“Nate, what makes you most sad? Mrs. Bowen? Amelia being so sick? Your mother taking off? Or is it something else?”
He shrugged, and he didn’t say a word. He looked out the window, at the trees with their yellow and red leaves. He was quiet for quite a long time, as we drove along for a good 20 minutes without him saying a word.
We got to the basketball court where I was going to drop him off. “Here you go, buddy. There’s a bunch of kids already playing a pickup game, so go on over there and get into it. I’ll come get you when I’m done with my new client.”
He got his ball, and zipped up his hoodie. He nodded his head. “I’ll see you, dad.” He ran towards the court, and I saw him get in with the other guys.
It was a short drive to Mrs. Blackwood’s house. It was a smallish ranch that was probably built around 1980, maybe before. It was white with green shutters, and there was an enormous oak tree in her front yard that had dumped a thick blanket of leaves that needed to be raked. It was 5 o’clock, so it was almost completely dark, but there was still a little bit of light.
Mrs. Blackwood apparently saw my headlights, because she opened the door before I ever got up to her stoop. She was an attractive woman, in her mid-to-late 50s. Her hair was greying slightly, and she wore it short. She wore glasses that were thick framed, and she was dressed in a hot pink jacket and black pants. She looked like she had kept in shape over the years, for she was slim and muscular. She wore no makeup, but she really didn’t need to. Her skin was unwrinkled and smooth.
“Mrs. Blackwood, it’s a pleasure to meet you,” I said as I shook her hand.
“Please, don’t call me Mrs. Blackwood. I should have told you that over the phone. My name is Audrey. I’m actually excited to meet you as well.”
I was definitely encouraged by the fact that she said that she was excited to meet me. Specifically, I was encouraged because she used the word excited. “Okay, Audrey. And you could go ahead and call me Damien.”
“Damien, please step into my humble home.”
Inside the home was a small living room with hardwood floors, a big screen TV, and several small red couches. I could smell the scent of burning incense, some kind of patchouli. There was a small cage in the corner of the living room, and a green and yellow parakeet chirped excitedly when I walked in the door. Also greeting me at the door were a pair of yellow labs, both of them female. They came up to me and wagged their tails and sniffed my crotch, and Audrey shooed them away.
“I’m so sorry, I’ve been trying to train them not to do that, but you know how they are.”
I laughed. “Not a problem. Not a problem at all. I happen to love dogs. I don’t mind when they sniff me. They’re just trying to make sure that I’m not a bad guy. I guess that they can tell that from my scent, although I don’t know how that’s possible.”
“Well, I don’t know if they can tell if you’re a good guy or not by your scent, but they certainly can tell by your body language and other signals. Dogs are good like that. They can always tell if you’re friend or foe. And I hope that you’re a friend. I could certainly use a friend right now.”
I sat down on one of the red couches, and she sat down on the other end of it. She poured me a glass of cucumber water, and handed it to me. I sipped it, and got out my notepad.
“Now where do you want to begin?” she asked me.
I cleared my throat. “You told me quite a bit over the phone, but I’m interested in knowing a few more things. One of the things that a judge or jury’s gonna look for in a wrongful death case is whether or not it was foreseeable that your daughter would have killed herself over the actions that Michael Reynolds took against her. Once we can establish that her killing herself was foreseeable, it’ll be a matter of damages. That is, if the jury believes that his actions were the proximate cause of her committing suicide. It’s a complicated issue, I won’t lie. Many times when people commit suicide, there are a lot of reasons why they do it, not just one. But, in this case, his act against her was so egregious that I think we have a good chance to prevail.”
“What would the jury be looking for when they award damages?”
“They can award damages on the basis of pain and suffering, and also they can award damages based upon the value of her life. In other words, they can extrapolate how much she would’ve made over the course of her life, and that could be how they would calculate damages. Also, in this case, since it was an intentional act, we can get punitive damages, which can be many millions of dollars. Of course, that all hinges upon whether or not we can prove the proximate cause issue, as well as the foreseeability issue. The proximate cause issue is probably more important than the foreseeability issue, but they’re both important.”
