Lost

Fifty nine months and 6 days ago life as I knew it ceased to be.

At sixty-one I did not feel I had any time to lose.  At that point the average life expectancy for a woman was seventy-eight years old.  Since I was still working and not able to retire until 65 four years of that would be spent commuting in ridiculous traffic for threes hours a day and working on my job nine.  So from 65 to 78 I had maybe 7 good years and that is best case scenario.  At that point in your life, you really have no time to waste.  And here I sit here wondering how many days have gone by that I have no recollection of?  How many hours have I now spent sitting and staring into space; doing nothing and watching the hours of my life drift by?  Five years I have been existing like someone already dead that just hasn't fallen over yet.

These were the years we had worked and waited for.  We were going to travel and finally after 40 years of working and raising a family, get to enjoy a little of our lives before they were gone.  And here I sit day after day without the energy, stamina or desire to "do" anything.  I am wasting what time I've got left - living in a state of limbo - not dead - not living.  Just waiting.  I realize I'm doing this and I hate it but I cannot seem to find what it takes to pull out of this.  I seem to have lost my zest for life.  I've always been a goal-oriented person.  I make lists. I set five year goals, one year goals, monthly and daily goals. But now I have no goals.  Waking up that is my big goal.  What do you do when you have no direction? What do you live for if you have no dreams, no goals, no desires and no hope.

We do enjoy days together from time to time.  We talk a lot.  Unfortunately, "this" is mostly what we talk about.  We laugh and joke and I am certainly thankful for that.  But life isn't the same --not just in my family but in my head, in my spirit and in my heart.

I feel I am drifting aimlessly.  Sailing without navigation, without so much as a map and worse still without a destination.

I want to live life again.  I do.  I just can't seem to find my way out of this.  Writing used to be my life and now I try to write and I get lost and ramble.

How do you find your way back? Can you find your way back?  If so, pray tell how?

This is the result of being a survivor?

About as I always imagined.

Survivors - I always wondered at those people that build bomb shelters and stockpiled weapons, food and supplies - what would they have to live for in a world decimated by a nuclear bomb?  Why on earth would they want to survive?  Me --I've always said I hoped I'd go out with the first blast.

Now I really know how true that is.

Thankful

For the sake of trying to get in a better place I need to think back over the past few years and be able to see ways that God has shown up for me and ways that I have been blessed.  Sadly, it seems to get more difficult everyday.  Not that He isn't showing up, it is just the frame of mind I'm in makes it difficult to recognize sometimes.  But there are things.  Things like moving us to this area.  This was not the house of my dreams and not at all what I was looking for or in an area I ever thought about living - but it was exactly what we needed and where we needed to be.  It's low maintenance with lots of storage and lots of privacy, a great place for the dogs and God knew that I needed to find my next door neighbor. He also knew that she needed to find me.  We needed each other.  She lost a son to a drug overdose 10 years ago.  She never talked about it and was somewhat stuck in her grief.  She had some of the same issues surrounding her son's death in that she could not openly discuss it and felt that she was deserted by friends and family over it and was expected to just get over it and move on.  It had been eating her up for 9 years when we finally started to talk.  Here she has found a safe place and I too, have found a safe place in her. 

Our church.  It still seems impossible for me to believe that at this age I could settle in that quickly and become so close to the people so fast.  We love the church and I look forward to going every week.  We now go on Wednesday's too and we enjoy a special relationship with the preacher and his wife.  I never thought we could ever fit in at another church after being where we were for 23 years.  I was on committees.  I had a regular job at the church.  We had keys to the church.  Here, I participate in the ladies ministry - my husband is on committees and is doing the job that our deacons handled at the other church and he has keys to the church. It is amazing to me how my husband is taking such an active role here.  It is like - this is where he always belonged.  He has come out of his shell and clearly this church is home to him.

I have more people here that I did there after 23 years.  When I moved here I thought I had only my best friend.  But I also have two granddaughters and their families, three cousins, my oldest and dearest friend and two new close friends and my sister is 37 miles closer than she was.  And my husband that never talked to anyone - now knows all the neighbors by name and walks over and talks to them??? 

