop there but I think you can see what I’m saying. 
After having such a grueling schedule for a couple of months, I got very sick. I had bronchitis and laryngitis at the same time. Being an asthmatic it’s important that I’m careful when I get sick and am seen right away. Symptoms progress more quickly for people with asthma. I wasn’t seen by a doctor until 2 weeks of having a fever, losing my voice and also losing 15 pounds. I had to beg them to take me to the doctors. BEG, and cry and write “please take me to the doctors!” On a notepad because at that point I had lost my voice completely. 
I was taken to a doctor and Karen had to be in the room with my during the exam, I was never allowed to be alone except for sleeping or changing my clothes, remember? Once she took me back to the dorms I was giving two days off of work and told to help do things around the church instead. So essentially not resting. Reeves called my parents and made me tell them “what a good job they were doing taking care of me.” 
There were many things that I questioned while I was there but simply didn’t want to get in trouble or bring attention to myself so I didn’t bring them up. One thing that bothered me was at work we were told to go out and ask people for donations for toys for the daycare. We raised hundreds of dollars, but when I asked when we were getting new toys I was told that the money was being used for something else that the church needed. Even though the daycare clearly needed updated toys for the kids, something else took precedence and I made me feel like I had lied to the local people who donated money specifically for toys for the daycare. 
The daycare was state funded so most of the babies and kids we took care of came from low income homes. Being state funded means that the daycare was given money specifically for food and other basic needs.  However, workers would pick up Walmart receipts and blur out the items on the paper and turn those into the state and really use the money for other things. I constantly struggled with the shady things that the church and daycare were doing that I was forced to be a part of. 

While I was at the college I became friends with another girl in the dorms, her parents had been going to the church ever since Reeves first started it and they were fully immersed in his craziness. One time while the church was celebrating a holiday at the camp they own, I began to learn some things. We were all swimming and playing in the water when, *Jessica, told me that she thought Reeves older son was attractive. She went on to say that when they were younger (15-16 years old) that they used to “do things” I started to ask her what she meant by that when we were interrupted by someone. 
At the daycare we would take turns working on Saturday. It was one such Saturday that Jessica and I were scheduled to work together. While the kids were napping we started talking and she shared with me that once it was discovered what the reeves boy and her were doing that she was sent to a girls home in Tennessee for a year and then was allowed to come back to Nebraska. 
Suddenly Karen burst through the door of the daycare, just as I was about to learn exactly what happened between Jessica and Reeves son and what led to her being sent to the girls home. I firmly believe that we were under secret surveillance and that all of our conversations were being monitored without our knowledge. Karen somehow knew what we were talking about and showed up just in time to tell us to stop talking. 
The next day Jessica was gone, completely moved out of the dorms and when I asked they simply said she was working on her attitude and walk with the Lord. She was gone for almost a month, and when she came back she seemed different. We were never scheduled together again. 
Now at this point I’m speculating but looking back I’m pretty sure of what must have happened for her to be sent to Tennessee for a year. His son was never punished or sent anywhere just in case you were wondering, how fair is that? Takes two to tango, does it not? It’s funny to me because Reeves did and still does I’m sure, preach proudly about his Kids untainted virginity. It’s crazy to me the lengths he went through to perpetuate a lie. 
When Christmas break was approaching my parents wanted me to come home to spend the holidays with them, I did as well. I asked for time off and Reeves was hesitant to let me get off of work and expressed very adamantly that it would be a bad idea if I went home. He really wanted me to spend Christmas and New Years there with them and the church as a church family. When I let him know that I wanted to spend time with my actual family and visit with them, as I had not seen them in four months and had been limited in my contact with them. Once I got on the plane I was determined to never go back. I may have wasted money on a round trip ticket but it was worth it to escape that abusive situation. 

The aftermath: 
I spent some time at home reintegrating myself into normal life. I eventually got a job and got married. Life has been good so far and I’ve been blessed. I can truly say I have moved on and rarely think of Reeves and what I went through. Reeves however has had a hard time letting go. Last year a fake twitter account of me was created by Reeves to make fun of me calling me “fat, sad Emily” and tweeting some really awful things. The account was removed after a couple of days but it was pretty upsetting. Reeves had found my Facebook and took a picture of my children and put it on the fake Twitter account. He also tried to hack into my Facebook at that time as well. 
I don’t wish Reeves Ill although I do hope he is brought to justice and exposed at some point. I’m so grateful that I’ll never have to see that man again. You may have noticed that I never refer to Reeves as “pastor” and that’s because I believe no true man of God, worthy of that title, would ever do what he has done. If you disagree then bite me. 
*names have been changed for privacy 

I have a brand new IFB Cult Survivor Support Group I created on facebook.

The link is:
https://www.facebook.com/groups/384146725520673/

My intention is to give a place on facebook where both atheists and theists are equally welcome. There are ifb cult survivor support groups on facebook but as I can tell they are all Christian groups. I wanted to create an IFB Cult Survivor facebook support group that isn’t a “Christian” group, but a “Human” group. The idea behind that is that I want to promote the atmosphere of “We are here for you because we are human and you are human and we as humans should stick together”….instead of promoting an atmosphere of “I’m a Christian and I’m here to help you but sooner or later that comes at the price of imposing my beliefs on you because I don’t know how to show compassion any other way.”

Christians are just as welcome in this group as non Christians. We will have a simple rule of “if you respect my diversity then I’ll respect yours”. I’m not sure how I’m going to enforce that rule but I’ll give it a shot. Wish me luck!

Am i on some kind of vendetta against Pastor Reeves?

The answer is a resounding NO.

I’m not on some quest for revenge. I have people who are close to me and some who are close’ish that are accusing me, not in so many words, that i’m out to get Pastor Reeves. I am not.

I already spent years going down that deep, dark rabbit hole of being consumed with bitterness, hatred and anger against Pastor Reeves. But it was around 2007-2008 that i learned how to forgive and learned how to make peace with my past and move on.

there are only two times in my life that i revisited my past with Reeves: 1, after watching Dr. Jack Schaap, the biggest cult leader in the corrupted sect of the IFB get caught…that event combined with the fact that i was a grown man at that point led to me finally speaking out on an IFB cult survivor group. That action led to two other things: Me calling the north platte police department and reporting the crimes, and my story being copied and pasted by a blogger onto his own blog called Religion’s Cell. Shortly after that, i learned that his crimes were protected by statue of limitation laws. Now when i went through the long process of writing my story(this was several years ago) i ended up having to relive those traumatic events in my head and i did get very angry and bitter all over again and was angry about the statue of limitations now protecting Reeves. But after a few months i got over it and went back to living my life.