At that, she handed me a copy of her daughter’s suicide note. “You can see it here in this note. She said that she felt humiliated and degraded, and she felt that she had lost everything because this video was made public. She talks about how ashamed she was about the video. She talks about how her pediatric practice was her life. It was her calling. She really cared about those kids that she treated, and it wasn’t just a paycheck. When she lost her practice, she felt that she was losing herself. Her identity. She didn’t know who she was anymore. She wrote all of that in this note. It’s all there.”
She gave me about 10 minutes while I read through the entire note. It was a good note, for the sake of establishing causation, because there was nothing in the note that talked about anything other than how she felt about the video. There was nothing about her wanting to kill herself because of other reasons, such as failed love affairs, or lifelong depression, or anything like that. It was pretty clear that the video and what happened after it made her feel that life was not worth living, that when she lost her practice she lost herself, and that she was full of shame and humiliation.
“This suicide note is tragic. And I’m very sorry for your loss,” I said. “If I can be absolutely cold about it, I will say that it provides good evidence of her mental state at the time when she killed herself. Now, you knew her well. What kind of person was she before this incident happened?”
Audrey took a deep breath, and hung her head. “That’s another thing. My daughter was a shy person. She really couldn’t come out of her shell with most people. That was the reason why she liked her kids so much – the kids that she cared for at her practice. She related much better to them than she did to most adults. She was a beautiful girl, but I will have to say that she always had a bit of a sadness about her. I don’t know exactly why she was so sad over the years, but she was. I tried to have her treated for clinical depression over the years, but nothing ever really took.”
Somehow, the words that she was speaking to me hit home. I wondered if it was going to be the same thing with Nate. Was he always going to be just a depressed guy, isolating himself away from other people his age, never making a meaningful connection? Would he end up with the same fate as poor Carrie Blackwood, killing himself at the age of 32?
“Has it always just been you and Carrie?”
Audrey nodded her head. “Her dad was around for the first six months of her life, then he took off. He went for the proverbial pack of cigarettes, and never came back. I never got child support out of him, even though I had orders against him for years. He never saw her after he left, either. I heard that he ended up in Wyoming, living out in the woods like some kind of crazy suicide bomber. At least, that’s what his sister told me. But I don’t personally know what happened to him, because I haven’t talked to him since she was a baby.”
I felt so sad for this woman. Carrie was probably her pride and joy. She became a physician, and I was sure that Audrey was very proud of her daughter. It was evident that Carrie was all this woman really had in her life.
“Now, do you know how Carrie managed to meet up with Michael Reynolds?”
“ No. I don’t really know. As far as I knew, Carrie didn’t date a whole lot. She was more into her practice than socializ
ing. She never talked about any men. We were close, she came over at least twice a week for dinner. She would stay around and we’d chat, or watched movies together. But she never talked about Michael Reynolds or any other man.”
“What about suicide, did she ever talk to you about that sort of thing? That she wanted to kill herself?”
Audrey shook her head. “No. She never said anything like that. She never told me that she wanted to kill herself. In fact, I never saw any signs that she was that depressed. I mean, I know that she always had a kind of sadness about her, but I never thought for a second that she was that far gone. Believe me, if I would’ve known that she was, I would’ve tried to do something to intervene. Anything.” She looked down at her hands. “I’ve been seeing a therapist about this, because I blame myself. I blame myself for not seeing how far gone she was. About not seeing how devastated she was to find this videotape going viral. My therapist told me that I’m not to blame for her killing herself, but I feel like I am. I feel like I am.”