We have doctors close and I have actually found a Physician's Assistant that I really like.  A good dermatologists, a really good Mohs surgeon and general surgeon, and one of the best hospitals and level one trauma center, and number one heart center is 13 miles from us.  A second newer hospital 9 miles away.  I found a counselor that is helping me after almost five years.  Now all we need is a new dentist that we really like and we have everything we need. There is shopping, doctors, hospitals, library, restaurants, post office, antique shops, a huge recreational lake and a college are all within 15 miles of us with no traffic.  As difficult as it was to wait for God to show us the right place - He absolutely did.  It was not what we were looking for and it was not where we were looking to be - but when the time got right, He brought us straight to it.  That is definitely something to be thankful for. 









          

What Grief Looks Like Today

I'm sure that almost five years in most people would think I would be well on my way out of the dark and while I am not in total darkness most of the time the shadows certainly still loom.

The thing is that I had been distracted for the most of that five years and while I have not tried to bury my grief in alcohol, drugs or the usual culprits I have, as I said once before, attempted with no success to "Type A" it into submission.

By nature I am a very logical, analytical person.  I'm a problem solver. A fixer. I assess the problem. Carefully consider my options. Gather my resources.  Attack.  So I set about to survive this the only way I knew how.  I have systematically gone through my bag of tricks, the things that have worked for me in the past with lesser trials --what else could I do?  I have no point of reference for such an enormous tragedy.  It's not like I can look back and say "Oh yeah, the last time this happened I did this or oh yes, when this happened to my friend Trina, she got through it by doing  that."

Nope.  Flying by the seat of my pants here.

So I have approached it striking at it with everything within my reach.  If I haven't gone through this before and no one I know has gone through this before so then we take the circle wider.  Surely somebody has gone through this before?  Right?  Not that I can find.  I know they have but nobody is talking about it.  That's because it is a taboo subject.  Because they are shamed into silence.  Because the last thing on earth you want to do is publicize it and draw attention to yourself.  Therefore there is no support out there that I can find for families of tragedies and the aftermath of this nature.  No websites.  No Blogs.  No How-to YouTube videos to instruct you on how you live through this and salvage what's left of your life and sanity. So logically --again I regroup.  What resources can I use that may be "close" to this? And the best I could come up with is grabbing a little here and a little there and piecing them into a weird mosaic of self-help.

I have read books - piles and piles of books searching, learning, taking notes looking desperately for that one magic book that is going to help me to dig out of this.  If I just keep reading surely I will find one that can: give me hope, give me inspiration, tell me how others have made it through, show me how to recover my faith in prayer, my trust in law enforcement, find my confidence in my abilities or fix my family.

We had shame and judgment from a murder accusation so I find a book about a mother whose son goes to prison for shooting someone.  How did she cope?  How did she maintain her sense of self?  How did she face the public?  How did she fight for her son? Does she tell people and if so, how?

We had a media circus and circumstances with the investigation that made us lose faith in our justice system so I find a book about a couple that lost their precious child and then were promptly thrown into defense mode when they were the first and only suspects.  How did they survive it?  How did they walk around in public when they were so well recognized from the media circus that was created from their tragic circumstances?  How were they ever able to even grieve their child when their lives and family and freedom were on the line from day one?  How did they ever trust law enforcement again?  How did they ever find their faith?

We had the death of multiples, that resulted in other families losing loved ones.  As a result we bore undeserved guilt so I find another about a mother whose son was a famed school shooter.  She was hated. Stalked. Not allowed to grieve her son.  Thrown in to a nightmare of a life.  How did she cope?  How did she find beauty from the ashes?  How did she survive?

Then I start breaking it down into the individual parts; books on surviving a tragedy;  books on losing a child; books on grief in general; books on Complicated Grief, books on Disenfranchised Grief. (I had never even heard that term before I was living it.) Then I moved onto faith.  I found a book about faith in the face of tragedy, Finding Hope in horrible circumstances, How to let God fight your battles and on and on.