2. The second time was when i started to create my own blog last month. I decided to create my own blog originally because i wanted to have an easy way of recording what happened and share my story via social media to help encourage other cult survivors to speak out. It was also for another reason that for legal reasons i’m not at liberty to say here.

Writing and then rewriting this blog has taken a toll on me due to having to relive my experiences in order to write out everything i remember with 100% accuracy. This did cause me to hurt all over again but was able to bring myself under control in a matter of days instead of months this time. But already i am over it and back to living my life.

Anyway i’ve been accused of things by people with good intentions who are only trying to help me. They mean me no harm but i’m sick of having to re explain myself so i’m putting it all here.

Here are some facts about me to squash certain misconceptions about me:

1. Blogging about my experiences here and sharing it on social media is not an indication that i cannot move on from what happened! It takes a lot of mental and emotional strength to voluntarily revisit one of the darkest times of my past to tell my story and it takes a lot of courage to share it with the world, knowing i’m risking a law suit. I am not slandering. It is not slander if what i speak is the truth. And it is never wrong to tell the truth openly about any subject. It is dangerous perhaps, but only dangerous to Pastor Reeves and dangerous to me as i will be attacked for it, which i already have via threatening messages of a possible lawsuit by some coward hiding behind a fake name on twitter. His twitter name is manmitty.

Just because i relive a bad memory and get angry does not mean i’m chained to anger. it just means that i’m human and i have scars and i will not apologize for my scars and i will not apologize for feeling emotions. nobody is forcing you to read this blog.

2. This blog is not a door for me to close so that i can go on with my life, pretending that what happened to me at 16 in the boys home never happened. I forgive Pastor Reeves but i will never forget. It’s easy for you people who tell me to move on because you’re not the victim here. You are not the one with these scars, I AM. You are not the one who has to live with these memories, I AM.

3. I am not interested in revenge. No matter how many times you say that i am, i am not. I want justice and i want closure. I cannot get justice by having Reeves arrested but i can have justice in another way by simply exposing the truth about him. People have the right to know the truth about Pastor Reeves so they don’t get sucked into his cult and get hurt. If someone is living in your neighborhood and is a child sex offender and you are a parent, you have the right to know so you can keep your children safe. So if you have a preacher in your town who is a child abuser, you ALSO have a right to know. Just because the abuse isn’t sexual in nature does not mean it is any less serious. Let me be clear, i’m after justice not revenge.

3. I have not embellished or exaggerated anything! Everything here is true. And i don’t need anybody to believe me in order to speak the truth. I will continue to speak out.

4. This isn’t about me. This blog is bigger than me. It’s bigger than all of us. This blog is for Reeves’ victims! They need to know that they are not alone and that someone is speaking out and telling the truth about Reeves. This is also about his potential victims. May their victimization be prevented.

5. I am an atheist but my reasons for not being a believer has nothing to do with Reeves or any other corrupted ministry leaders.

From an early age i always questioned the existence of God. I’ve always questioned the story logic of an all knowing all powerful God, who creates faulty humans and then punished them eternally for being faulty. Adam and Eve, if they ever existed were not perfect before sin, otherwise they would have not been faulty enough to eat the forbidden fruit.

From 2007-2017 i did convert to Christianity and tried to have a personal relationship with God. I never could establish communication and eventually went back to being an atheist as a result. There was a time when i thought i was communicating with God but after 10 years it felt like i had a relationship with an imaginary friend and became absolutely convinced there is no God. I kept an open mind but ultimately i found no reason to continue to believe. I basically got tired of waiting for God to reveal himself and moved on with my life. 10 years is enough waiting as far as i’m concerned.

My beliefs today mostly revolve around atheism and humanism. I don’t believe in God. Instead i have faith in humanity and our potential to continue to evolve and create a better future for ourselves if enough of us work together for the common good. Unlike many religious folk, i don’t see black people, white people, men, women, and LQBTQ folk…instead i see human beings, human beings and more human beings, all with the potential to do great things and not just bad things. I believe in a dream introduced to me by Star Trek, that one day humanity will evolve out of our infancy and we put aside our petty differences and learn to coexist in peace. Yes it may never happen but this is where i put my faith.

3. I am not anti religious!

I don’t care if you are atheist, Christian, Muslim or Catholic. Just as long as you respect my diversity i will respect yours. I will never try to convert you to atheism or humanism so please don’t try to convert me to your religion.

If your god does exist and he really is all knowing, all powerful and eternal, then God DOES NOT NEED YOUR HELP! God, a supposedly infinitely powerful and immortal being does not need the help of a mere mortal to change my mind of what i believe or chose not to believe. If God exists, he is fully capable of revealing himself to me without your assistance.

And the more you try to convert me or convince me God is real, the more you demonstrate to me how powerless and non existent your God is because when you do that, you are saying with your actions that God cannot personally reach out to me and speak with me, so you must do it for Him.

4. I do not hate Pastor Reeves! I forgave him a long time ago. I would rather be at peace with him. I would rather be his friend and not his enemy. But the only thing he can do to make things right with me and all his other victims is if he publicly admits that he has done wrong and hurt a lot of people and get out of the ministry and go make an honest living for a change.

However if he doesn’t do that, it is because he does not want to lose his status, his power and lack of accountability and trade it all in for some honor. If he actually did though, I would support him 100% because as a humanist i am all about progress and people bettering themselves.

5. I am not at war with Pastor Reeves, and i’m not trying to destroy his family his church or his ministries. However if they collapse because of him getting exposed, then all that means is that it was a house build on a sand dune of lies.

For example, First Baptist Church in hammond, indiana is still going strong DESPITE Pastor Jack Schaap getting busted and thrown in jail. That’s because that church was built on honor and integrity.

If Reeves ever does get exposed for some crime and go to jail, i hope his church lives on and continues to try to make a positive difference in North Platte.

I am not anti religious. I only draw the line when either it’s being forced onto non believers or used as an excuse to hurt people.

6. I am not angry at God! I cannot be angry at someone who does not exist. And if some day i discover that God does exist i have no reason to be angry with him. After all, i cannot judge someone i do not know.

In the original part of my blog I had a whole chapter dedicated to tell the story of how I escaped. But due to legal reasons I am not going to go into detail. Also this blog isn’t a weapon I created on the internet to trash Pastor Reeves’ name. Pastor Reeves and I may still be enemies, but I have no desire to be enemies. The purpose of this blog is to tell the truth of what happened.

