A Father’s Fight for His Son in Anne Arundel County

Jeff Reichert had primary custody of his son. Then Anne Arundel County got the case. Three judges later, he has been erased from his son’s life — while the man who took his son’s mother in operates as both a replacement father and a legal strategist in the proceedings that made it possible.

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On February 2, 2022, Jeff Reichert sat in the Circuit Court for Anne Arundel County as Judge Alison Asti issued a pendente lite order granting Sarah Hornbeck sole legal and physical custody of their son Grant and ordering that Reichert have no contact with the boy for 90 days. According to a December 2025 court filing, Grant begged the court in tears not to be separated from his father, asked for five minutes to say goodbye, and told the courtroom that his father was “the only person who’s ever looked out for me my entire life.” Grant was removed from the courtroom that day and sent with his mother.

That 90-day temporary order has never been meaningfully lifted. It has now been over four years.

What makes this more than a tragic custody dispute is what came before it. Jeff Reichert did not lose primary custody because a court found him unfit. He had primary custody under a 2019 consent order entered in Baltimore — a court that had seen years of evidence, including Hornbeck’s 2018 DUI arrest, her criminal probation, and a neglect finding that gave Reichert custody in the first place. He lost it in Anne Arundel County, a court that, as reported separately by Riptide Investigations, may never have had proper jurisdiction over the case.

What followed in Anne Arundel County was not a careful reexamination of that Baltimore record. It was a systematic exclusion of Reichert from the proceedings that stripped him of his son — conducted by three different judges, in the same courthouse, reaching the same outcomes — while the man who moved into his son’s life simultaneously positioned himself as both Grant’s replacement father and a legal operative in the proceedings that kept Reichert out.

The Exclusion

Jeff Reichert is a U.S. Army JAG Corps veteran with service-connected PTSD and traumatic brain injury, conditions recognized and documented by the Department of Veterans Affairs. In-person court attendance at the Anne Arundel County courthouse — five hours from his home in Chesapeake, Virginia — triggers symptoms that prevent meaningful participation. He has been requesting remote appearance accommodations from this court since at least 2020.

The court’s response to those requests, documented in a formal ADA complaint Reichert filed with the U.S. Department of Justice on December 1, 2025, is a chronicle of denial:

November 2024: Remote appearance request denied, no explanation given. Hearing conducted without him.

December 2024: An ADA advocate attempted to file an accommodation request on Reichert’s behalf. The clerk refused to accept it. Reichert’s own request was denied on the day of the hearing. Hearing conducted without him.

June 2025: ADA accommodation request denied at the start of the hearing, with no explanation of why the accommodation was unreasonable. Hearing conducted without him.

July 2025: Judge Donna Schaeffer denied an accommodation request, provided no explanation, and issued an order directing Reichert never to file another ADA accommodation request in this court.

October 2025: ADA accommodation request denied. No explanation provided.

A sitting Maryland circuit court judge issued a written order prohibiting a disabled veteran from ever again requesting the accommodation federal law guarantees him. The DOJ accepted Reichert’s complaint for investigation.

The contrast with federal court is direct. On January 13, 2026, U.S. District Judge J. Mark Coulson granted Reichert remote appearance rights in his pending federal civil rights case, recognizing his documented disability. One week later, Reichert attached that federal order to an emergency accommodation motion filed in Anne Arundel County. The same judge who had ordered him never to request accommodation again was being asked to consider a federal court’s contrary determination.

“Five hearings in this matter have already occurred without Plaintiff’s participation. The Minor Child has likewise never been heard.”

— Reichert’s Emergency ADA Motion, January 20, 2026

The Bench Warrant and the Trap

On June 25, 2024, a scheduled two-day merits hearing convened in Anne Arundel County. Reichert was present. His counsel moved for a postponement. The parties were sent to a postponement judge, where the request was denied. Following that denial, Reichert left the courthouse before proceedings resumed.

The consequences were immediate. The court dismissed his Petition for Contempt with prejudice and his Motion for Modification without prejudice. It granted his attorney’s oral motion to withdraw from the case. And it issued a bench warrant for his arrest.

