PAHOKEE, Florida (WTLV) — Stuck like a sandspur to the eastern edge of Lake Okeechobee and surrounded by thousands of acres of sugar cane, Pahokee is about as remote as Florida gets. It’s a town defined by farming, religion and poverty — the trifecta of Florida agricultural life – and it feels, says resident Chad Stoffel, like “the middle of nowhere.”

Even more remote than the town is the tiny community of Miracle Village. Located two miles east of Pahokee on Muck City Road, is what some residents call a modern-day leper colony: a safe haven for the most despised people on Earth.

Sex offenders. Hundreds of them.

“People were terrified for their kids,” recalls resident Raheem Akbar of when the town first learned about the influx.

They weren’t just fearful. They were threatening. “This is the good ol’ boys,” Pastor Patti Aupperlee says of the town’s mindset. “Everybody’s packing heat. ‘It would’ve been good to go kill [a sex offender]. They would have deserved it!’ This town doesn’t play.”

The hostility was so strong, village founders needed a police escort to attend City Council meetings.

“The Sheriff’s Department was totally opposed to us, probation was opposed to us, the community …” recalls founder Pat Powers. “Nobody wanted us.”

The fear and hatred sex offenders evoke is so strong, even other sex offenders share it.

“I was definitely nervous about moving into a community of sex offenders,” admits Chad Stoffel, a Village resident and convicted sex offender. “Because my impression of sex offenders were old guys in trench coats, sitting in parks, trying to steal children and rape them and kill them.”

Today, though, the town of Pahokee does more than tolerate the sex offender colony. It has come to embrace it. And nowhere is that turnaround more evident than at the United Methodist Church, where many offenders attend service.

Not long after moving from Wisconsin to serve this remote parish, Pastor Aupperlee invited Village residents to take part in a weekly service. Reaction was swift… and furious. Aupperlee recalls being confronted by Lynda Moss, a longtime parishioner and one of the town’s most influential residents.

“She cornered me in the office, and it was: ‘What in the hell do you think you’re doing?'” recalls Aupperlee. “‘Those people can’t come here.'”

“I was angry,” concedes Moss. “Had I ever known a known sex offender in my life? No. Did I ever want to? No. Did I want them in my church? Hell, no!”

But Moss’ heart has changed. Today, she refers to the residents of Miracle Village as her “kids.”

“It’s that mothering thing,” she says, seated in her kitchen. “These guys needed mothering again. They needed nurturing. They needed somebody to love ’em — warts and all.”

The day Pat Powers came to look at the village, he was not impressed.

“This was a dump! Three different people came up and tried to sell me crack cocaine. I said, ‘No, God… this can’t be it.’ And uh, that was it. That’s how we found the village.”

Finding housing has become increasingly difficult for sex offenders. The state of Florida prohibits them from living within 1,000 feet of anywhere children might gather – parks, schools — which in urban areas eliminates most housing. And many cities, including Jacksonville and Miami, have increased that distance to 2,500 feet.

It’s not clear just how much protection the setbacks offer. Those accused of two of them most horrific child sex crimes in Northeast Florida– Donald Smith and Donald Davidson — lived several miles from their victims. And the horrific death of Somer Thompson at the hands of her Orange Park neighbor could not have been avoided by housing restrictions, because her killer, Jared Harrell, was not a registered sex offender.

The result of housing restrictions tends to be clusters of sex offenders, like the one in the Fairfield area north of downtown Jacksonville: within a 1-mile radius around John Love Elementary, there are more than 108 registered sex offenders and predators. Those who can’t find housing end up on the street, turning the population everyone wants to track into a community of transients.

Aside from homelessness, Pat Powers says the policies of banishment can be destructive.

“If you’re under house arrest, you’re alone by yourself and guess what you’ve got?” he asks, pointing to his temple. “This mind — the greatest television in the world.” He adds, “You don’t want them alone. You want them out doing stuff. You want them occupied.”

Some 500 sex offenders, mostly men, have cycled through Miracle Village, and more than half of the 300+ residents there today are sex offenders. But families live here too, including some children, and workers from the sugar cane fields. The village is at capacity, and has proven a magnet for other sex offenders around the state.

Today, Pahokee is home to more sex offenders per capita than almost place in Florida – about 10 times the rate in Jacksonville.

“People freak out, they freak out,” says Stoffel. “They don’t know what to think. They think maybe we’re going to be dangerous or we’re going to attack them or attack their children. That’s simply not true, not what we’re about.”

Despite the fears those numbers may evoke, local law enforcement says the village has been a model community. And the town of Pahokee has come to embrace the sex offenders as family. Indeed, the real miracle of the village may be the way attitudes have changed.

After weeks of tension that threatened to pull the church apart, Lynda Moss heard Chad Stoffel play piano and sing. The music touched Lynda. But it also changed her.

“I’ve worked in a church, I’ve seen great concerts,” says Pastor Aupperlee. “He was worshipping. And it was so amazing.”

“It’s like I said to you about the pit bulls — you only hear about the bad ones,” explains Lynda Moss. “Like the sex offenders, you only hear about the heinous-crime ones.”

In fact, sex offenders as a group are less likely than any other to re-offend. Depending on the study, recidivism ranges range from 5 to 30 percent. In many cases, when they are re-arrested, it’s for technical violations of life on the registry, or nonviolent, non-sexual offenses.

Law enforcement in Palm Beach County says the Village has been largely trouble free, in part because even the smallest infraction can send residents back to prison. “They’ve seen what our village has done, seven years, eight years,” says Pat Powers. “Nobody’s been raped, killed, or murdered because of us.”