What I have learned is that there are others that have it worse than me and that you cannot fix an illogical circumstance with logic.  You cannot stop grieving your family by reading a book or a hundred books.  Grief is not dealt with by systematically checking things off of a list.

I have been in survival mode for so long until I forgot how to come out.  "Breathe.  Put one foot in front of the other.  Do the next thing.  Keep busy."  And part of my survival tactic was to not look this full in the face and feel what I feel.  I ran desperately from my feelings because the pain was unbearable and I was afraid if I let myself fully absorb all of this I would sink to a place I could not come back from.

What does grief feel like today?  It feels like sadness. Fear. Shame. Guilt. Sorrow.  Remorse.  Frustration.  Hopelessness. Deep, deep emptiness. Pure physical pain. Confusion. Crazy. Anger. Betrayal. Lethargy. Mistrust. Insecurity.  And did I mention crazy? 

Sadness for the huge loss of my youngest son, the life of the party, the practical joker, the loving and loyal dad whose love and many talents are now wasted.  Sadness for the loss of the baby that I finally let myself relax and love with abandon.  How I miss those tiny hands and feet and how I long to bury my face in his soft baby hair and smell that sweet baby smell, to hold him, rock him, roll fire trucks with him and hear him laugh hysterically when we play hide and seek behind the sofa pillows and I finally "find" him, watch him run a million miles down my driveway pushing his toy. And how sad I feel at the waste of the life and talent and beauty and blatant honesty that was my daughter in law - she loved life so much and it was cut short before she had a chance to even live it. And sadness and deep guilt for her parents; the only other people in the world that know our same loss.

Fear of literally everything now.  I went from fearing nothing in the beginning when I didn't have enough sense to care --to fearing everything as my world is now so shaky, unpredictable, temporary, unstable and small. 

Insecure as my innocence in believing such as this could never happen to us has been forever shattered and I now live knowing my world can be rocked beyond belief with one phone call.  All of my life I'd believed God would surely protect my family like I prayed. I know now that is not true. You can pray till the cows come home and the worst of the worst can still happen.

Shame, Guilt & Remorse because I chose not to see them; guilt that I couldn't have fought harder for the truth because I felt I had to put the living above the dead; shame because my logical mind thought of that; guilt because there is another family has this same god-awful pain and loss and they believe my son caused it...

Anger at myself first and foremost for not having the strength it took to see them or keep up the fight for the truth; anger at the Sheriff's Department, anger at the Deputy Coroner, anger at the media, anger at everyone that had ever hurt Brian, anger at the general public that did not think I should love and grieve my son.  Anger at God and then add that to the top of the list of things I'm angry at myself about.

This is what it feels like today.  And still it is soooooo much better than it was.

Another Wave...

I have told you of several really weird and unexplainable things that happened early on like the incident with the pendulum on the clock, Siri asking if I wanted to ask her: "Where is Brian?" etc. All of that happened early on and there has been nothing odd or unexplainable since.

However, until a couple of months ago when another weird thing happened.  My phone battery had depleted while I was in the car without my charger and the phone went completely dead.  I had to wait till I got home to plug it in and let it charge a while before it would even boot up.  When it finally did and I picked it up to use it there was an email on the screen as if it had just come in.  I opened the email and it was from --Brian; from five years ago --on his birthday!  It said:

"He's saying: "Here comes another one." He's talking about a wave."

Well this didn't make sense out of context so I had to go back through five years and thousands of emails to find and read the email string that lead up to this to see that he is referring to a video he sent me of Paxton at the beach.  I'd sent him one saying that I couldn't understand what the baby was saying in the video and this email was his answer to that.  But it was just those words:

"He's saying: "Here comes another one." He's talking about a wave."

