Teen's turnaround gives family a cause
By Bill Sanders
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 09/20/07
John Brocard is sitting in his den, reading his Bible and waiting for the kidnappers.
It's 2:45 a.m. on a school night. He left the garage door open and the downstairs lights on, just as he agreed he would.
His wife and three kids are tucked in their beds.
By time the kidnappers walk in, John is resigned to what is about to happen.
He's crying as he approaches the men who will take his 16-year-old son. Yes, he tells them. He'll keep his wife, Fair Brocard, out of the way.
With the two kidnappers following, John walks upstairs, opens Bubba's bedroom door and flips the light switch.
"These men are here to take you," John tells his son. "Go with them."
One of the kidnappers tells Bubba that he's a former Golden Gloves boxing champion and will restrain him if needed.
Bubba, bleary-eyed, knows fighting would be fruitless. So he surrenders, both physically and emotionally.
He throws on a pair of pants and a shirt. No time for toiletries or a change of clothes.
The two men get Bubba into their car and drive to the airport, where they fly him 1,000 miles from home.
By the time Bubba goes to sleep again, he's in Loa, Utah, in a place where, at once, the earth's natural beauty beckons and its rugged terrain forewarns.
It's been almost 10 years since the scene played out in the Brocards' home in east Cobb County.
That night, May 12, 1998, changed forever not only Bubba and his parents, but eventually, the lives of hundreds of other families whom the Brocards have counseled because of what they went through with Bubba. Even so, it's still a hard story for them to recount.
Imagine being so desperate to save your teenager that you arrange a middle-of-the-night kidnapping at your home.
Bubba had become a menace. He punched holes in walls during outbursts of rage. He got drunk and belligerent one day, high and aloof the next.
"He was totally out of control," John Brocard said. "He was using marijuana, was drinking alcohol, lying, stealing and manipulating us. He would verbally abuse me and cuss at me in front of my wife and challenge me to fight.
"His constant outbursts of anger and rage scared his older sister and younger brother to the point they were afraid to be around him. His mood affected our whole household and our marriage."
The ensuing weeks weren't easy. Bubba was at a program called the Aspen Achievement Academy. He was angry at first. Ultimately, he accepted it.
Bubba spent every day hiking and camping, every night sleeping under the stars. Not once during those eight weeks was he able to bathe in a real shower or put on deodorant. For the first couple of weeks, he talked with no one back home. He was constantly counseled about how to communicate without fighting.
"The first few days, I was in shock," Bubba Brocard, now 25, recalled recently.
"When my thoughts came to me, I realized I was there for a reason. It was kind of a relief for me. Dad saw it in my eyes as I was leaving, but I couldn't sense that then. But getting away from everything, all the kids I was running around with, and taking a step back to look what I was doing is what I needed."
After eight weeks, Bubba came home. The gamble, John Brocard found, had paid off.
'We were broken'
Bubba Brocard went on to graduate from Wheeler High School, then Kennesaw State University and is now a salesman with a company that sells and rents uniforms. But the Brocards' risk, it turned out, didn't just change Bubba. It had changed his parents.
John and Fair Brocard soon learned they couldn't go on as if nothing had happened. Gradually, John realized work as a corporate lawyer was unfulfilling. Fair's job in the Johnson Ferry Baptist Church children's ministry no longer seemed as important as helping parents in need.
It seemed everywhere they looked, the Brocards saw families being ripped apart. Every time, it opened a painful sore.
They decided to embrace the hurt.
John Brocard would represent troubled juveniles; Fair would counsel their parents and invite them to participate in a Bible-based support group. It started with getting involved in the lives of friends they knew that were going through hard times with their children. In time, it became the nonprofit organization Prodigal Child Ministries.
"We've seen our child hit bottom," John Brocard said recently. "We're about putting lives back together now. We want to reach out to help kids in crisis, but to also teach the parents that it's not always their fault. They can be freed from that. They need to be freed from that.
"We were broken people. None of this was because we were strong. It was God's grace seeing us through it."
From hostage to escort
To many families, the Brocards have been a godsend. Ask Gary and Ella Givens.
Their story was similar enough to the Brocards, a stable family with a child who was brought up to know the difference between right and wrong, yet somehow chose wrong.
Lindsey Givens became a cocaine addict shortly after graduating from Georgia Tech, her parents said.
The Givenses, who live in Acworth, didn't know the Brocards. In a matter of days, they learned of them, got to know them, then trusted their lives to what they had to say.
"We knew very little about programs, where to go, what to do, etc., but a friend who had a daughter with similar issues told us about the Brocards and gave us their number," Gary Givens said recently. "This was on a Thursday morning. Ella [Givens] immediately contacted them and asked a hundred questions. They were so helpful and patient, providing much guidance, concern and love even though we had never met them.
"They recommended a place in Utah, gave us contacts and numbers and by the grace of God, on Saturday morning, Lindsey and I were on a flight and the path to recovery."
Lindsey wasn't taken against her will. Most who go there aren't. But once there, her experience was very similar to Bubba's, which was as hard on Mom and Dad as it was on Lindsey.
"The next several months were some of the hardest we ever had to endure in our lives. So many things happening, very little contact with Lindsey, by design. During that time, John and Fair were always there to answer our questions, comforting us and giving us hope and giving us sound advice to cope with this period. We set up a group of prayer warriors who we would update continually and ask for their prayers, and the Brocards were always there when we needed them."
Fair Brocard did some quick math —- 20 families a year, times 8 years —- for the number they've had in their groups.
"But there's many more that we've not had in a group, but counseled and given out information on various camps to," she said.
Like Bubba, Lindsey has come out the other side, clean, sober and stronger than ever.
A few years ago, before Bubba Brocard went into sales, he worked for the Center for Safe Youth, a program similar to the Utah one he attended. He was an "escort."
Escort sounds so much friendlier than kidnapper. But kidnapping is the term John and Fair Brocard still use.
Bubba Brocard admits it's more like a kidnapping than a guided tour.
"It was a reward and a nightmare at same time to be working with them," Bubba said. "I knew how I felt when I was escorted, and it wasn't good. I felt a lot of kids that I transported felt same way. They'd say: 'I can't believe you do this as a job.' They'd lash out at me pretty good. But I was there because I believed in the program and knew it could help these kids, and that's what I'd tell them."
Bubba Brocard speaks to some of the adults and kids that his parents work with and has decided that sharing his story is more beneficial than hiding it.
What he does, what his parents do, it all seems natural to Bubba now.
"If you'd have asked me 10 years ago, could I see myself sharing this story, or being an escort, or seeing my parents change career course, I never would have guessed it."