Opposing counsel characterized his departure as fleeing. Reichert’s documented position is that appearing in the courtroom under the circumstances — his postponement denied, his counsel effectively ending the representation, his PTSD disability unaccommodated, facing a multi-day hearing he had sought to delay — made meaningful participation impossible. Whatever the characterization, the consequences built the trap that now holds him. The bench warrant cannot be purged without a court appearance. Appearing in court means immediate arrest. The court has denied the remote appearance that would allow him to address it safely. His Virginia driver’s license has been flagged by Maryland’s Office of Child Support Enforcement through interstate enforcement mechanisms. The child support arrears — approximately $86,000 — continue to accumulate. He cannot address the arrears without addressing the warrant. He cannot address the warrant without appearing. He cannot appear without risking arrest. The court has told him he may never again ask for an accommodation.

Meanwhile, the $120,000 he has paid in child support since February 2022 has gone to support a household where another man is raising his son — a man Reichert has been fighting in court while simultaneously being excluded from the court itself.

John Michel: Attorney, Replacement Father, Legal Adversary

John Michel is a Maryland-licensed attorney. He has shared an address with Sarah Hornbeck since at least September 2020 — the same address Hornbeck was not disclosing in the custody case while Michel was helping her navigate it. According to Reichert’s February 2025 court filing, Hornbeck moved into Michel’s home with Grant approximately one week after Michel’s late wife died. He has no children of his own.

Michel owns the house. He pays the mortgage, taxes, insurance, utilities, and most vehicle expenses for the household where Grant lives. He drives Grant to school, attends his football and lacrosse games, pays for extracurricular activities, and has committed to contributing to Grant’s private school tuition if needed. These facts come from Michel’s own January 2026 court filing.

Michel represented Hornbeck as her attorney of record in the September 2020 condo association lawsuit — a concurrent legal proceeding in which both he and Hornbeck were listed at the same Clarks Point Road address she was not disclosing in the custody case. He has appeared as Hornbeck’s attorney in cases involving at least one other father as well. He is a named defendant in Reichert’s pending federal civil rights action. He was awarded $1,000 in sanctions against Reichert by a Virginia court after Reichert filed protective order petitions against him that the Virginia judge found were made in bad faith — a finding that is part of the adversarial record and will be cited by opposing counsel.

In June 2025, Michel filed a motion to intervene in the emancipation proceeding Reichert had filed on Grant’s behalf, describing himself as Grant’s de facto parent under Maryland law. He filed pro se — as an attorney representing himself. The court granted the motion in August 2025. Michel became a formal respondent. He then filed a motion to dismiss the emancipation petition, which was denied in September 2025. He served interrogatories on Reichert in October 2025. He filed opposition to Reichert’s summary judgment motion in January 2026. He has actively litigated as both a party and his own counsel for six months in a court that has simultaneously denied Reichert the accommodation that would allow him to participate at all.

“Mr. Reichert never exercised, and therefore effectively abandoned all of his rights to in-person visitation and telephone communication with G.R., and thereby abandoned G.R. emotionally.”

— John H. Michel, Esquire, pro se filing, January 3, 2026

Reichert’s position is the opposite: that he has fought continuously for access to his son, that the supervised visitation structure was designed to be practically unusable given his disability and distance, and that the court’s refusal to accommodate his disability made meaningful participation impossible. The record supports a more complicated picture than either side’s characterization. What is not complicated is the documented trajectory: a father with primary custody, progressively excluded from the proceedings that took his son, while the man who moved into his son’s life prosecutes legal filings against him in the same courtroom.

What Grant Said

Grant Reichert is now 16. He has not been heard by any court since November 2023.

A February 2024 Baltimore County CPS investigation, conducted by social worker Hunter Kasky, documents Grant’s own account. Grant told the investigator he cannot stress how much he misses his father. He said his father raised him until he was twelve, that his father is his hero, and that he wants to be with him. He described his situation: his future feels like it is being thrown away, and it is out of his control. He said no one tells him anything and that he is just left in the dark.

When the investigator asked Grant the miracle question — if he could wake up tomorrow and everything was perfect, what would that look like — Grant said he would go back to his dad.

That CPS report is in the Baltimore County record. The Anne Arundel County court has continued the existing custody arrangement regardless.

Three Judges, One Court, One Direction

The consistency of outcomes in Anne Arundel County warrants examination on its own terms. Judge Schaeffer denied the jurisdiction challenge in 2021 — the challenge that, if granted, might have returned the case to Baltimore, or transferred it to Virginia, where Grant actually lived at the time. She later denied ADA accommodation requests and issued the order prohibiting Reichert from ever filing another one. Judge Asti issued the February 2022 no-contact order, denied remote appearance motions, and issued the bench warrant after refusing to permit remote participation. Judge Morris signed the March 2025 order maintaining sole custody with Hornbeck and restricting Reichert to supervised telephone calls.