Well I have referred as have many others to grief coming in waves and I have also referred to this being like a shipwreck with me being overcome by the waves so this was unnerving to say the least.  Here comes another one?  Oh God, I hope and pray not --but let me tell you, it totally rattled me.  I tried to blow it off and try and get on with my day but the weirdness of the fact that out of literally thousands of emails that sit on my email account - an email from five years ago, from my son that died five months after that, on what turned out to be his very last birthday shows up on my phone screen as if it were brand new and unread - was strange enough but "this" being the actual message of that email?  Beyond weird.

Well I finally settled down about it and chalked it up to a freaky weird coincidence when two days later it happened again.  Same deal.  Email shows up on my phone screen like a brand new email.  I open it.  It is from Brian.  Same exact email now a second time.  The following week I get an error message on my screen that said:  "your text could not go through."  Well...I had not sent a text.  I opened the error message and it lead me to the actual text it was referring to... and it was the last text I ever sent to Kara; asking "Are you okay?"  She was not.  I had been texting both of them alternately all morning with no answer and that was my last text to her before I sent someone to the house to check on them.

But again "this" a few months shy of five years ago! And believe it or not - that too, actually happened a second time a week later.  And this past Monday - I got the email from Brian now a third time!  This has never happened with any other emails as long as I have had a smartphone. Never.  And now out of thousands of archived emails - this one email has come up on my screen as if it had just been received - three times! And I have also never had an error message come up like that and did not in fact even get that error message the day or days shortly after I sent it.  But I get it twice almost five years later and within days of the emails from Brian???

That is crazy and I really do not know what to make of it.

Mother's Day

Here we are yet another Mother's Day. My fourth since losing Brian.  It seems each year I have fewer and fewer children in my life. Brian was missing Mother's Day 2015.  By 2016 I'd lost my relationship with my oldest son too.  And by 2019 my relationship with my daughter is destroyed as well. So by the fourth Mother's Day after this loss I'd lost all three.  Not the same loss thank God but gone just the same.  So does that even qualify me a mother anymore?

Traumatic death and unresolved grief - the gift that keeps on giving.

It's been quite a year.

I retired after 35 years in commercial insurance and over 50 years of working a public job. And since I retired...

I watched my dear friend for over 55 years succumb to lung cancer while her daughter and I sat by her side in the hospice.

Shortly thereafter, my daughter quit speaking to me.

My sister almost died in December.  She went by ambulance to the hospital with a temperature of 105.  She spent the next two weeks in ICU totally unconscious on total life support.  Her organs began to shut down and her body temperature dropped to 73.
She was dying.

With literally thousands praying for her and a God-sent nursing staff on Christmas Eve she awoke from a coma and after two more weeks in the hospital she was released to a slow and arduous recovery that is still in process six months later.

The night after they had called all the family in not expecting her to live - my son calls me in a rant. He doesn't ask about my sister shows no sympathy and no concern but cusses me out and hasn't spoken to me since.

I spent a day in the ER --my second time ever in 65 years.

It took me four years to try and recover from the hurt and betrayal and attempt to reclaim the lost relationship with my best friend of 42 years...and one conversation for her to tear it down again.

After almost five years.  I finally have an appointment "this week" to see a counselor and I have finally given in two months ago to antidepressants.  I fought it for four and a half years but that is a long time to wake up and realize after all that time I was no better.  I still had no will to live and no interest in life. The depression was killing me and I was killing every relationship I ever had.  I was not sleeping.  I was eating myself to death and my blood pressure was out of control.

That said, things were not all bad.

The antidepressants have been a God-send.  I wish I had allowed myself to get help long ago.

Though I still lost my friend, because I had retired three weeks earlier I was able to go and be with her and her daughter when she died.  She did not die alone.  She was in a wonderful compassionate place with the two people she would have chosen to be with her.

Though my sister almost died - she didn't.  She shocked the doctors and the nurses and  against all odds came out of it and with apparently no damage to her vital organs which they did not believe possible.  She is now not only walking again but driving now.  Thank God for the miracle we witnessed with her.  I know she was a testimony to the power of prayer and the grace of God to a lot of the staff at the hospital too.