The other purpose of this blog is what I have to say this chapter.

If I were to have called the police as soon as I escaped the boys home, I could have Pastor Reeves brought to justice. But Pastor Reeves threatened to murder any of us boys if we ever tried to expose him and he knew where I lived in Denver and I was in fear for my life and my family. I spoke out about it to my family and to Pastor Alley but at the time nobody believed me.

It wasn’t until 11 years later, when I became an adult and I learned about Pastor Jack Schaap, another cult like Pastor in Hammond, Indiana who was way more powerful than Pastor Alley and had even less accountability became so corrupted that he ended up going to jail because he was caught cheating on his wife and having sex with an underage, 17 year old girl who he was violating since she was 13 years old.

I also learned that there were staff members in his church that knew what was going on and when they were asked why they didn’t speak up, they said that they didn’t think anybody would believe them. After all, Dr. Jack Schaap was a man of God and therefore can do no evil in the eyes of many members of his Baptist Cult.

That convicted me pretty hard because the very reason I didn’t speak up to the police about what happened when I was with Pastor Reeves, is that I didn’t think I could have made any difference, except getting myself killed.

But at this point in my life I was a grown man didn’t let people intimidate me anymore. I finally called the North Platte Police Department and had a police report filed over the phone with an investigator. After emailing an investigator my story, he looked it over and told me that even if I could prove that Pastor Reeves is guilty, there is nothing they can do because his allegid crimes are now protected by the statue of limitations.

I called just a few years too late!

After learning about other cults in the United States and reading about survivor stories I learned that this horrible mistake I made of not speaking to the police until it was too late, is one of the most common mistakes cult victims make.

If you are a cult victim, please find the courage to speak out and contact the police. If you know someone who is a victim of a cult, call the police. Never underestimate the difference that one person could make. And if you have to wait to call the police, make sure you call before the statue of limitations run out on the crimes you are aware of.

One other thing I discovered: I discovered that you can actually get counseling when it comes to recovering mentally after horrible experiences. If you are religious, you can get counseling for free through a pastor. But of course be careful. I never reccomend trusting Pastors. I personally will never trust any kind of leader of a church. Pastor Jack Schaap’s relationship with that underage girl started off with her going to him for counseling for being sexually abused. However, not trusting ministry leaders is just my personal opinion. There are probably really good pastors out there. I just haven’t ever met one.

I didn’t know that I could seek out counseling so it took me 10 long years after I got out of the boys home to heal and learn the hard way to not be consumed with bitterness and anger and hate. I had to learn that on my own. If you are a victim of a cult and have escaped, don’t make the same mistake I did. Seek counseling and make healing your top priority!

“The key to everything is discipline!” – Pastor Reeves

This was one of his favorite things to say behind the pulpit and to us boys as he beat us. But the confusing thing at the time was this guy looked like he ate the entire menu of McDonalds at the time. He was so fat when I was in the boys home that you can feel the floor shake whenever he walked passed you in a room. And now after all these years I see a picture of him on the internet where he is all skinny. I assumed it was because he succeeded at following the atkins diet that he started right before I left the boys home…turns out he had weight loss surgery. He preached that discipline is the key to everything…but in the end he couldn’t discipline himself enough to stick to a diet and exercise plan like everybody else and got weight loss surgery. Funny how that works.

“There are only two rules in my boys home: Rule#1: I’m always right. Rule#2: If you think I’m wrong, refer to Rule#1.” -Pastor Reeves

These were rules that he made us memorize and quote this to him. If we ever disagreed or had an opinion other than his, we’d immediately get punished for it.

“Don’t think! Don’t think! I do your thinking for you!” -Pastor Reeves

More times than I can count, he would give us instructions on how to do something and we would misunderstand it and not do what he said…or we did do what he said but Reeves didn’t remember that he told us to do it in that way and when he began to punish us, we would respond with, “I thought that’s what you said.” And he would respond with “Don’t think! Don’t Think! I do your thinking for you!” Pastor Reeves was the first and only pastor who actually admitted to not letting people think for themselves because he wants to do their thinking for them. He may have been different about this with members of his church, but this was how he was with us boys.

“NO MERCY FOR YOU SON!!!” -Pastor Reeves

Whenever he would have those “punishment sessions” with us where he would chew us out, insult and belittle us, beat us with a 2×6 that he affectionately called bertha, he would always get in our face and in the sheer pleasure of him making us suffer for whatever we did or he accused us of doing at the moment, he would look us in the eyes and say, “No mercy for you, son.”

“You’re family is no longer your family. You don’t have a family anymore. I am your family. You’re family refused to raise you properly so they left you here for me to do their jobs for them. I’m your family now. I’m your dad now. So forget about ever going back to you’re family. I’m the only family you’re gonna have.” -Pastor Reeves.

That is more of a paraphrase than an actual quote, but that was the message he got across to us because he had an official truth about the boys home he told the parents, then he had an unofficial truth that he told us boys. The official truth he told the parents, is that we would stay at the boys home for a year and he would rehabilitate us by making us a part of his family so we can experience having both a mother and a father in our lives that were strict and taught us discipline.

Trying to brain wash us into thinking that he is our family now was the unofficial truth he taught us boys.

“Children do not have any rights! The only right they have is to live or die!”-Pastor Reeves

I heard him say that from behind the pulpit more times than I can ever remember. It was like one of his favorite quotes whenever he preached sermons that were about raising children.

“Bertha is going to save your life!” -Pastor Reeves
He said to me many times that the reason he did time in prison when he was younger was because he was never spanked the way we boys got spanked. He justified the way he treated us as his way of keeping us from walking a path that would lead us to prison some day.

“Where’s Bertha!”-Pastor Reeves

I can’t remember what Pastor Reeves used before he started using the 2×6 paddle that he called Bertha, but I remember that our butts kept breaking paddles and finally Pastor Reeves got fed up with paddles breaking and he sent Jon Lemon and Dave King to a building that he owned where he was having us boys remodel on the inside because he was making a “barracks” for more boys to live in as he tried to expand his boys home capacity. He sent Jon and Dave to that building where there was lots of lumber and construction tools and he said, “Build me a paddle that will not break!”

Hours later, they came back with a board that was two inches thick, and six inches wide. It was 2-3 feet long. I can’t remember the exact length but I remember that it was long enough that it can be swung like a baseball bat. They used a circle saw to cut the length of the paddle, and used a grinder to carve out a handle that was long enough so he can swing with both his hands. Then there were huge holes drilled into the paddle that from what i understand made it more painful. This paddle was so brutal that the pastor instantly fell in love with it. I remember his exact words after he beat us with the paddle for the first time, “I love this paddle! I will call her Bertha!” He then sent the boys back to make another one just like it just in case it broke, then had them make two smaller ones to use on his own children that were carved out of a 2×6.

