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Sharyn Hakken recalls husband's threats that she says led to kidnapping

 
Sheryl Hakken was sentenced to seven years in prison, with credit for time served, for kidnapping her sons with her husband, Joshua Hakken, and saling to Cuba with them in 2013. [JAMES BORCHUCK   |   Times
Sheryl Hakken was sentenced to seven years in prison, with credit for time served, for kidnapping her sons with her husband, Joshua Hakken, and saling to Cuba with them in 2013. [JAMES BORCHUCK | Times
Published Oct. 11, 2014

TAMPA — A day after she was sentenced to prison for helping kidnap her children and sailing to Cuba, Sharyn Hakken said she went along with her husband's scheme for fear he would kill her parents as he had repeatedly threatened.

She was to stab her father while he was tinkering with his record collection in the garage, she said her husband, Joshua Hakken, instructed her. He would take care of her mother.

"If you get in my way, I'll kill you," she recalled him saying. "I'll do it with or without you."

During a wide-ranging, 90-minute interview Friday with the Tampa Bay Times at the Falkenburg Road Jail, Sharyn, 36, described how she talked her husband out of murdering her parents by eventually agreeing to accompany him, their two sons and their aged rat terrier on a 300-mile voyage to Cuba in the spring of 2013.

By that time, the good-natured, college-educated engineer she had met in college and married in 2004 was gone, she said, replaced by a paranoid, delusional husband who wanted to control her every move. Worse yet, he had deeply influenced her thinking, convincing her that CIA agents were tracking them and intended to harm their children.

On the lam from law enforcement in Louisiana, where Joshua had been arrested on drug charges and their children had been placed in foster care, the Hakkens spent much of 2012 hopscotching around the western United States and Florida in their truck.

They camped in Ocala National Forest and slept in motels. Losing custody of their young sons had confirmed all of their suspicions about the government's intentions, and they grew desperate.

Joshua, also 36, began telling Sharyn that her parents were evil and she had to kill them, she recalled. She became severely depressed and talked openly of suicide. She hoped the world would end in December 2012, martial law would take over and she would be able to reclaim her children without fear.

But if this did not come to pass, she planned to overdose on Valium saved from her husband's vasectomy "and die peacefully in the woods," she said.

January came, the world did not end, and Joshua told her to forget about killing herself.

"Wait, I have an idea! We're going to get a sailboat," he said.

"I kind of thought I was going to be able to convince him somewhere along the way that it wasn't going to work," she said. "Starting off with getting a sailboat. By golly, he got a sailboat."

Characterized by her attorney as a supporting actor in her husband's risky action-adventure, Sharyn allowed that she and Joshua made plans together. She went with him to buy the sailboat and stocked it with food, water, and Dramamine for motion sickness.

She drove him to her parents' house near Tampa, where he bound her mother with zip ties and abducted their sons, then ages 2 and 4 and living with their grandparents. Anything less than full compliance on her part would have led to violence, she believed. She assumed they would be caught before they made it to Cuba.

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"I went along with it, absolutely, I had free will. I could have stopped it at any time, and that's why I took responsibility for it and plead guilty," she said.

On Thursday, a judge sentenced her to seven years in prison. With time served, she could be released in five. Joshua was given the maximum 15-year sentence. Standing before the judge, he announced that he was a prophet sent by God to warn people that the end of the world was coming.

Conciliatory by nature, Sharyn often went along with her husband's plans. She could talk him out of his most extreme ideas, such as shooting his way into their sons' foster home in Louisiana, often by dangling the threat that he would act alone.

But she was also highly suggestible and, she now believes, mentally ill — possibly bipolar. When her husband came home from work in 2011 regurgitating conspiracy theories he heard on the Alex Jones radio show, she began believing them, too. To this day, she remains open to the "potential" that the Sept. 11 terror attacks were an inside job, and that the U.S. government is dropping poison from airplanes.

When Joshua told her he "might" be a prophet, she didn't contradict him. When he told her he had an alien brother, she went with him to see the spot, high in the Colorado mountains, where the spacecraft had supposedly landed. It was a construction site.

"He wholeheartedly believed it, so obviously a part of me believed it could be true," she said. "I'm a little embarrassed to admit that now."

Soon, he began telling her she was special, too, like he was. She never believed that.

After nearly two years in jail, she said she has changed. She plans to divorce Joshua and has begun a romantic relationship with a former jail inmate, Lacrecia White. They talk on the phone every day, she said, sometimes more than once.

In case anyone is wondering — and people, her mother included, have inquired, she said — she "did not turn gay in jail," she said. "This is something I've always struggled with," she said, recalling how eager she was to please her parents, find a husband, get a job and have children.

She misses her sons and hopes to reunite with them some day, if a judge permits it.

"In here you either break or you grow, and I definitely have grown," she said. These days, when she looks back on the choices she made, she's more than a little incredulous.

"I'm a very smart woman and I'm an engineer," she said. "It's still a big question I have for myself."