INDEPENDENCE, MO. ? There was a time Joseph Grant had it all — a loving family, a successful horse-training business and a 40-acre ranch.

Back in 1998, the 32-year-old Grant gained national press when he exposed a farm in Miami County, Kan., containing 200 starving and neglected Hackney ponies. While many of the horses had to be put down, Grant aided in rehabilitating the survivors.

Popular and gifted, Grant introduced his horse-training talents to Eastern Jackson County in the summer of 2000, when he conducted a clinic in Oak Grove to raise money for the family of the late Mickey Sanstra, who died during heart transplant surgery.

Mickey Sanstra’s wife, Jean, will be forever grateful to Grant for the time he donated and for the $1,200 the clinic raised.

“I greatly appreciate what Joe did at the benefit,” she said. “I thought he went above and beyond what he needed to do, and he promised to stay until it was over. I think it was 1:30 (a.m.) when it was over.”

Trouble begins

Six months later, Grant’s life began to change.

Despite lots of work and being surrounded by the things he loved, he began to lose his patience, his temper and eventually his connection to his wife and three stepchildren.

“I lost track of what I really wanted,” said Grant, 36. “My kids mentioned that my attitude was starting to change. I would raise my voice.”

Perhaps it was the pressure to be a good trainer and a good father that got to Joe Grant, or perhaps it was his perception of how people viewed him as a black man training horses.

“When Linda and I moved to Miami County (in 1998 from Virginia) we didn’t know nobody,” he said. “I was in a mixed marriage and a lot of people thought that was wrong right off the bat.”

Horse trainer Joseph Grant calms a nervous horse so he can train it not to kick at people who come close to its injured leg. While some say his gifts to horse training speak for themselves, Grant has faced an uphill battle in his personal life.

The road to Grant’s eventual breakdown this past October goes back years, he said.

While the 1998 horse rescue remains one of his life’s highlights, Grant maintains some people in Miami County connected to the farm’s owner, Newman Stern, have shown him resentment for the pressure he put on authorities to clean up the farm.

More than once a carload of people drove by his home in the middle of the night with less-than-cordial intentions.

“They was hollering things and shooting at night,” Grant said. “Hollering (racial slurs) and things like that to my family.”

One night, Grant said, he jumped in his truck and chased one of those cars, cornering it at an intersection long enough to identify some familiar occupants, including an ex-Miami County Sheriff’s Department deputy.

“They were friends of Newman Stern,” Grant said. “He owned the horses I rescued.”

Afraid of the law

Fearing the law after that, Grant chose to run from police instead of facing a routine motorcycle-helmet violation in Paola, Kan.

“I hid in the woods,” he said. “One cop was hollering, ‘You’re in Kansas now boy, and we’re going to find your black (expletive)”‘

During his escape, Grant went to Drexel, Mo., but the next day his conscience got the best of him and he returned to Paola to turn himself in. Waiting for him were 13 allegations police had amassed during the incident. But a member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was waiting to defend Grant at the courthouse and official charges never materialized.

Grant moved his family to Drexel in 1999, under more accepting and friendly terms. He bought a 40-acre ranch and was doing just fine with his training business.

Since learning about horses from his grandfather as a youngster in Virginia, Grant has had the ability to take an unbroke horse that has never been ridden and train it to trust a rider in about a half-hour. His specialty is curing behavioral problems such as biting, kicking or stubbornness, more often than not in one session.

Things fall apart

His own problems paved a destructive path for Grant before he got the chance to see the light.

What normally was a peaceful home life changed. Grant said he and Linda had an argument that dealt a blow to their marriage.

“I said things I shouldn’t have said,” Grant admits, and out of guilt he decided to leave the farm and live with friends.

Grant said there was no way he could go back to the farm. His wife eventually moved to another part of Missouri.

Bouncing from place to place, Grant ended up back in Kansas in 2002, this time in Olathe, staying with friends Kevin and Angel Hefner, to whom he is forever grateful.

But trying to take steps forward was not easy for Joe Grant. One day in October a tow driver came to repossess his motorcycle and later claimed Grant assaulted him.

Despite Grant’s claims of innocence, police laid an assault charge and he landed in jail in Johnson County, waiting for the bond to be set.

While Grant sat in a jail cell, his thoughts turned lower and lower.

“I was waiting to get out on bond and I said to myself if I get out on bond during the three days the first thing I was going to do was kill myself … I asked the deputies for a counselor and a counselor came to my cell,” Grant said, “I let everything out. It was the first time I ever opened up to anybody like that.”

The counselor told Grant he had been worrying too much about what others think and not enough about his own feelings and actions.

‘It saved my life’

Three days turned into nine in the jail cell, as no one came to bail him out. Grant considers his extra stay to be a blessing because it gave him time to think. And time to prioritize his feelings.

“It saved my life,” Grant determined. “Since then I have dedicated my life to me. He said nobody can help me until I help myself.”

Grant has set out to become the horse trainer he once was, the one featured in the April, 1998 edition of Western Horseman Magazine.

“Back in that article the writer said I didn’t know what ‘no’ meant,” Grant reminds himself from time to time. “I want everybody to know that I still don’t know what ‘no’ is. Joe Grant doesn’t know the meaning of the word ‘no.'”

Although Grant has not fully beaten his challenges, he has a much better outlook on life, horse-training and earning the respect he used to have.

“I want to take everybody I’ve ever done wrong and make it right,” he said, including his family.

“I don’t want to cause grudges with anybody, but I want people to know me,” Grant said. “If nothing good ever happened to me here, I wouldn’t be here. I want people to know the good outweighs the bad and I just want the bad to stop.”

Grant can compare anything to his experience with horses, including his jail time.

“I was like the horse in the round pen,” he said, “And the counselor was me.”

Grant recently gained back a customer near Oak Grove. After delivering a horse, he stopped for gas at Casey’s General Store where something special happened — somebody recognized him.

“They said, ‘Hey, when are you coming back to do another clinic,'” Grant said.

That day meant a lot to Grant.

“The people of Oak Grove have shown me more respect than most others have since I moved here from Virginia.”

People who remember Grant from the Oak Grove clinic have returned the favor.

“I was quite impressed by him,” said David Gipson, a frequent announcer at Oak Grove rodeo and horse events at Frick Park. He introduced Grant to the crowd at the 2000 benefit, which raised $1,200.

“If I can get something going for him, I will,” Gipson said.