Miranda Webb: Trauma, anarchy and perilous life on the run from Northeast Ohio to Mexico
First of a two-part story.
Miranda Webb knew danger lurked when her dog started barking inside their Acapulco rental home in February 2019.
When she peeked out a window, Webb saw four teens outside a locked gate, throwing rocks toward the house.
Webb’s boyfriend, Shane Cress, whom she met when they were students at Kent State University, immediately grabbed a Taser and a small handgun and headed outside to investigate.
She grabbed a machete, but before she could follow Cress and a friend down the driveway, she heard “pop, pop, pop.” One of the teens had opened fire.
The drug war Webb tried to leave behind in Ohio had caught up to her in Mexico.
Only this time, it wasn’t Portage County law enforcement after her.
It appeared to be a Mexican drug cartel.
What happened in the years before and since is part of Webb’s complicated journey to be free.
Free from the extended childhood trauma of her mother’s drug dealing and addiction, which for years had the family on the run from a motorcycle club and Northeast Ohio police.
Free from mainstream society, where she never felt she fit in.
And free now, at age 29, to pursue a quiet life of crocheting, selling home-brewed kombucha and flying from a circus trapeze somewhere in Mexico.
Webb — who is better known to many by her alias, Lily Forester — worries less now about drug lords than being deported back to Ohio.
She’s been a fugitive since 2015 after she and Cress skipped bail on felony charges accusing them of making hash oil from marijuana at West Branch State Park near Ravenna.
Webb, who worked to reform Ohio’s marijuana laws when she led Kent State’s Students for Sensible Drug Policy, denies the allegations but could face more than 20 years in prison if convicted.
This is the story of Webb, her search for self-determination and what she lost — and found — along the way.
About the docuseries:'The Anarchists'
It is based on more than four hours of Zoom interviews with Webb in September, along with previous interviews she’s given to others, news accounts, court records and the recently released HBO documentary series “The Anarchists,” which is partly focused on Webb’s life in Mexico.
Miranda Webb was born into the drug war
Webb was born into the drug war, she often says.
Her parents, Randal Webb and Michelle Jarvis, met because “my dad liked to buy weed and my mom liked to sell weed,” Webb said.
They didn’t stay together. Randal Webb lived in Lake County, east of Cleveland and, until she was about 8 years old, Miranda Webb lived a tumultuous life with her mother in Lorain County, west of Cleveland.
Some of Miranda Webb’s earliest memories are police officers lifting her, asleep, out of bed during overnight drug raids wherever her mom was living.
“I’d wake up and ask, ‘Where am I?’ ” Webb said. “They’d tell me I was at a police station and that my mommy’s in jail and they’d give me a stuffed animal.”
Webb also remembers her mom waking her up, saying they were going on adventure and fleeing into the night, leaving everyone they knew behind.
Webb later learned from her mother’s journals that they were running from a motorcycle gang. Jarvis, she said, had been dealing opium for the bikers and owed them money.
“They were coming to kill her and our family,” Webb said.
“Mom had two personalities,” Webb said. “Mom and ‘Red,’ her drug-dealing name.” “Red” was a reference to Jarvis’ long, naturally red hair.
Jarvis, who had five children, spent about seven years of Webb’s childhood on the run.
By the time she was 8, Webb was sick, losing her teeth and diagnosed as malnourished. When Webb asked Jarvis if she could live with her dad, Jarvis considered it for a while, then crushed up a pill, snorted it and told Webb she could go.
Webb’s mom got clean for a while and by 2010 had moved to Medina County, where she lived with two young sons in a house on state Route 18 between Montrose and Medina.
Just before Christmas that year, Jarvis ran out of the house and onto the busy highway during morning rush hour, saying she was being chased by demons.
Jarvis beckoned her boys to follow her. They didn’t, but watched as one car hit their mother, then a second before Jarvis stumbled into the path of an oncoming semitractor trailer. The Ohio State Highway Patrol said Jarvis died later that day at Medina Hospital. She was 42.
An autopsy revealed Jarvis had morphine, oxycodone and tramadol in her system, Webb said.
“I think she just gave up,” Webb said.
Webb was 16 when Jarvis died and everyone started drawing parallels with her mother, comparing how they looked — Webb had long, strawberry-blond hair — and acted.
Webb said she loved her mother, but never intended to follow her path into addiction or hard drugs.
Kent State University, Webb thought, was her way out.
Ron Paul, marijuana and sparks
Webb paused midsentence the first time she saw Shane Cress.
It was around January 2012. They were both freshmen at Kent State, and Webb was leading a Students for Sensible Drug Policy meeting.
“Nice hat,” Webb told Cress, who was hiding his budding dreadlocks under a Ron Paul cap.