The antidepressants have helped me.  And I am finally getting sleep and by pure "accident" due to a recall of my BP Medicine I was put on an alternate that after 20 years finally has my BP under control and totally normal.

And though I don't have my other two children and nothing can replace them, my church family and my extended family and old friends and new have come along side me to pick up the slack and keep me from going this alone.

God is good after all.

Too many coincidences

I understand that I am a mother and that it is natural that I would want someone to blame for this.  But I assure you that I had more than one reason to feel there should have been a more thorough investigation.


Though I knew my son and I knew on day one that this was absolutely not possible as the months went by I had more and more reason to question the conclusion of the investigation.


As mentioned before the police entered through the only ground floor window that lead to a finished room in the basement.  The window was actually open though it appeared locked. It was just pulled down to appear that it was secured just as someone might do that was exiting the home and wanted everything to appear normal and secured.  Both doors securely locked and dead-bolted and yet the one and only ground floor window - virtually open?  The window hidden from view behind large shrubbery.  That is the same window the police entered the home through and yet the reason they gave us for saying Brian was the shooter?  No sign of forced entry...


It took me ten months to get the police report.  I was denied access to it on multiple occasions though it is my right by Georgia law.  The report however, showed very little.  They charged me nine dollars for 30 pages of what appeared to be about five copies of a few identical pages and on each almost all text was redacted - crossed through in bold black marker.  August 24, 2014, when the police left the home after their investigation a short list of what was taken from the scene was left on the coffee table in their home.  My son in law brought it to me when he retrieved their computers and cell phones from the house. The item on that list that jumped out at me was: two spent shell casings from a 9mm gun.  Two.  Three people shot but only two shell casings recovered.  That is a very loose end.


Days later the house was professionally cleaned by Serve-Pro and everything gone over with a fine toothed comb.  No third shell casing was ever found.  There was no carpet in the entire house only hard floors so nothing was going to be lost or camouflaged in carpet and still no third spent shell casing was ever found and I know this because I called the supervisor in charge at Serve-Pro and asked.


If no one was alive to leave the house - how did one get missing?  I repeatedly asked that question but never received an answer.  Ten months after the tragedy that took the lives of my children I was finally able to get a copy of the report.  It contained just a tiny bit more information than we already knew but the main piece of information it contained was that the missing shell casing was noted on that report and it was the shell casing to the bullet that killed Brian...


Not quite three months after my children died my 82 year old neighbor also a long time resident of Paulding County had a heart attack in his driveway.  As he fell he hit his head against the bumper of his truck and his poor wife found him when she returned from a ministry meeting later that morning.  When the police and emergency crew arrived the police on the scene actually asked her if she thought he had any reason to have harmed himself.  Suicide? By throwing himself down on the bumper of his truck?  His wife was livid.


Four months after my children were killed - in a county that covers 315 square miles and has a population of 142,763 an 18 year old boy was found shot to death in his car one mile from my son's home. A week later a twelve-year veteran of the sheriff's department and veteran of the military was found shot to death also apparently in the middle of the night along with his wife and twelve year old daughter and 21 year old son - also deemed murder/suicide.  This happened about eight miles from my son's home.  Three different instances of murder less than 10 miles apart, all within a four month period.  Just a coincidence or could it be that there is perhaps just a murderer on the loose in that area. 


Another common denominator - Young adult males all around the same age, all in the same geographical area, all could have known some of the same people.


About six weeks after the kids died I hear of an incident told to my daughter in law's mother.  I knew Kara was the one that insisted on buying a gun for protection but I had never known why.  She says she feared for their safety after an acquaintance of Brian's teenage son came to the door demanding that he send his son out.  The boy was angry and cussing and threatening the son. She said, Kara was terrified and called the police to come immediately. At that time Brian, 38 years old had never owned or fired a gun in his entire life.  He kept only a baseball bat as protection.  He grabbed the baseball bat as the boy tried to push his way in the door to come in after Brian's son.  He did not use it of course but held it to discourage the boy from coming in.  He told the boy that the police were on the way and he had better leave.  The boy turned to leave and as he got almost to his car he turned and screamed back at him "This is NOT over!  I will come back here and kill you and your whole damned family!"