Not long after I left the boys home, the police some how found out about bertha and confiscated it from him. I don’t think they ever got the second 2×6 paddle though.

Another moment I remember well is that one time he got a BB gun. it was the kind that looked like a .22 caliber rifle and you had to pump it. He enjoyed making us bend over and shooting us with it. He also shot us in the legs and other parts of our bodies and called us cowards if we so much as acted afraid whenever he felt like he needed target practice.

I remember when I was attending a school that was a part of his church, I walked up behind him to tap him on the shoulder to get permission to use the bathroom while he was shooting his BB gun. He responded by instantly turning around and putting the end of barrel of the BB gun to my neck at gun point and pushed me through two rooms screaming at me and saying he was going to shoot me. This was his “fatherly” way of teaching me never to walk up to someone from behind while shooting a gun.

Stay tuned for Part Five: How I escaped the boy’s home

Looking back:

As a 33 year old, as I look back and think about these memories, I have come to an opinion…I’m not claiming these next words to be facts. This is only my opinion: In a world like ours(referring to all of humanity) there are so many different systems of morality that come with so many different kinds of cultures and belief systems. Because of that there are so many grey areas. However I never truly knew what evil was, until I spent some time with Pastor Reeves.

That being said, there is something I must add to my opinion about Pastor Reeves. He may be evil in my own opinion, but at the end of the day, Pastor Reeves is just as much of a human being as anyone of us. I strongly believe that it is our actions that define us.

Over the years I had to teach myself that I am no better than Pastor Reeves. That is because I’m just as much as human being as he is. That means that if I allow myself to be consumed with bitterness, anger and hate and fear, then I could transform over time into the very same kind of person Pastor Reeves is.

To anyone reading this blog who has also been victimized by Pastor Reeves or has gone through situations unrelated to Reeves where you were horribly abused and escaped somehow, you will soon learn that ‘getting out’ of that situation is the easy part. The ‘hard’ part is living your life after you ‘get out’ of that situation.

Because sooner or later, all the pain you feel for having been hurt deeply by someone will eventually turn into anger and rightly so. It’s ok to be angry. What matters is what you choose to do with that anger. You can either let it consume you and ultimately transform you into the very person or thing that hurt you….or you can use that anger to motivate yourself to become the best kind of person you can be so that you are helping others instead of hurting others. This is the ONLY way that the cycle of abuse and hate can be kept from continuing. Allowing the anger from the memories of being abused to consume you is how abused children end up becoming abusive parents.

I’m not a Christian so I’m not going to give you some lecture on forgiveness, how that you need to forgive and treat your enemies with love, etc. I got no problem with Christians or anybody who chooses to be religious in anyway, just as long as they don’t force their beliefs onto me. I’ll defend a person’s right to be a Christian just as quickly as I’ll fight for my right to be an atheist.

Instead of giving you a lecture on forgiveness I’ll just give you what I believe. There are some things that cannot be forgiven. There are some lines that cannot be uncrossed. However, whenever it is possible to make peace with people who’s actions demonstrate that they are your enemies, make peace with them. It is better to coexist peacefully than to try to destroy each other. Humanity is slowly starting to figure this out. We went from nuking each other in world war II, to having entire nations working together to give aid to other nations and refugees. That’s a big step considering our ancient history where empires took turns conquering the world and committing genocide. Some countries are still stuck in the ancient ways of hate but the fact there are countries that have evolved past that gives me hope for the future, and inspires me to not allow myself to be consumed by bitterness and hate.

Chapter Two: Out of the Frying Pan, into the Fire
When I first met Pastor Reeves it was when Pastor Alley gave me and my mom a ride all the way from Denver, Colorado to Brewster, Nebraska.
At this point in my life, I was so stressed out from dealing with dysfunction at home, the abusiveness of my Dad who was always drunk/high, my Pastor who always publicly embarrassed me whenever he could and spanking me to the point of abuse that I began to find escape by getting on a public transportation bus that stopped at a bus stop a few houses down from my home in Denver and just hanging out at Libraries, reading books, or going to a movie theater at downtown Denver’s 16th street mall. It was the only time I had any peace. And that peace became addicting. So addicting that even though I was working my first job at a furniture place, that in the mornings I began to skip work and just get on the bus and hang out at down town Denver all day, then come home really late at night without telling anybody where I was.
At one point I did this for three days in a row and came home so late at night, that nobody knew I was home, and left so early in the morning that nobody noticed that I left. So from my mom’s perspective I just ran away. From my perspective, I found peace by just staying away from everybody who kept hurting me emotionally and physically. And I took it too far.
At this point mom finally stopped spanking me and having me spanked. She stopped disciplining me because no amount or kind of discipline controlled me. I was so consumed with hate, bitterness and rage that I used my rebelliousness as a weapon to hurt my parents and to hurt Pastor Alley.
My mom was convinced and even I was convinced that I was out of control. And that’s what pushed my mom into having me placed in a Baptist run, private boys home that Pastor Alley found out about.
When I met pastor Reeves, he sat me and my mom down in his church’s school while Pastor Alley hung out with some of the school kids outside and he explained to us how the Boy’s home worked.
Reeves explained how that there was a time in his life where he was out of control and had a dysfunctional home as well. And that life led him to doing hard time in prison eventually. Reeves explained that his philosophy behind how he runs the boys home is based on an idea of his, that troubled teenagers are the result of not having enough structure and discipline at home, so he has the boys live in his house with him, his wife and his kids as one big family and him and his wife try to be the father and mother that troubled teens never had that supposedly led to them becoming such trouble makers.
His idea that if he provided the family structure and the rules and discipline the way my family should have provided that it could reverse the dysfunction that me and the other three boys in that boys home had.
The other three boys were Josh Welch, David King, and Jon Lemon. They were between the ages of 16-17.
How Pastor Reeves explained everything made perfect sense. He convinced us that this is what I needed. So much so that I told Reeves that I need to be at that boys home.