Webb and Cress were fans of Paul, a former U.S. congressman who ran for U.S. president as a Libertarian and as a Republican. Among other things, Paul was critical of U.S. fiscal policy, the war on drugs and, after the 9/11 attacks, the war on terror.
Later in the meeting, as the students were introducing themselves, Cress said he had just been released from prison and was a victim in the drug war.
“That just like hooked me,” said Webb, who also considered herself a victim of the drug war.
Webb opposed any drugs that could lead to the kind of addiction that ruined her mother’s life. But she initially enrolled at Kent State to study botany because she wanted to learn how to grow marijuana.
Cress, it turned out, was years ahead of her.
The first week they started dating, he took her to his off-campus rental house. Outside, there was a huge garden.
“That was his cover — a hippie growing vegetables,” she said.
But inside, hidden in the basement, were cannabis plants growing in tents.
The plants weren’t doing that well, Webb said, but Cress said he could teach her how to grow.
Webb didn’t know it then, but the two had something else in common: Cress’ dad also died a violent death in Medina County.
Steven Cress, who had a bipolar disorder, shot and killed himself in 1992 after police burst into a room while he was threatening suicide, his family said.
He died three days before Shane Cress’ first birthday.
By the time Shane Cress was 2½ years old, he began showing some of the same behaviors as his father, his mother, Judy Hlavac, said on “The Anarchists.”
When he was 5, she put an alarm on Cress’ bedroom door after he began nighttime rages, destroying things in the house as others slept.
Cress was soon diagnosed with a bipolar disorder, like his father, and as he grew older, he turned to marijuana for comfort.
At 17, he followed a girl to Oklahoma and was arrested after a landlord discovered Cress was growing weed in a closet.
A judge told Cress he could go to prison for life or go to a boot camp and then leave Oklahoma. Cress chose the second option.
At boot camp, officials shaved his head.
Cress “didn’t think they had a right to do that,” Hlavac said in the HBO documentary. “It changed him. He started becoming very anti-government.”
A steep hill at Kent State, a fall and a rescue
A couple of weeks after Webb and Cress started dating, Webb tested out the new Rollerblades her dad bought her for her birthday.
She was skating between her Kent dorm room at Olson Hall and a convenience store when she underestimated how steep a hill was.
Webb crashed outside the psychology building and broke her jaw in three places.
Doctors wired her mouth shut for six weeks, and Cress made her smoothies for a week and took care of her “weed needs” to manage jaw pain.
Cress believed marijuana could help many ailments. In high school, he developed a special strain to help a friend who was shot in the eye with a BB gun after prescription medicine didn’t help him.
He was also teaching Webb about Libertarianism, the political idea that the state should stay out of the private market and people’s private lives.
“It’s not actually that radical to believe that people should be free,” Cress told Kent Wired in 2012 after taking over as president of the Kent Student Liberty Alliance. “At the end of the day, the government is just a big gun that we use to point at each other, and that’s why most of us don’t like politics. Because it’s just a game to control the gun.”
But being free, when it came to marijuana, wasn’t easy.
When Cress’ Kent landlord discovered marijuana growing in the basement, he gave Cress five days to move out, Webb said.
Cress and Webb moved the operation to a friend’s house overlooking the former tire factories in Akron’s Goodyear Heights neighborhood.
In the coming months, after about 18 months of college, they both decided college wasn’t for them, and they decided to live their political philosophy full time by being self-sufficient and going off grid, disconnected from running water and electricity.
In the winter of 2014, a friend hooked them up with a house on the east side of Cleveland.
Instead of overlooking old rubber factories, this house off Pershing Avenue overlooked an industrial valley of steel mills.
Many of the surrounding houses had been abandoned or torn down years ago as Cleveland shed blue-collar union jobs.
Webb and Cress spent what money they had on solar panels and a generator. They heated the house with a wood stove and gathered rainwater from the roof to cook and drink.
When spring came, they built a garden, planting seeds in moldy bales of hay a farmer didn’t want.
Webb said the garden thrived, with a dozen types of tomatoes, cucumbers, kohlrabi, beans, corn and any other vegetable that would grow in Northeast Ohio.
At the same time, Cress took a job building stages at Jacobs Pavilion in The Flats to bring in extra money.
“Locals thought we were crazy,” Webb said.
But things were going fairly well, she said, until the house was condemned.
Webb and Cress were still committed to living off the grid, but wondered if it might be easier if they joined a larger community instead of going it alone.
In January 2015, they moved out of the Cleveland house, which has since been torn down, and made plans to move to Detroit’s Fireweed Universe City, where artists, anarchists and others had reclaimed a block of abandoned houses in a particularly rough section of that city near 7 Mile Road.