They went right out and bought two guns and went to the local firing range to learn to shoot them. According to the police Brian sold his the year before.  Kara carried hers in her car.


They moved into the new house shortly thereafter and three years later on August 23 in the middle of the night Brian and his whole family are killed...


Two years prior to this Brian's 16-year old daughter ran away from home and was staying at her boyfriend's house.  Brian found out where she was and called the police to come and assist in getting his daughter out of the house and home.  They did.  At that time, the policemen on the scene warned the boy's mother that she was a minor child and she was interfering with custody and could get in serious trouble for allowing her to stay there.  They told the mother if it happened again - she could be arrested.  Less than a month later it happened again.  A second time Brian called for help to get his daughter home safe and a second time Paulding County came to his rescue.  He did not press charges, nor did he want the woman locked up but since she had been officially warned previously the police arrested the boy's mother.  The boy was furious cussing and screaming threats at Brian "and included his family" that night also.  This I did know about.  Paulding County would have also known about it.


The same day that they were all found dead - that same boy was arrested for the first time ever.  And he has been in and out of jail almost constantly since that day... 


This is on record.


Paulding County helped Brian get an emergency custody hearing before a judge when his son was put out of the car and left on the side of a deserted road at 16 by his mother.


At 14 his daughter also chose to come to live with him.  Paulding County DFACS came to their home on several occasions to do home welfare visits when he and Kara had called them so that he could get temporary custody in order to be able to enroll her in school.


They noted on the incident report from the day they were found that there had never been a call to that home for any sort of domestic violence and Brian had been a resident of Paulding County since he bought his first home there at 21 years old.  The only calls they had ever had were from him concerning the safety and protection of his children. 


He had never laid a hand on any woman ever.  He could hardly even put his children on restriction.  He had never been in any kind of trouble in his life and had nothing more serious than a minor traffic violation in 41 years.


In the officers own words - "The house was immaculate and nothing appeared to be out of place.  It looked as if they had all put on pajamas and just gone to bed."


Just saying that there appears to me to be at least cause for reasonable doubt.

So Many Things...

Still haunt me.  Here we are almost five years later and the ripple effects of this tragedy are still appearing.  The sum total of all of it are still today continuing to destroy my family and likely will as long as we all live.

The split second decision to deem this murder/suicide --made by the investigating officers of The Paulding County Sheriff's Department in the middle of a gruesome and horrific crime scene was decided based solely on the personal opinions of the officers on call that day.  Circumstantial evidence that would never fly under any other circumstances.  Loose ends that were never addressed.  Hard evidence that was ignored.  Forensic evidence that was never collected.  Not one ounce of proof was given to us.  Not one ounce of proof was ever found.  And no one cared.  They were the police.  We argued.  We begged.  We pestered.  To no avail.  They had the only say in it.  It was their job but they chose not to do it.  They assumed it wasn't important. He was dead.  He couldn't dispute it and they didn't have to follow standard protocol.  Brian wasn't important.  We, his family weren't important.  The fallout they left with that decision has ruined to the point of no return, our entire family.  "This" this horrific and unimaginable loss would have been alone, enough to destroy us but that along with this horrific, biased and blatant injustice - has pretty much finished us off.

I have given them the benefit of the doubt which is far beyond what they ever gave Brian.  I can imagine the horror that they all walked into that day.  I know it was awful.  It was mind-boggling.  It was devastating.  It was a scene that would have caused many of them nightmares for years to come. And I can absolutely understand how they could have come to that opinion early on.  Forty one year old man, beautiful, younger woman, two year old child all shot to death and the only one that was not in his bed was Brian.  I am not blind.  I can certainly see that the devastating scene would be enough to make you angry and make you want to jump to the obvious conclusion; call it like you see it and get out of there as quickly as possible.  I get it.  I do.

