tfandango

Hi there. Frank Freshwaters is my great uncle. I have never met him (obviously), nobody in our family knew where he was for quite a few years. I will tell you what I know.

He hit and killed someone driving drunk in Akron, when he was in his 20s. Spent some time locked up and then in a half way house. Apparently when he had about a year left in the halfway house, made a really bad decision and left. That violated his parole and he was sent to prison.

The Shawshank thing is pretty much just media mumbo-jumbo. He did escape from the penitentiary in Mansfield, Ohio. This is the filming location for Shawshank. That is where the similarities end. According to my family, he walked away from one of those highway cleaning crews when nobody was looking.

He then hid out in West Virginia for some time. My grandmother and great grandmother (his sister/mother) would visit him yearly there as he would refuse to return to Ohio. I think this is probably illegal but our family knew where he was and the police did not. For a while, eventually they discovered him in West Virginia and arrested him. The story goes, they found him hiding in the cabinet under the sink. However, and I am not sure about the validity of this next statement or why this would be, West Virginia refused to extradite him to Ohio. Maybe some political differences between governors, or perhaps that is just the family lore. He disappeared shortly after that but I believe kept in contact with my grandmother for some time.

My grandmother grew somewhat annoyed with him as he never returned to the family as some of his brothers and mother passed away. I remember her saying "He thinks the police are still looking for him, nobody cares".

Currently he is back in Ohio awaiting a trial. Some of my uncles and aunts have tried to visit him but nobody is on some special list so they aren't allowed contact. We have heard from a bunch of new relatives as it appears he had a few children on his adventures.

Personally, I read the stories because Shawshank is in my top 5 movies of all times, when I saw the name "Freshwaters"... mind blown. Sadly though he didn't outsmart everybody and escape through a hole he dug over decades, just wandered off...

What can you tell us about the experience of the show transitioning from SciFi to Amazon? It was stressful for us, what was it like for you?