Lynda Moss agrees. “It might be the safest place to live.”

Pastor Patti so trusts the men she knows from the Village, she once gave them her house keys to set up an after church dinner. She and her husband Paul were finishing closing up the church, she says, “And all of a sudden he looked at me and said, ‘Do you realize our daughter is home alone with 11 sex offenders?’ And I was like, ‘Huh! OK.'”

But Aupperlee is no wide-eyed pushover. She makes clear while “all persons are welcome, all behaviors are not.”

“If someone is doing something harmful? What is left of you, I will turn over to the detectives? Don’t screw with me.”

Miracle Village requires a kind of vetting of residents. It’s operated by Matthews 25 Ministries Inc., and any potential tenant must believe in Christ, and take responsibility for their crimes. They don’t accept residents who’ve committed violent sex crimes, or anyone who have other convictions – drugs or burglary, for instance – that might make them nuisance neighbors.

It’s a distinction state laws don’t make. Housing restrictions are identical for violent predators and nonviolent offenders, people who rape children and those who commit so called “Romeo and Juliet” crimes.

Christopher Dawson was arrested for the first time in his life at age 20. He says that he and all of his friends believed the girl he was dating was 18.

“I was with her for months,” he says. “Her family loved me. I spent the night. Her mom even said how much my daughter loves you.”

But one night, in 2011, the two were parked in his car. “The cops came by, knocked on my window, asked what we were doing. I said, ‘You know, just making out, looking at the stars.'” When the officers demanded ID, Dawson says, it was the first time he learned she was 14.

He was arrested on the spot, he says, and thrown in the “bubble,” a spot in the jail reserved for the worst of the worst.

“The rapists, the killers,” explains Dawson. “I was crying my eyes out.”

Dawson served two years house arrest, and still has eight years of probation left. But he can’t speak to anyone under 18 years old without specific court permission. And he’s a registered sex offender — forever.

Chad Stoffell is also a nonviolent sex offender. Raised in a conservative religious home, he lived most of his life as a closeted gay man, believing that his very nature was a sin against God.

“I grew up in an environment that said you cannot be gay, it’s just not appropriate – you’re going to hell, damnation, abomination.”

A teacher in a Christian school, Stoffel attempted to rid himself of his homosexuality, joining an anti-gay ministry. When his counselor told him he needed to confess all his sins, he admitted an affair he’d had with a 16-year-old student. “I just needed to get that out of me and become cured and become straight, like normal people,” he says.

But his counselor was compelled by law to report him. Within weeks, Chad was behind bars, soon to be a registered sex offender, for life.

“We’re a bunch of men and women who made some poor choices, and we definitely hurt people along the way. We will never deny that,” says Stoffel. “But we also feel that we shouldn’t be thrown away forever. Punish us? Yes, punish us. And we’ll pay our debt. But once we get done with that, we’d love a chance to just move on with our lives and try to start again — like almost every other type of person out there.”

It’s these kinds of stories that Lynda Moss says most people never hear. “When you learn what the actual offense was… it’s not near what the news portrays it.”

All sex crimes have victims. And even for those who believe in second chances, some stories are harder to hear.

Pat Powers was one of the top racquetball coaches in the world, when “I started messing around with some of my students.” He was convicted of molesting 11 teen and pre-teen students at his Bradenton racquetball club.

“Now I can look back. At the time, I thought I should be killed. I hated myself. I didn’t think any punishment was bad enough that’s honestly how I felt.”

His crime destroyed his marriage, and nearly his life. But he is proud of how he’s turned his life around, and he wants others to know that sex offenders can recover.

“The hardest thing in world for me to do was first time I stood up there and said: ‘I’m a sex offender.’ Because everybody was like, ‘Ugh! Now I don’t care.’ I want people to know. I was a sex offender. I’m not currently.”

Harry Folger, also a Village resident, spent almost 13 years in prison for molesting his step-granddaughter. “She was 12 years old at the time,” he says quietly. Like Pat Powers, his marriage fell apart, he lost touch with family, and he entertained thoughts of suicide.

“It’s tough to deal with, to know you’ve committed — to know you’re capable of committing — that type of crime.”

But forgiveness comes from all corners. Including former victims. Margaret Smart, a former pastor and Pahokee resident, was molested when she was 11. The perpetrator was a family friend, but she recalls that her father, too was complicit.

“Dad was nearby, and he got mad at me because I wouldn’t lay my head back down in the car — in this guy’s lap,” she says.

Despite her own experience, Margaret has fallen in love with Folger – a registered sex predator. The two met at a church picnic two years ago, and fell in love almost immediately. She says that her ability to see beyond his crime is because she views it as something he did, not who he is.

“I knew Harry as a person,” she says, “not as a criminal.”

Pastor Patti was also a victim of a sex crime, molested – like most such victims – by someone she knew. “A good friend of the parents,” she says. “And I never told a soul — because it must’ve been my fault.”

Like the man who molested her, she notes, some of the worst offenders are never caught. But she sees no value in demonizing Pahokee’s residents.

“The folks that are here in the village, they’re in counseling, they’ve gone to jail, they’ve faced their accusers. They’ve been humiliated, mortified — and they’re repentant.”

Christopher Dawson agrees.

“Some of us made a mistake in our lives, and we have to own up for it. But we’re still human beings. We’re still children of God. We want to be treated as you’d want to be treated.”

For Lynda Moss, the need to minister to village residents is a fundamental Christian value.

“You’ve got to dig down deep in your heart, and say what’s right? What’s right here? What are we called to do as Christians? What are we called to do? If I don’t love a sex offender,” she adds, “then I’m not loving Christ.”