Three judges in the same courthouse. Consistent outcomes against the party who had primary custody under a prior court order that reflected Hornbeck’s documented history of substance abuse, neglect, and criminal probation. Consistent outcomes in favor of a party whose partner is a Maryland-licensed attorney with professional familiarity with Maryland’s court system. Asti issued the February 2022 no-contact order, denied remote appearance motions, and issued the bench warrant after Reichert left the June 2024 hearing following denial of his postponement request. The bench warrant and the sustained pattern of ADA denials together created the situation in which Reichert now finds himself: unable to purge the warrant without appearing, unable to appear safely without accommodation, barred by court order from ever requesting accommodation again.

Both Hornbeck and Michel are attorneys. Michel has represented Hornbeck in concurrent proceedings across multiple cases involving at least two different fathers. He files in Anne Arundel County family court with the precision and confidence of someone who knows how the system works. The question of whether his professional relationships extend to the court apparatus that has heard this case — and whether those relationships bear any relationship to the consistency of outcomes — is not answerable from the public record alone. It requires reporting that Riptide Investigations is pursuing.

What is answerable from the public record is this:

• The father, who had primary custody, no longer has any custody.
• The man who moved into his son’s life one week after his wife died now has court-recognized de facto parent status.
• The court that made all of this possible acquired jurisdiction through a filing that its own record contradicts.
• And a federal agency is now investigating that court for disability discrimination against the father it excluded.

The Broader Litigation

Reichert’s federal civil rights action — Reichert v. Hornbeck et al., Case No. 1:24-cv-01865, U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland — names Hornbeck, Michel, and attorney Brennan McCarthy as defendants. On July 23, 2025, Judge Coulson denied the defendants’ motions to dismiss, allowing the case to proceed to discovery. The case is ongoing.

On December 2, 2025, Reichert filed a separate declaratory judgment action in the Circuit Court for Baltimore County — Case No. C-03-CV-25-005682 — naming Hornbeck, the State of Maryland, Baltimore County District Court commissioners, and ASA Michelle Fuller. The complaint documents commissioners telling Reichert, “We know who you are,” when he attempted to file protective order complaints in September and October 2024, and school staff physically removing Grant from Reichert at a football game in September 2025 based on a protective order that had not been served. The State of Maryland, the District Court of Maryland for Baltimore County, and ASA Fuller were all served by December 19, 2025. Hornbeck — herself a Maryland-licensed attorney — was not served until February 4, 2026, after a sheriff’s affidavit of non-service was filed on January 28. The State removed the case to federal court on January 20, 2026. The Baltimore County docket is now closed.

Charges against Hornbeck, filed in January 2024 based on Reichert’s detailed criminal complaints, were dropped by ASA Fuller without a meaningful explanation, according to the complaint. Reichert’s own criminal charges, all based on Hornbeck’s filings, were dropped or dismissed.

Where Things Stand

Jeff Reichert had primary custody of his son under a consent order entered by a court that had seen the evidence. He left Maryland only after being violently arrested multiple times on charges that were subsequently dropped, jailed for ten days, denied his medications, and subjected to a seizure. The case moved to Anne Arundel County on a filing whose jurisdictional foundation is disputed. Every significant ruling since has gone against him, issued by three different judges in that court.

He has not seen his son in nearly four years. He owes $86,000 to avoid incarceration under a warrant he cannot purge without appearing in a court that will not accommodate his disability. His son’s mother’s partner — an attorney who has represented her in concurrent proceedings and now litigates against Reichert pro se — has been recognized by that same court as Grant’s de facto parent.

Grant is 16. He told a CPS investigator he wants to go home. No court has asked him since.

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A companion report examines the jurisdictional foundation of this case and how a disputed address filing in 2020 placed it in a court that may never have had authority to decide it. A future report will examine the pattern of outcomes in Anne Arundel County and the professional background of the attorneys whose litigation strategy has shaped those outcomes.

Disclosure: All factual claims are sourced to court records, docket entries, transcripts, federal court filings, and administrative complaints cited herein.