Pastor Reeves ended up being way worse to us boys than Pastor Alley ever was. The abuse that he put us through was horrific.
At first, it started out with him always talking down to us boys and belittling us. Then I began to noticed him spanking us way too much. He did the same thing to us boys that Pastor Alley did to me and always accused us of lying about something. He was also always randomly accusing us of things we were not guilty of. A lie was ten swats from his paddle. And if we were not guilty of whatever he accused us of and we tried to tell him that we were not guilty, he then falsely accused us of falsely accusing him and would give us an extra 10 swats every time we tried to tell him we were not guilty of whatever he was accusing us of. After a while, we began to play his game and whenever he randomly accused us of something we were quick to admit our guilt even though we were not guilty so we can minimize the amount of spankings we would get.
It wasn’t uncommon for me to out of nowhere to get 30-50 swats for something I didn’t even do. So we were spanked a whole lot. The rules we got were so strict it was impossible to follow them all perfectly, which led to spankings. It seemed that half the time we got spanked or punished in some way was over things we were not guilty of. And his ‘punishment sessions’ involved more than just spankings. And he had a way of making us believe every time that we got punished, whether we really deserved it or not, was our fault, God’s will and for our own good.
I will not go into detail on what he did to the other boys for legal reasons. I will leave it to the boys to speak for themselves, should I ever manage to get into contact with them and convince them to speak out about all of this.
Pastor Reeve’s ‘punishment sessions'(for the lack of a better term) started off with his accusing me, chewing me out, belittling me, insulting me, spanking me, taunting me and saying, “no mercy for you son” and telling me how he enjoys spanking me. Then he would monologue like a villain in a James Bond movie about how I’m nothing and how he is going to raise the bar on how he punishes me. He then would slap me around and kick me. He then would hit me with the paddle in the arm or punch me in the chest. Then go back to spanking me some more.
The longer I stayed there, the more intense and abusive his punishment sessions became. While hiding behind the excuse of “trying to help me lose weight”, he would make me do an exercise call ‘deep knee bends’.
Deep knee bends are a very simple exercise. You hold your arms out straight in front of you, keeping them level with your shoulders. You stand up straight and look forward. Then while holding your arms straight in front of you, you squat down as far as you can and then stand back up while keeping your back straight.
However Pastor Reeves turned this simple exercise into a way to torture me. Whenever he felt that constantly insulting, falsely accusing me, and belittling me and excessively spanking me to the point of leaving bruises were not enough, and whenever he felt slapping me around and kicking me or even occasionally hitting me in the balls wasn’t enough, he would make me do deep knee bends until I told him to stop. That doesn’t sound like torture, until you have to do them, and keep doing them for what feels like half an hour and your legs produce so much acid that your legs go numb and you begin to get extremely light headed because you are so out of breath. During a punishment session that involved deep knee bends, when I got to the point where i was beginning to lose control of my legs, I would collapse and fall to the ground and just lie there gasping for air. And when it got to that point, Reeves would scream at me and kick me while I was down until I got back up. If he didn’t kick me while I was trying to get back up, he would pull me up himself and spank me some more as punishment for stopping the exercise without him telling me to stop. There were times that I really had to take a crap in the middle of the exercises and sometimes he would let me take a bathroom break and forced me to continue to the point of crapping on myself.
If things got that bad, he would then announce to everyone in the house or in the school or anywhere he made me do this that I just crapped myself, thus adding humiliation to my torture. And this exercise would still continue on until he told me to stop.
And the whole time he would say to me over and over, “No mercy for you son!”
And this was my life when I was at the boys home. I lived every day in fear and dread. I lived every day, one day at a time, trying my best to follow the rules so I wouldn’t get beaten, spanked, humiliated, taunted, belittled, insulted and intimidated by Pastor Reeves. And even following the rules as best as I could wasn’t always enough. This was because whenever I didn’t do something to instigate a ‘punishment session’ with Pastor Reeves, he would make up one of his false accusations.
During these ‘punishment sessions’, whenever he began to monologue he would talk about how that the reason he is putting me through this is because he believes that sooner or later I’m going to snap and fight him. And I was getting to that point. But he told me that whenever I do finally break and try to fight him, then he will in his words “break me”.
His words exactly were, “When you finally break, I will break you.”
I want to be very clear about something: He was not threatening to break my bones. He was talking about breaking my will. I know this because I actually asked him once what he meant by he was going to break me and he would explain to me that part of the rehabilitation of his boys home is that he has to break my will. He often used the analogy of breaking clay in order to mold a new thing.
And keep in mind, that I have aspergers syndrome on top of all of this, so as an aspie(someone with aspergers syndrome) I would still occasionally do or say things that were inappropriate without realizing they were inappropriate until the damage is done. This got me in a lot of trouble when I was with Pastor Alley, and it got me in trouble even more when I was with Pastor Reeves.
To this day, I don’t think Pastor Reeves even knew I was autistic. By the time I went to the boys home I completely forgot that I was diagnosed with aspergers syndrome. I only remember my mom mentioning my diagnosis to me once but that was a forgotten memory by the time I was in the boys home. By the time I was in the boys home even I was convinced that my autistic behavior was the result of the dysfunctional environment I was raised in. I didn’t rediscover that I had aspergers until I was 27.
And also keep in mind that this was a time when nobody knew what to do with someone who is autistic or has aspergers and autistic behavior was often misinterpreted as misbehavior.
But since I already went through a cycle of abuse with my dad, who always justified his violence, and I already went through a cycle of abuse with Pastor Alley who always justified his violence, I was never successfully brain washed by Pastor Reeves into thinking that how I was being abused by him was all my fault, God’s will and for my own good. I understood that Pastor Reeves is an asshole and assholes by nature never take responsibility for their actions. They always blame their actions on others or on circumstances. I knew there was no reasoning with this man. So I knew what I had to do. I just had to survive, become whatever Pastor Reeves wanted me to become and one day when I get out of the boys home, I will finally be free to be whoever I wanted to be.
Because I saw through Reeves’ lies and deceptions of him justifying his verbal, emotional and physical abuse, and I understood that his agenda was to cause me to snap so he could break me, I saw this as my one chance to defy him.
The whole time I was in the boys home he put me through his punishment sessions and tried to break me but he never could. Not once during the entire time I was in the boys home did he ever catch me crying or showing any sign of breaking. He even complimented me once on how he just can seem to break me and even called me strong. Of course he still promised to break me and that it was only a matter of time but he never succeeded. That was one small victory I had over this man that makes me smile to this day.
Pastor Reeves, if you are reading this, you never broke me!
Things continued to get even worse. He spanked us so much that he kept breaking paddles and it was getting very frustrating for him. So he had two boys take some tools and some lumber and make him a paddle that will not break. Eventually a new paddle was made that never broke the whole time I was in the boys home.
This paddle was a beast. It was made out of wood, and was two inches thick, and six inches wide, with holes drilled into the paddle. I don’t remember exactly how long the paddle was but it was the longest paddle I ever saw. It was more of a board than a paddle. This paddle caused so much pain and so much damage that Pastor Reeves out of affection for the paddle began to call it Bertha.
We always knew somebody was about to get spanked whenever we heard Pastor Reeves’ voice shout, “Where’s Bertha!”
He enjoyed using that paddle so much that there were times that he made me stretch out across a bed face down so that he can swing in a downward motion. With each swat he would jump up in the air and swing down as hard as he could as he body came back down from the air just to maximize the potential this paddle had of inflicting pain on us.
I’m going to explain just how damaging this paddle could be. After getting spanked so much I was able to calculate exactly what my butt was going to be like based on how many swats was coming my way.
Five swats: My butt would be red and back to normal in an hour.
Ten swats: My butt would be red for a day
Twenty Swats: My butt would have bruises, mostly patches of green and purple. However If my butt was still healing from getting twenty swats a few days ago, my butt would be bleeding at this point.
Thirty Swats or more: My butt would be black and so bloody that I would have to take a shower just to wash the blood off.
Pastor Reeves didn’t always let me shower and as a result, blood would stick to my underwear and at the end of the day when I was getting into PJs to go to sleep, I would have to peel my underwear off of me causing bleeding to start again. It would take at least a month for my butt to recover and I always got sick for some unknown reason whenever I had to heal from this injury.
Bertha can basically do in only 30 swats what took Pastor Alley over 100 swats with his 1×4 paddle.
Pastor Reeves didn’t spank us over a bed all the time. It was only on special occasions when he was more angry that he usually got. And he seemed to be angry all the time. Because I have aspergers, I never really found out if his constant anger was the result of actual emotional problems that he had, if he was insane, or if it was just an act to put the ‘fear of Gawd’ into us boys.
…but he still never broke me!

