In high school, Ben became interested in environmental science, which lead him to groups like PETA and Greenpeace. His involvement was mostly contained in meetings, protests, handing out literature, etc. Even though it didn't win him friends at school (and his folks thought he was a weirdo) it was a cause he believed in. He went to college for a year in Chicago, where he became more and more involved with a group called Hurricane- headed by professor Alan Morrison. It started innocently enough: smuggling mistreated animals from zoos and into shelters, freeing lab animals, political advocacy, etc. He felt like he was doing more than just droning at people impotently on the street. More and more he lost interest in his classes as Hurricane grew more radical and Professor Morrison relied on Ben more and more for bringing his plans to fruition. It also didn't hurt that Ben knew where to get the best drugs.
The whole thing went south after an action at a cosmetics company, when the group set fire to the building after clearing out the test animals and getting the security guards out. Ben and the rest of his team- mostly college students a few years younger than him- were arrested after a few days on the run. While Ben refused to cooperate, he had no idea that the rest of the team and Professor Morrison had decided to pin it all on him as the fall guy. Fortunately, since Ben had a decent lawyer and no one died he got off relatively easy: five years behind bars, less with good behavior. Prison was hell, but the worst was remembering each of them in the courtroom lying through their teeth to save their own hides. Especially the man Ben had come to admire so much.
After four years keeping his head down, Ben was set loose. He headed back to his folks' place in Springfield but finding work was hard going and he had lost a lot of friends in the time he was Inside. Prison at least had made him a better criminal and a capable fighter. He fought to stay out of trouble as long as he could, but there's always bills to pay and no one was eager to hire an ex-con. So he started picking up odd jobs- boosting cars, moving weed, whatever payed and didn't seem too risky. He lost touch with his parents, gave his parole officer the slip and focused day to day on survival, all the while wishing he could recapture the idealism he used to have before it all evaporated into prison hall beige.
It's at this point that Val entered his life.
Ben started feeling like he was being watched- on jobs, running to the store, whatever he was doing on a given night. He stopped taking jobs; he thought it was an undercover cop, the DEA, the FBI, someone. Forrester packed up everything he couldn't live with out and headed into the woods to let things cool down for a bit. She pounced on him while he was setting up his tent- almost a foot shorter and a hundred pounds lighter, but she hit like the biggest f&%@er in the cellblock. When it became clear he couldn't win, he ran for it- and his future sire was more than happy to oblige. The next few hours were a game of cat and mouse in the deep woods that Ben was doomed to fail. As the life left him in a fit of cold ecstasy, Ben wasn't terribly upset. Things had gone off the rails- why not finish it off now?
He awoke, to his great surprise, with a terrible thirst under a heavy tarp. Pushing on it, he found that he had been buried naked a few feet in the ground. After considering which way he was pointed, Ben dug his way out into the night... wondering all the while how he had been breathing under that tarp and all that earth. Or was he breathing? No... Not anymore...
Ben found his clothes a short distance away and set about learning what had happened. Over the next several nights, he learned through trial and error exactly what he had become and what it meant for him. After that time, Val made herself known to him- to say that he had passed her test and she considered him worthy. Over the next several weeks she taught him the basics of what vampire society was and their place in it.
Valencia wasn't the worst sire- very into "tough love" but maybe it was for the best that she let him make his own discoveries and his own mistakes. For the last decade as a vampire, Ben has been traveling the highways and back roads of the midwest, looking for the place where he can set down roots and figure out exactly where he stands on all this "Jyhad" business.