Webb and Cress picked a vacant house well-suited for solar panels and a garden plot and returned to Northeast Ohio a couple of weeks later to pack up the rest of their stuff at a relative’s house in Portage County.
‘My car was like the Mary Poppins of weed’
“Whoa, look who we have here,” a Portage County sheriff’s deputy said when he saw Webb and Cress at West Branch State Park near Ravenna in the summer of 2015, Webb said.
Webb said she recognized the deputy from their Students of Sensible Drug Policy meetings in Kent, where he was apparently working under cover.
No one trusted him, Webb said, because he always said he was trying to launch a similar student group at the University of Akron, but it never materialized. The Portage County Drug Task Force did not respond to messages.
Webb explained to him and two other officers that she and Cross were on their way back to Fireweed in Detroit when they stopped at an empty house at the park to let out their dog.
Webb thinks she might have escaped with a ticket for trespassing that day if Cress wasn’t so cocky, filming everything, including the search of her car.
“My car was like the Mary Poppins of weed,” Webb said. “But instead of a bag, it was a car and they just kept pulling out thing after thing. My bongs and my pipes and a case of butane and some weed that had already been blown,” meaning the marijuana had already been drained of its THC.
Webb said she tried to persuade officers to let them go on their way, explaining that they were headed back to Fireweed where they intended to form a legal marijuana business under Michigan state law.
But deputies said the couple was using butane to manufacturing hash oil, a concentrated form of marijuana often referred to as “dabs.”
They held Webb and Cress in the Portage County Jail, and a grand jury in August 2015 indicted each of them on several felony charges, including the illegal manufacturing of drugs and trafficking in marijuana.
Cress’ family bailed them out and tried to persuade them to stay.
But Webb and Cress decided to run.
They first headed back to Fireweed, where they knew they could find work. When that ended, a relative convinced them to head to Oregon, where she said they could make a few thousand dollars doing trim work during the marijuana harvest.
They thought that would be enough to pay their way into Mexico, where they hoped they’d be safe from Portage County authorities.
Webb and Cress found a ride-sharing service to Oregon on Craig’s List.
They arrived in Oregon just before Halloween 2015 and discovered it was the end of the cannabis growing season.
Webb and Cress found a little work, but were paid in weed, not cash, which had little worth in an area saturated with marijuana, Webb said.
Many people there went by aliases, and that’s where Webb was reborn Lily Forester. Cress was already calling himself John Galt, the name of a character in Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged,” and a hero for many Libertarians.
Some of Cress’ family sent them $700 to help, and they used it to buy an old, canary-yellow pickup truck and started making their way toward Mexico, panhandling for gas money along the way.
For months, they had been watching videos of Canadian entrepreneur Jeff Berwick, whose website — DollarVigilante.com — describes him as an anarcho-capitalist and "freedom fighter against mankind's two biggest enemies, the State and the Central Banks."
Earlier that year, Berwick founded something he called Anarachapulco, an annual gathering of anarchists from around the world in Acapulco, which was the focus of "The Anarchists."
Webb and Cress were intrigued. Webb emailed Berwick and told them they were heading to Anarchapulco, but had no money and no passports to cross the border into Mexico.
Bienvenidos
The lines of cars and trucks heading from the U.S. into Tijuana on Feb. 5, 2016, seemed to never end.
When Webb and Cress finally reached a screening point, an official waved them to the side.
“It was terrifying and one of the most exhilarating moments of my life,” Webb said.
They were sure the border officials would screen them and discover they were on the run.
But all they saw in front of them was a big sign that said “Bienvenidos.”
“What does that say?” Cress asked Webb.
“I recognized that word but I didn’t know what it was,” Webb said.
Bienvenidos means “welcome” in Spanish.
“We kept driving and within 10 to 15 seconds, we were in the thick of Tijuana,” Webb said.
Tijuana is nearly 2,000 miles from Acapulco.
“We didn’t realize how big Mexico was until we crossed the border,” Webb said.
They decided to take Federal Highway 200, an often bumpy and sometimes dangerous road along the coast, because they didn’t have money to pay the tolls for the direct route to Acapulco.
When they found an internet connection, they reached out to a friend who met them and traveled with them the rest of the way, camping in caves or in isolated spots.
The goal was to reach Acapulco by Feb. 18 for Anarchapulco.
The trio rolled into Acapulco four days early, on Valentine’s Day, Webb said.
They found an apartment near the beach for about $50 a month.
But while they were on the beach, Cress noticed houses up on a hill, overlooking the city and the sea.
“He pointed and said, 'That’s where I want to live,’ ” Webb said.
Are there anarchists at Anarchapulco?
Anarchapulco wasn’t what Webb expected.
She had hoped to meet more people like her and Cress, dedicated to living off grid and tax free.
Instead, the schedule was packed with seminars on entrepreneurship, buying gold and silver and cryptocurrency.