Looking back at these experiences when I was 16 years old now that I’m 33 years old:
I don’t hate Pastor Reeves. This was another classic example when a Pastor gets too much power and has zero accountability. For the first 10 years after I got out of the boys home I was consumed with anger and bitterness. I went down that dark rabbit hole where I learned the hard way that anger and bitterness can destroy you. But as I grew up and became a man, I learned how to deal with my physical and emotional scars and I learned to forgive someone. I had to teach myself not to hate people like Pastor Reeves. I developed so much experience with bitterness and hate the first 10 years after I was out of the boys home that I learned this: Bitterness may destroy it’s own container…but hate…hate is even worse: Hate has the potential to transform you into the very person or thing that you hate.
I hated my dad for being someone who drinks too much, so I became someone who drinks to much.
I hated Pastor Reeves and other christians for thinking they are better than other people, and so I became someone who thinks he is better than religious people.
There came a point in my life where I dedicated myself to learning how to overcome hate and bitterness. I cannot tell you how to overcome those things in words but I can tell you it’s a process and overcoming the negative emotions that come with horrible memories doesn’t happen over night. And when you experience the things I experience you never truly get over it or forget it. Instead you have mental scars that you have to live with. Every once in a while those scars will get agitated and will make you feel angry bitter and hateful. And the only true form of healing you get is when you go from taking months to bring yourself under control when your scars flare up and haunt you, to taking days.
This is why I’m having to do this blog all over again because 16 years after getting out of the boys home, my scars flared up and caused me to relive the abuse all over again in my head and my blog turned into something that was hateful. I want this blog to be civilized. I want this blog to be able to help others who have been horribly abused and survive, not encourage others to hate Bill Reeves.
Also, Pastor Bill Reeves and Pastor Alley are not even the same category of preachers.
I believe that Pastor Alley is a good man. However I believe that Pastor Reeves is someone who needs to be stopped. He may have been a good man at one point of his life, but I don’t think he is a good man anymore. And the reason I know this is because when Pastor Alley began to finally see how he screwed up with me, he responded by apologizing to me and asking me for forgiveness and by not spanking anyone anymore out of fear of taking it too far again.
Pastor Reeves, on the other hand, KNEW that what he was doing was wrong. He was so aware of it, that one time when I was in the boys home, he took me to a river dam. It looked like one of those dams that are used to create electricity. I can’t remember where this dam was but it was somewhere in Nebraska. He walked me across that river dam, just him and me, and he began to tell me that he knows that one day I will get out of the boys home and one day I will want to speak out about what happened. And he threatened me! He told me that if I ever tried to expose him that he would hunt me down and kill me. And if he couldn’t get to me, he would get to my family and kill my family.
Ok, you know how sometimes when someone gets angry someone else and says they are going to kill someone but they don’t really mean it? That wasn’t what was going on here. Pastor Reeves was very calm and cool when he threatened me. And he constantly made me repeat the threat back to him so he can make sure that he was serious about killing me or my family if I ever tried to expose him whenever I got out. On that day, several times he tole me that there are so many places in Nebraska where he could kill me, bury me and nobody would ever find my body.
It was because of this that I didn’t call the police and report his crimes to the North Platte Police Department until 11 YEARS after I got out of the boys home. It took me that long to grow up and become a man and learn to not let Pastor Reeves’ threats intimidate me anymore. Even then, just to be careful I got me a weapons carry permit and took some gun safety classes, and even went to my local police department and asked a lot of questions regarding gun safety, gun laws, etc. I’ve been conceal carrying off and on ever since. I got no plans to shoot Pastor Reeves. However if he ever does come after me and my family and try to kill us, I’m prepared. I hope that day never comes. I hope that I never EVER have to use my gun in self defense. I’ve talked to police officers over the years who told me about times they had to use their guns in self defense, and even they told me that if you take someone’s life, even if it’s in self defense, you still have to live with having to take some one’s life and it is a horrible experience to live with that.

stay tuned for chapter three

Disclaimer: Forgive my bad grammar and spelling. I’m a welder, not an english scholar. And just because I’m ignorant with grammar and spelling don’t mean I’m stupid. At the time of me writing this, I make 23 dollars an hour, operating a 300,000 dollar robot and fabricate the best small tract type tractors in the world for Caterpillar. You don’t achieve something like that in life by being stupid.

Anyway, back to the chapter:

Pastor Alley is the pastor of Cornerstone Baptist Church in Denver, Colorado.