What I have a problem with is the fact that had he been alive, standing there holding the smoking gun things would have been far different.  He would have been read rights - because he would have rights.  He would have had the right to an attorney to defend him. He would have been allowed a trial by jury.  He would have had the chance to enter a plea and tell his side of the story.   They would have done a complete and thorough investigation albeit in the attempt to prove his guilt not his innocence.  But my point is they would have had to prove it; something they didn't feel necessary since he was also dead and couldn't defend himself.  They would have held interviews to get to know him and what he was like. They would have talked people on his job, long time friends, neighbors close by, they would have interviewed his family and come to know him through the people that knew him.

Had he been alive to deny it regardless of what they saw when they arrived - they would have had to follow up on the open ground floor window and check for shoe prints, finger prints, evidence of tampering with the lock.  They would have searched for any and all of the physical evidence on the scene, carefully logged it and sent it to the state crime lab for analysis.  They would have dusted for fingerprints. They would have checked his and her computers, phone records, email trails, text messages they would have searched extensively for hard evidence of a motive.  They would have made certain they had all of the spent shell casings and done a ballistics test on the gun and those shell casings.  Perhaps they would have had an expert to analyze the blood spatter, a forensic expert to check the gun powder residue or the blood on his clothes to see if it matched the victims blood.  Had they found drugs in the home - he would have had a toxicology test immediately and all drugs would have been carefully logged and become evidence in the case.

These are only fair.  These alone are the puzzle pieces that create the picture.  These are the protocol of our justice system.  If they were going to accuse him of a crime as serious as murder - they would have to have hard evidence --even if they walk in and find a suspect standing over the body and holding the gun.  It may be their educated opinion that he did it but that would not hold up in court.  While our justice system is not foolproof and it is certainly not perfect, in the vast majority of cases, it is fair and it works.  All I ever asked for; all I ever expected --was just the same investigation they would have given anyone - basically that they just do their jobs and not let our lives be totally destroyed based on their clearly and maybe even justifiably, biased opinions.

I am now and have always been aware of the fact that this - none of this - would ever make sense.  I understood fully that I may never know the why behind any of this and that I would likely never find "closure".  But I never asked the Sheriff's office to guarantee me "closure".   I only wanted Brian to have a fair trial even if their evidence had shown the exact same outcome.  No, it would not have brought them back, it would not have made losing my children any easier, it would not have brought me or my family a happy ending.  And I never thought it could. But it would have given us the truth to the best of their abilities.  Truth we could see.  Truth that would have provided some proof to us.  It would have given me the ability to sleep at night knowing I had done all I could in my power to see to it that he was given the benefit of the doubt in a fair and complete investigation.  I may have not spent the last four and a half years angry as I personally obsessed over all of the evidence that pointed to someone else being in that house that night.  Perhaps I would not have been constantly running everyone he ever knew past a "perk" test for motives and to see who fit the criteria and who did not; placing them all on my personal list of suspects, turning it over and over in my mind and grieving over all of the evidence that was right there and could have helped in a fair determination but knowing that it can now never prove or disprove anything because it was destroyed without ever having been considered.  I could have perhaps by now been able to find peace, sleep at night, enjoy holidays again, have hope and find the will to live.  Perhaps I would still have the security I once had in law enforcement and believe again in our justice system.  Perhaps my entire family would not have been totally destroyed by the lingering anger over the unfairness and injustice that plagues every one of us now and regrets we will all live with forever.

Had he lived and they needed to actually prove his guilt - things would have been very, very different and that is not right. When the truth was never pursued it was an insult and an injustice to all of them. Because he was not living he did not matter.  And because we were related to him, we did not matter so none of us were allowed to question or dispute their personal opinion. And because of that the memory and legacy of the best father I ever knew, along with the rest of our entire family was destroyed.  Of the irreparable damage that was inflicted on us August 24th 2014 only part of it was caused by the loss and our loss was multiplied ten times by the injustice caused by The County Sheriff's Department that day-- The very ones hired to "Protect and Serve".

If it could happen to anyone it could happen to everyone.