Ron Paul — the man, whose ideas had unintentionally brought Webb and Cress together — was a speaker, but so, too, was Milo Yiannapoulos, a Donald Trump supporter who has been repeatedly connected to white nationalists.
Most of the people who attended seemed to be weekend anarchists — looking for ways to escape everything from taxation and public schools to laws reining in personal freedom, like recreational drug use.
But few were living their philosophies daily like Webb and Cress.
“It turned out we were some of the most anarchist people there,” Webb said.
After Anarchapulco, Webb and Cress headed into the surrounding hills looking for a house to rent. They found one for about $400 a month in Vista Hermosa overlooking the water where sunsets paint the resort city pink.
“The vibe we got was that a lot of poor people lived there,” Webb said. “But when we moved in, they didn’t tell us it had a reputation for being dangerous.”
One day, while exploring the neighborhood they found a cemetery and noticed something unnerving: Gravestones showed entire families had died on the same day.
Men, women and children were gunned down, Webb said, as part of a drug cartel’s “cleanup” in a fight over heroin.
By then, they were deeply ensconced at their rental, which was working as a mini farm.
There were growing fruits, vegetables and marijuana on terraces.
And they had about 100 chickens, 25 ducks, 30 quail and a few rabbits.
Webb sold produce and eggs as one stream of money.
She also made and sold handblown glass bongs and kombucha, blogged for money and held weekly “meat-ups” where she had a pop-up restaurant serving only meat.
The operation became so big, a fellow anarchist they met in Acapulco moved in to help.
That, Webb said, turned out to be a mistake.
Paul Propert, a U.S. Army veteran from Pennsylvania, openly struggled with post-traumatic stress disorder and drug abuse and had been asked to leave other anarchists’ homes.
That year, Webb and Cress were working on a spinoff to Anarcapulco.
They called it Anarchaforko, or “The Fork.”
It aimed to be a low-key extension of Anarchapulco, where attendees could make their own experiences by buying or selling products and services, from yoga classes and spiritual healing to T-shirts and henna tattoos.
While Webb and Cress worked to get The Fork off the ground, their roommate, Propert, was setting up a business of his own: Paul’s Fiesta Supplies.
Many who came to Anarchapulco liked to party, and Mexicans had been supplying illicit party drugs through the cartels.
Propert planned to take over that business, Webb said, adding that she and Cress weren’t involved.
The Mexican cartels didn’t care much about the people who grew and sold weed, Webb said.
But everyone knew to stay away from cocaine, meth and heroin, she said. Trying to sell any of those things would get you killed.
Nevertheless, Propert printed up flyers for Paul’s Fiesta Supplies and set up an open drug market inside a hotel room on a top floor at a swank resort where Anarchapulco was held.
Webb said she and Cress visited him there and knew it was a problem, especially because Propert was letting people use the drugs in the same room instead of making them go off site.
“That’s drug dealing 101,” Webb said.
Paul’s Fiesta Supplies soon caught the attention of hotel security and, apparently, the cartels.
Mexicans approached Anarchapulco’s managers and told him gringos were selling in the hotel and there would be trouble, according to “The Anarchists.”
The leaders of Anarchapulco told Propert to stop dealing and Webb and Cress kicked him out of their home.
“If I wanted to have drug addicts in my life, I would have stayed with my family,” Webb said.
Propert wasn’t happy and began posting social media threats, mostly aimed at Cress.
But that wasn’t the only problem.
Webb and Cress had broken up at least dozen times since they met, Webb said.
“It was either it’s you and me against the world … or I (expletive) hate you,” Webb said.
By mid-2018, she said, they were fighting all the time.
Webb didn’t look well. Photographs and videos of that time show she is sickly thin (she said she had 0% body fat). Tiny scabs dotted her face, and her strawberry-blond hair had grown into long dreadlocks that had been entirely bleached by the sun.
As 2019 neared, Webb said she began moving some of her things into a small home she had rented nearby, intending to leave Cress.
At the same time, Propert’s threats were escalating. He was trying to shift the blame of Paul’s Fiesta Supplies onto Cress and Webb, so the cartels would target them instead of him, Webb said.
Around Christmas, Propert shared the coordinates of their house with drug cartels, Webb said. He also provided them with a hand-drawn map with how to break in through their locked gate.
But nothing happened, at least not right away.
Read Part 2 of this story:‘Somebody please come’: Northeast Ohio fugitive Miranda Webb runs for her life
Beacon Journal reporter Amanda Garrett can be reached at agarrett@thebeaconjournal.com. Follow her on Twitter @agarrettABJ
This article originally appeared on Akron Beacon Journal: Miranda Webb, aka Lily Forester: Life on the run from Ohio to Mexico