His church was not a cult. And during the time I was at that church, the IFB movement to my knowledge had not yet corrupted into a cult like culture…at least to my knowledge.
And let me clarify what I mean when I say cult and cult like. According to the Bible, a Pastor is supposed to be a leader of the flock(the specific church a pastor is a pastor of). However some churches become cult like. And by that I mean where people in the church do not try to pursue a personal relationship with God like how the Bible teaches. Instead the people of a church let the Pastor do the ‘walking with God’ for them and that mistake leads to other mistakes. The end result is that you have a Pastor who has too much power and influence over his church members and people end up believing whatever the Pastor says, instead of believing what the Bible says. You then have a horrible miss balance of power between the members of the church, the church leadership and God.
This causes many problems. One problem it causes is that the Pastor’s will becomes God’s will. Whatever the Preacher says goes. Members of a church then stop thinking for themselves and let their Pastor do their thinking for them. That’s a lot of power and influence for a Pastor to have. This creates another problem: You have a single human being(the preacher) who is left with too much power and not enough accountability. He no longer has anyone to answer to. There are no longer any consequences for his actions. The Church then corrupts from being God’s church, to being the Pastor’s church. In these situations a Pastor may say that it’s still God’s church but the actions of the church members will demonstrate that it’s really the Pastor’s church.
If the corruption of the church continues in this direction, the entire church(both the leadership and the members) begin to corrupt into a cult like structure, where the Preacher and anyone with a high enough social status can pretty much get away with anything. In many cases leaders of this kind of church or even the Pastor himself can do horrible things to people such as violent abuse, verbal abuse, sexual abuse, etc and members of the church will cover up the crimes because if the truth comes out it would destroy the church. Members of a cult like structure like this who help cover up these crimes are typically brain washed into believing that they are doing God a favor. They are brain washed into believing that they are doing the right thing.
This kind of corruption is what was going on at Cornerstone Baptist Church. It was happening on a very small level though. The corruption wasn’t that big, but it was big enough for Pastor Alley to horribly abuse me and get away with it.
I was around 5 years old when my family started going to that church. I grew up in a broken home with a crack head drunk of a father and my mother always working herself to the bone as a nurse just to keep the bills paid. Due to the domestic violence and general lack of a consistant structure at home, all the strict, high and mighty standards at Pastor Alley’s IFB(independant fundamental baptist) church gave my family a false sense of order and security…and our family fed off of that.
I ended up becoming one of the biggest trouble makers in the church while growing up going there. I was acting out because I had little to no discipline at home and what little discipline I got was inconsistant at best. My dad would shout amen on sunday, then smoke crack and drink rum on monday, then get even more drunk and either be kicked out of the house to live on the street or get himself thrown and jail by friday.
Growing up in my home was an endless cycle of my parents using me and my sister as pawns to hurt each other when they fought, and my dad getting sober, getting cleaned up and hold a job for a little while, then fall off the wagon and get drunk and high and thrown in jail or on the street again. Sooner or later he would manipulate my mom into letting him stay just one night at our place and he was living there again…then the cycle would start all over: Get cleaned up, get a job, finally have some money again, get drunk/high, get kicked out on the street or arrested, find his way back into our home and then rinse and repeat.
I grew up having no repect for authority because at home I would watch my parents behave like total ghetto trash fools, and then when I’m at church, I had no repect for authority at church because of me having no desire to be a christian, and having Christianity forced onto me. From an early age, I didn’t believe in God. I never had any reason to believe he existed.
When I say that religion was forced onto me, Pastor Alley never forced me to be a Christian. It was my parents that did that. But for some reason I believed that Pastor Alley was trying to force Christianity on me so I resisted him just as much as I resisted my parents. This caused me to become quite the rebel at his church.
On top of all of this, I have asperger’s syndrome. Keep in mind that this was the 1990’s and there wasn’t much awareness of autism in those days and many believed that a child with aspergers behaved in a non normal fashion because that child needed discipline.
Pastor Alley wasn’t knowledgable about aspergers. Nobody was in the 1990s. So he thought he could have my strange autistic behaviour that was mixed with dysfuction of living in a broken home FIXED by spanking my problems out of me. He believed that if he disciplined me enough, then I would turn out the way I should.
So that led to me getting spanked a lot. Eventually Pastor Alley started a school and I was getting expelled on a regular basis at whatever schools I was going to because of getting into fights. Pastor Alley thought that I was just a rebel and that he could fix me by having the rebelliousness spanked out of me. The reality was that I kept getting into fights at school because I was autistic and autistic kids don’t fit in very well. That leads to bullying and that led me to getting into fights with bullies and beating them up over and over again until i got expelled. When bullies bullied me around, teachers never did anything about it. But whenever I stood up for myself and fought back out of self defense, I was treated like the bad guy and punished. Pastor Alley honestly did not understand that. So he talked my parents into putting me into his baptist school that was run at his church.
His school had a demerit system and you got spanked after so many demerits. But Pastor Alley had a military background so that background influenced greatly how he led his ministries, including the school. This led to very strict rules.
I racked up a lot of demerits and as a result I earned a lot of spankings. He started off with paint sticks. I kept breaking them. Then he went to ping pong paddles and I kept breaking them. Then he moved onto what I ‘think’ was a 1×4 board that was made into a paddle. I don’t remember exactly the size. You’d have to ask Pastor Alley about that. It was too long ago for me to remember. I kept breaking those but Pastor Alley discovered that if he wrapped the 1×4 paddle in some kind of clear plastic, possibly clear plastic tape, it made the paddle seemingly indestructable. To my knowledge, he never had a broken paddle after that.
Pastor Alley for some reason always seemed the need to confront people about their problems publicly…especially during a church service. He rarely took anyone to the side to confront them about a problem he had with them. He mostly did things publicly. He ran off a lot of people from the church due to calling people out on things publicly during a church service. This didn’t help people with their problems. It ultimately humiliated them and caused them to get angry and leave. Pastor Alley embarrased me a lot in front of other people. From his perspective he was trying to teach me to live and act right but from my perspective he was trying to humiliate me and bully me, so I reponded by being the biggest pain in the neck I could be to him as a way to ‘make him pay’ for embarrasing me.
This lead to a very negative relationship between me and Pastor Alley. The more he embarrased me and disciplined me and spanked me, the more rebellious and defiant I became. What really made things get bad was that I had aspergers syndrome. When a person has aspergers syndrome, that person will very frequently do or say things that are very innapropriate and the aspie(someone with aspergers) would be clueless that what they said/did was innapropriate until the damage was already done. So my aspergers got me into a lot of trouble on top of being a rebellious and dysfuctional kid in general.
At this point, there was no abuse going on.
But eventually things began to get out of hand. One day at school, I got caught lying about something and got demerits and spankings because of it. And I deserved it. But then Pastor Alley began to assume the worst of me and began to accuse me of lying about everything. Then his attempts to spank the rebelliousness out of me began to transform into a cycle of child abuse.
Pastor Alley began to develop a habit of always assuming the worst in me and running with it. This caused him to accuse me of lying any chance he could. Lying was 10 swats from the 1×4 paddle. His wife, also began to accuse me of lying a lot to. But instead of trying to find out if I was really lying, they would assume I was lying and have me spanked. And whenever I defended myself and said I wasn’t lying and that they’re falsely accusing me, then I would get spanked again because they said I was falsely accusing them of falsely accusing me. Before I knew it I was getting spanked all the time for not even doing anything. My behavior was beginning to improve before this abuse began. But that changed when this abusive cycle became a consistant thing. I tried to tell other people and even my parents that I keep getting spanked for things I’m not guilty Nobody would believe me. That was because Pastor Alley is the man of GAWD and therefore can never be wrong, and I was just a kid.
Because church members were letting the Pastor and the church leadership do their thinking for them, people in the church supported Pastor Alley as he continuously spanked me and spanked me and spanked me for things I wasn’t even guilty of. If he just ‘thought’ I did something, then I would get spanked. And nobody could stop him because he had too much power and zero accountability.
And everyone was brain washed into believing that it was my fault, God’s will and for my own good. I was too angry at Pastor Alley for that brain washing to take ahold on me.
I believe this was the time when either the church began to become more like a cult, or I began to notice it become like a cult.
One time, the spankings got so bad that Pastor Alley had men in the church hold me down across a table and he gave me 200 swats from that 1×4. It was very common for me to get 5-30 swats at a time but this was the worst that it got. By the time Pastor Alley finished, he was out of breath and my butt was black and bloody.
It took a month for me to recover and I was out of school for a month because for some reason I got really sick and was bed ridden. I felt like I was experiencing the symptoms of the flu when I was going through the healing process.
And nobody thought there was anything wrong with this! After all it was the man of gawd who did this to me so it must have been God’s will, my fault and for my own good.
If somebody, anybody, would have called the police and the police saw what was done to me, that Pastor would have gone to jail and his school shut down. But Pastor Alley had so much power and influence over everybody at that church and even me, that nobody even thought there was anything wrong. And I was brainwashed into thinking that I was powerless to do anything about it. And since I was a kid, it never entered into my mind that escaping this cult like enviornment was just a 911 phone call away.
By the time things had gotten this bad, I became consumed with anger bitterness and rage against Pastor Alley, against my parents and against everybody else I knew who was blindly following him. As a result my behaviour got worse and worse over the years.
By the time I was 16 years old, I had gotten so out of control due to being consumed with bitterness and anger that Pastor Alley put me into a boys home for a year. That was the point in my life where I went from the frying pan into the fire. I went from being in a church that was cult like, to being in a church that literally was a cult! The cult of Pastor Bill Reeves!

