Parents are locked up and desperate

It happens everyday.  It can happen to you.

Third in a six-part series
Chapter 1: The allegations
Chapter 2: The investigation

Chapter 3: Incarceration

Between the jail food, the constant pacing and a gnawing anxiety, Julian Wendrow would lose 30 pounds in 80 days in the Oakland County Jail.


But he feared he was losing much more.

He was separated from his wife, his son and his daughter in winter 2008. The family had been scattered by a criminal case in which he stood accused of raping his teenage daughter, who cannot speak.

His daughter, who thrives on routine, was surrounded by strangers at a group home in Detroit.

His son was at a juvenile detention facility in Pontiac, housed with young criminals.

And his wife, Thal Wendrow, was at her mother's home in West Bloomfield, under house arrest.

He couldn't talk to any of them.

In his jail cell, he had plenty of time to think, to speculate, to wonder.

"This wreaks havoc with one's mind," he said.

In fall 2007, Julian Wendrow was active in the Arc Michigan, an organization to help developmentally and intellectually challenged people. He has a teaching degree from Michigan State University.

Thal Wendrow was a research attorney for the Oakland County Circuit Court and sat on the local chapter of the Autism Society of America.

They have two children -- a severely autistic and mute daughter who was 14, and a son, then 13, who has Asperger's syndrome, a milder form of autism characterized by difficulties with social interaction.

They lived a mostly quiet life in West Bloomfield, attending weekly services at their synagogue and spending their evenings and weekends taking their daughter to track events and their son to swim meets.

Neither parent had ever been suspected of a crime, much less arrested.

Now they were branded child molesters, facing dozens of years in prison as a result of allegations their daughter typed with the help of a school aide, using a debunked method called facilitated communication.

Thal Wendrow knew the criminal justice system well, at least from the court end. But neither she nor her husband was prepared for the reality of life in jail.

Embarrassing ordeal

Thal Wendrow, then 44, was stunned by her feelings of helplessness. The smallest things upset her.

She'd been arrested so quickly that she hadn't had time to put on a bra and found herself at a court appearance braless. "I couldn't believe it was happening," she said.

The charges were felonies: child abuse, for supposedly failing to protect her daughter, and witness intimidation because prosecutors insisted she was pressuring the girl to stop reporting the abuse. The charge against her husband, accused of repeatedly sexually assaulting their daughter, was even more serious: third-degree criminal sexual conduct.

"Humiliation doesn't even begin to express the feeling of standing in a courtroom handcuffed," Julian Wendrow said.

At the urging of prosecutors, he was denied bond. His wife was given a $2-million cash bond -- far beyond what the family could scrape up.

They were taken to the Oakland County Jail to join more than 1,200 other inmates.

Thal Wendrow had trouble stomaching jail food, prepared by a food-service contractor for Oakland County at a cost to the county of 91.5 cents per meal.

"It was pretty degrading," she said. "I can pretty much eat anything, but the bologna-cheese sandwiches were really rough."

Worse than the food was the constant worry. "My biggest fear was that, once it was all straightened out, and the truth came out, that the kids would still be gone, in foster care, that we couldn't get them back," she said.

Her only fond memory of jail was a church group that visited to drop off Bibles and sweets for the prisoners because it was the holidays. Thal Wendrow is Jewish, but she appreciated the gesture.

She was released on personal bond five days after being jailed but was ordered to wear an electronic tether that kept her at her mother's house and cost her $365 a month.

Life in jail

Julian Wendrow, then 52, arrived in jail on a Wednesday evening -- Dec. 5, 2007 -- and spent his first three nights in a holding tank where prisoners are kept before processing. There were no beds, so he slept on the floor with two blankets.

He arrived without socks; it would take days to get a pair to help keep his feet warm. And accustomed to his quiet home, he struggled with the constant jailhouse chaos.

"The lights are always on, and people are coming in and out," he said.

That Saturday night, Wendrow was moved to a 10-man cell. On Sunday, his defense attorney, Jerome Sabbota, came to visit. Sabbota requested that Wendrow be moved out of the general jail population because he was charged with assaulting a child, putting him at risk of being assaulted by fellow inmates. Two hours later, Wendrow was transferred to another 10-man cell, with others charged with sex crimes.

"The worst part was not knowing what was happening to my children," he said. "I was looking at 75 years in prison, I'm innocent, and these people are trying to destroy my family."

Unlike his wife, who tends to be reserved and reticent, Julian Wendrow carries an abrupt manner about him, accentuated by traces of an accent from his childhood in South Africa. A tall, burly man, he's often gruff.

Immediately, he had trouble with his new and mostly much-younger cellmates.

On the first day in his new cell, he had an altercation with a younger inmate who he said called him "an old, bald Jew."

Wendrow admonished him. "I said, 'I know everybody talks smack in here and people say things, but lay off my religion because that's just not on.' "

He reported the insult to a deputy, and the inmate retaliated by spitting on him, according to court records.

Wendrow was moved to a safer one-man cell, where he would spend the next 74 days.

He spent his days pacing back and forth, for four to eight hours every day. He did push-ups to break the monotony.

For one hour each day, he was allowed out. He spent 30 minutes of that time pacing the 57-foot walkway directly outside his cell.

He showered and washed out his underwear and socks.

Then it was time to return to the cell.

In addition to pacing -- he later calculated that he walked 4 to 10 miles a day -- he passed time reading.

A library cart brought books -- he read the works of author Daniel Silva and the Hebrew Siddur -- and friendly deputies allowed him to check out more than one at a time.


Still, he had trouble with the concept of incarceration. During one of his shower breaks, he was disgusted by mold growing on the bottom of a mat on the shower floor. He complained to a deputy and asked for chemicals to clean it, but said the deputy snapped, "You're in (expletive) jail, man."

Another deputy had the shower scrubbed.

Wendrow also complained about the food, which he said was often burned or had melted packaging. The jail provided him with kosher food, but he lost 30 pounds while he was incarcerated.

Scattered family

The allegations that surfaced on Nov. 27, 2007, scattered the tight-knit family.

With her husband in jail, Thal Wendrow spent her days under house arrest at her mother's home.

Their daughter was placed in foster care at the Denby Center, a residential treatment facility for emotionally disturbed children, run by the Salvation Army in northwest Detroit, 17 miles away.

Their 13-year-old son was placed at Pontiac Children's Services, a residential home for delinquent teenage boys. He later said in a deposition that he was exposed to pornography and marijuana use by some of the other residents there.

The Wendrows, married 21 years, were forbidden from having any contact. When they found themselves in the same courtroom after spending seven weeks apart -- he in his orange jail garb and she wearing her electronic tether -- they were careful not to look at each other.

Making eye contact, they feared, might violate the court order.