In politics, reputations are hard to shake. In family court, reputations are too easily ignored.
Maryland attorney John H. Michel is living proof.
Maryland has no shortage of mediocre lawyers with poor reputations, but Michel manages to stand out from the rest — not for brilliance, but for reckless ambition, political opportunism, and dangerous overreach.
He failed upward — and children are paying the price.
In 2019, he was booted from public life in disgrace when the Maryland Senate rejected his nomination to the state’s Handgun Permit Review Board, calling his record reckless and dangerous. Lawmakers went so far as to abolish the entire board rather than let Michel and his allies continue overturning police safety decisions.
It should have been the end of him.
But Michel didn’t fade. He pivoted — and within a year, he wasn’t just meddling in gun permits. He was meddling in the life of someone else’s child.
A Gun Board Run Amok
The Handgun Permit Review Board was created to give citizens a fair appeal if the Maryland State Police denied them a permit. On paper, it was a check on bureaucracy. In practice, by the time Michel joined in 2017, it had become something else entirely: a rubber stamp for applicants.
State records show the board overturned or loosened nearly 90% of permit denials. Police officers testified that their recommendations were being gutted. Gun safety advocates warned that Maryland’s strict permitting laws were being hollowed out from the inside.
And one of the loudest voices pushing those reversals? John Michel.
Observers described him as dismissive of police testimony, siding with applicants even when there were red flags. He downplayed risks, stretched discretion, and cast himself as a champion of the “little guy” while undermining public safety. It was as if they were bureaucratic noise.
By 2019, lawmakers had had enough. The Maryland Senate rejected Michel’s renomination outright. Days later, legislators voted to abolish the board altogether. The reason was simple: lawmakers and law enforcement had lost patience with the board’s reckless record.
It was a stunning rebuke. Most men would have taken the hint. Michel didn’t. For most lawyers, that would have been the end of a public career. For Michel, it was only the end of one arena.
He failed at guarding guns. Now he guards a child.
A Lawyer Without a Lane
Michel’s law career has been unremarkable: construction disputes, real estate deals, state contracts. Nothing about his résumé suggested family law expertise — or any role in deciding who should raise a child. There was no family law experience, no child advocacy, no history of working with vulnerable populations. Not to mention, he has no children of his own with his wife of 30 years.
But Michel had always hungered for more. The gun board gave him a taste of influence, a seat at a table where he could overrule experts and assert himself. When that door slammed shut, he looked for another.
The next opening wasn’t political at all. It was personal — and it came through tragedy.
July 28, 2020: The Widowhood Pivot
On July 28, 2020, Michel buried his wife who had just died.
The circumstances remain opaque, but the fallout was clear: within days, Sarah Hornbeck — the mother of Grant Reichert — was inside living at Michel’s Middle River home. But they weren’t presenting themselves as a household or being in a relationship. For nearly the next two years, Michel’s presence was concealed from Jeff and from the courts. False addresses were used, and Michel’s role was kept out of official records until late 2021.
The speed of the transition of Michel’s widowhood stunned observers. One day she was there, the next she was gone — replaced almost immediately by Sarah. One household ended; another was instantly created. What looked from the outside like a new household was, in reality, opportunism cloaked in secrecy. Michel had slipped into Sarah’s life at her lowest moment — and hidden in the shadows while consolidating control.
When one woman was fresh in the ground, another was in his house. That’s not grief — that’s calculation.
For a widower in his late fifties with no children of his own, the timing was jarring. Unknown to Jeff at the time, Sarah — who had lost all custody of Grant due to her abuse of alcohol and drugs, and foreclosed on her home all just a year earlier — was suddenly inside Michel’s home. On paper she was still tied to other addresses, including ex-boyfriend David Brandeen’s Severna Park residence. Brandeen had only ended the relationship with Hornbeck two weeks earlier. This necessitated her need for a new place to live.
In reality, Michel had already stepped into her life. But he and Sarah concealed that fact from Jeff and the court for nearly two years. Did she conceal from Michel the relationship she was just in? Was he aware of her issues with drugs and alcohol?
The shift was more than personal. It also marked the beginning of Michel’s entry into family court — a realm far outside his professional background, but one where he quickly began leveraging his legal skills and connections. This included seemingly erasing all of Sarah’s issues that had cost her custody of her child.
By February 2022, in the worst day of Jeff and Grant’s lives, Michel’s takeover was nearly complete. After a critical disastrous court hearing, Grant was forced into his mother’s custody — and effectively into Michel’s control. To Jeff and Grant, what happened on 2/2/22 is indisputable evil. John Michel is at the center of it.
The First Grab for Influence
By the summer of 2021, Michel was no longer just hovering around Sarah — he was testing his influence on Grant.
On one of their first encounters, he handed the child a loaded M9 handgun. It was reckless, dangerous, and telling. For Michel, this wasn’t just a stunt. It was a performance: a chance to cast himself as the ‘cool’ father figure, to wedge himself between a boy and the father who had raised him.
The Senate said Michel was too reckless for guns. Family court let him hand one to a boy.
Opportunism doesn’t always look like a court filing. Sometimes it looks like a man handing a child a gun, not to teach, but to impress — exploiting a moment to assert himself where he had no place.
The Opportunist’s Pattern
This wasn’t the first time Michel had blurred boundaries. He has a dangerous pattern of overreach.
- In 2002, as a law student, he pursued Sarah openly even though she was with Jeff.
- In 2017–2019, he abused his power on the gun board, ignoring experts to push his own authority.
- In 2020, he stepped into Sarah’s home life after his wife’s death, and in Sarah’s lowest moment — and concealed the truth until the courts caught up.
- In 2021, he seized his first opening with Grant, using a loaded handgun to play father figure.
- In family court — he is accused of intimidation, child abuse, coercion, and even false imprisonment.
- In politics — he clings to Republican connections and gun-rights credibility to stay relevant.
The pattern is the point. Michel doesn’t wait for permission — he waits for weakness.
Questions linger about how all this happened, how he maintained connections that have destroyed Jeff’s life, and if he had always been present in Sarah’s life since 2002, behind Jeff’s back.
The through-line is clear: Michel doesn’t create opportunities. He takes them when others are weak, distracted, or grieving. Michel cannot resist inserting himself into roles he has no business holding, wielding authority recklessly, and leaving wreckage in his wake.
And now Michel has found his most dangerous stage yet. He isn’t just playing politics. He’s playing father — with another man’s child.
Why It Matters
So, who is John Michel, and why would a man with no children of his own circle another man’s family for decades?
This is not a story of a dedicated public servant. It is the story of a dangerous, reckless opportunist.
If Maryland’s Senate once decided Michel was too reckless and unfit to oversee gun permits, why are its courts letting him position himself as a father? How and why is he even being trusted with a child?
The answer lies in opportunism: the ability to spot openings, seize them, and rewrite the rules to your own advantage. The ability to fulfill a fantasy. Michel did it on the gun board. He’s done it in family court. He’s done it with Sarah Hornbeck over two decades in the making. And in all cases, the consequences fall on people who never consented to his authority — citizens denied public safety, and now, a father who has never heard from John Michel is denied his son. We’re talking about a menace, a stalker hiding in plain sight.
This isn’t ambition. Its opportunism cloaked in secrecy — and it has already endangered both public safety and a child’s future.
He is not a father. He is not a public servant. He is a predator — and Maryland let him in.
Coming Next: Part 2: The Stalker (The Long Game) — how Michel’s fixation on Sarah Hornbeck began in law school and lingered for two decades, until tragedy gave him his opening.
Discover more from Reform Maryland Courts
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
