For more than 10 years, José (not his real name) stood armed and ready with a screw gun when the factory buzzer sounded at 5 a.m. Eight and a half or nine hours later, he would clock out and drive home to meet his oldest daughter's school bus when it arrived.
He has called Goshen home since he moved here as a teenager. Eventually meeting his wife and starting a family, José's free time filled up with trips to Wal-Mart, working on cars, helping his dad with home projects and mowing the lawn.
Grateful for a good and quiet life, and not wanting to experience a run-in with the law, he presented himself at a local Bureau of Motor Vehicles office last August to renew his driver's license before it expired.
Within a month he found himself jobless and sporting a house-arrest monitor on his right ankle. Unable to pay the mortgage, he and his family of five moved in with his parents, who also live in Goshen.
He can be found there, nowadays, baby-sitting the youngest two children while his father and wife work full time to keep them all in food and gasoline. Two of the vehicles he owned are gone, sold to help make ends meet.
"All because I tried to do right by the law," he said.
Years ago, when José applied for his first driver's license, he gave the BMV attendant his legal, correct name and address. But as an undocumented resident, he didn't have a Social Security number. So he invented one. Although he has renewed the license before, successfully, this time it and his identification card were confiscated by the attendant. In short order José found himself before an Elkhart County judge facing a charge of identity theft.
"They told me the Social Security number was no good," he said with a shrug. "They didn't want to give me another license."
The skeleton in his closet had stayed hidden until that day, and José had assumed that his not having his own Social Security number was all right with the government also, since for so long it allowed him to use the invented number without any consequences. Now his 4-year-old daughter plays with daddy's ankle bracelet with one hand while he coaxes a splinter out of the other on a chilly spring morning, and he second-guesses whether he made a good decision by not fleeing to Mexico to avoid punishment.
The judge in his case, José said, gave him a month between his hearing and sentencing to decide, in José's estimation, if he wanted to flee or face possible jail time or home monitoring.
Just three days before the imposed deadline, he was still vacillating.
"I called my friend and asked, 'Should I go?'" he remembers. His family also struggled with the decision.
But his commitment to family overrode his concern for himself.
"My kids don't want to go. My daughter's been (to Mexico)," he said, indicating the 11-year-old. "She likes it here."
Some family members also have pointed out to him that if the children, who were all born in the U.S., were to return to the U.S. years from now dad might not be able to come with them or visit them if he were a fugitive.
"I just want to do what's best for them," he said.
So he turned himself in.
For a time he was confined mainly to his parents' house, but recently has been allowed a daily four-hour window during which he may go look for a new job. He hopes to find one, and also hopes that his good behavior will convince a judge to take the bracelet monitor off a little early.
He feels deceived, that he did everything that he possibly could the legal way, including not fleeing. And it has cost him everything except his family.
"I know people who, they drive without the license, they steal or do drugs and they get in trouble and go to Mexico. I could do that," he points out.
Instead he'll go underground by looking for a new name and Social Security number to work under, and probably get to work by driving without a license, he says.
He didn't want things to be this way.
"The law won't let me do anything else. I have to get back to work."