LOOKING BACK AT MY RELATIONSHIP WITH PASTOR ALLEY:
In defense of Pastor Alley, what he put me through he did because he honestly thought my bad behaviour was because I had no consistant discipline at home and thought that enough discipline and correction would fix me. He was clueless about my autism. Everybody was. It was the 1990s nobody at the time had a clue on what to do with someone who had aspergers syndrome. And by the time I went to the boys home I forgot that I was diagnosed with aspergers syndrome. It wasn’t until I was 27 years old that I rediscovered that I had it and began to do research on it and a lot of things in my life began to make a lot of sense.
Pastor Alley is not a monster!
What happened between me and him was that he was a Pastor who was honestly trying to help me. He honestly thought he could change my behavior with enough swats from a paddle and enough lectures. He thought wrong. Later on in life, Pastor Alley finally began to understand how wrong he was. The more he gained experience as a Pastor, the more he realized how much he crossed the line and the more he began to realize that he abused me.
In 2007 he finally came to me and with tears, admitted to me that he screwed up and begged my forgiveness. Of course I forgave him and from then on, him and I were no longer enemies.
Pastor Alley is simply a pastor who made some horrible mistakes with me and a lot of other people over the years. And it is my opinion that he has learned from his mistakes and has become a better pastor because of it. Unfortanetly for me, the damage was already done and he couldn’t exactly take back what he did to me. I still have to live with these memories and these scars for the rest of my life. But at least I got some closure, knowing that he never spanked a kid like he did with me ever again. And as far as I know, he doesn’t even spank anyone anymore.

Stay tuned for chapter two: Out of the frying pan, into the fire.

I’m 33 years old, but when I was 16 I was in a privately run baptist boys home in Brewster, Nebraska that was run by Pastor Bill Reeves. He is now pastor of North Platte Baptist Church in North Platte, Nebraska.

This blog will tell my story about what happened, the abuse, the threats, everything that I can remember within reason.

I have sought legal advice before creating this blog because if Pastor Reeves felt so inclined, he could sue me for slander and defamation of character. I have received threatening/intimidating messages in response to a previous version of this blog from someone hiding behind a false name on twitter. They were messages like, “You better stop telling lies.” and, “I’m an attorney, and I look for cases like these. If you don’t stop you will be facing a lawsuit.”

I responded to those threats by:

1. Deleting the blog
2. Seeking legal advice
3. Creating a new blog to tell my story in such a way that I’ll be prepared for a lawsuit.
4. I also took pictures of that entire conversation and saved it to a file on my computer
5. I also took pictures of that entire person’s twitter account and saved it to a file on my computer in case that person deletes or locks their account.

When it comes to proving my story to be true, I do have one witness, someone who was working in that boys home but left after noticing some of the verbal and physical abuse. I also have other advantages that will help me in a slander or defamation case should I ever get sued that i will not mention here. After all, it is not wise for me to show all my cards. That being said, Pastor Reeves, if you are reading this blog and you want to sue me, I am prepared to fight back in court and I will win. Winning will not lead to you going to jail because your crimes committed against me are protected by statue of limitation laws. However winning will prove that I’m not lying. And by the time I win any lawsuit you get filed against me for slander or defamation, simply going through that court battle alone will succeed in helping me expose you more effectively than any blog could ever do, so I suggest you leave me alone. However I’m willing to fight you in court if I have to. I would much rather you come to me, admit what you did was wrong and ask for my forgiveness(which I would gladly give). I would rather us be at peace with one another. I would much rather you and I become friends and not be enemies anymore. I would rather you be a good pastor and not a corrupted one. But at the end of the day, regardless what you choose to do, I’m going to speak the truth about what happened.