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18.05.12

Don't judge her by her house, she begs. This isn't her. This isn't the way she would live, if she had a choice.

The broken windows covered with cardboard. The huge cracks in the front door. The holes every few feet in the drywall. The worn carpeting and dingy paint.

Michele Sheffield apologizes. She doesn't have the money or the time to fix any of that.

That goes to her son, Harley, who's bearded, 20 years old, 6-foot-2 and 252 pounds, whose diapers she changes every day.

The shattered windows, the damaged front door, the battered drywall — he did all that.

Harley is profoundly autistic, with a vocabulary of perhaps 200 words. Much of the time he's calm, as he was at McDonald's after school, eating fries and a burger, smearing ketchupy hands on his Georgia Bulldogs shirt.

See more photos of Michele and Harley

But by the time he gets to his Westside house, gets out of his mom's Ford Explorer, that calm is gone. A reporter and photographer are there, breaking his routine. He begins to pull at his throat, hooting like an Indian in an old Western movie. He slaps his face, again and again. He bites his fingers, jumps up and down.

Source: Florida Times-Union