Once again, I thought of Nate. He was going down the road to where he was tempted to try drugs. And there was the warning that the antidepressants I was going to put him on might cause him to be suicidal. Would I be able to see the signs in time? Would I be able to stop it? If something ever happened to him, I didn’t think I would’ve been able to forgive myself. I’d have a hole in my heart so huge that I wouldn’t be able to recover. Yet, people who are on the edge of killing themselves don’t always reach out to their loved ones and tell them so. Carrie Blackwood apparently never told her mother. I had talked to other people who’ve lost their children through suicide, and they usually said the same thing – they had no idea that that their loved one was so depressed that they were on the verge of killing themselves.
I had to comfort myself with the thought that maybe Carrie Blackwood killed herself exclusively because of this videotape, and Nate obviously didn’t have something like that going on. But he did have the molestation of his teacher to contend with, not to mention all the other crazy things that had happened to him in his life the past few years. Was my son on the verge of getting to the point of no return? Would I be able to stop it? Those unanswered questions scared the living crap out of me.
“So what do you think about this case?” Audrey asked me. “Do you think we’re going to be able to hold this guy responsible for my daughter’s death?”
I took a deep breath. “I’m going to go ahead and file a lawsuit, and get him in for a deposition. I can ask him a lot of questions about his relationship with Carrie and how he knew her, and whether or not he understood that she was depressed and vulnerable. Now I don’t necessarily think he’s going to tell the truth, but I have a way of asking questions to where I can get at the truth, without the person even knowing it. Even if he comes across as somebody who clearly didn’t know that Carrie was suicidal, he had to have known that what he was doing was not just wrong, but illegal.
What I can’t really understand, however, is why it was the he chose to go ahead and post that video online. Usually in these things, it’s what’s known as revenge porn – that means that when one person breaks up with another person or does something that makes that person mad, that person will post a humiliating video online as a way of getting back at the person who wronged them. There are a lot of unanswered questions I have in this entire scenario. Why would he have posted the video online? How did they meet? Did he know that she was in such a state that she would do something like this?”
I didn’t want to tell her that I had another unanswered question - that maybe she didn’t know her daughter as well as she thought that she did. I could not discount the possibility that there was more to the story than what Audrey had realized.
However, I couldn’t lose sight of the fact that the main reason why I was doing this was to get some justice for Harper. This Michael Reynolds might be so slippery that he was able to get out of criminal charges for everything he’d done to hurt people, but I was determined that I was going to hold him to account for some of his wrongdoing. Maybe this was just a small thing, but if I could get a judgment against him for millions of dollars, especially if that ruined his life, then I would feel that some modicum of justice was done.
I left Audrey’s home, and went and picked up Nate. He saw me pull up to the basketball court, and he grinned a grin that was bigger than anything I had seen from him in a long time.
“Hey dad,” he said as he turned around and waved at the other guys on the court. They all waved back, and smiled, and some of them shouted that they hoped to see him around again.
“Buddy,” I said to him. “How did things go?”
“Good,” he said. “All those other guys were a little bit older than me, but they let me play. They all said I was pretty good. I actually feel good right now, dad. I think I feel better than I’ve felt in a long time.”
This gave me encouragement. I knew that Nate enjoyed basketball, but it never dawned on me that maybe that was something that he should really get involved with. He was a little young to be on the team at school, but at the same time, I knew that there were leagues where he could play. I wondered that if I could just get him really involved in the sport, that maybe, just maybe, that could be something that would get him out of his depression. That would be the best thing – get him involved in something that brings him out of his shell, and maybe I wouldn’t have to put him on the antidepressants.
We got in the car, and Nate sat next to me with the ball on his lap. He chatted to me excitedly about all the points he scored, and how he actually managed to make a three-pointer from the middle of the court. “I never knew I was so good at this, dad. The other guys were a lot bigger than me, but they were really liking me. I’d like to keep playing, dad.”
I tousled his hair, wondering if it was as simple as that. Growing up, I never had the opportunity to play organized sports. I was in reform school by the age of 13, because I was already committing crimes. Already running with a bad crowd. And the school that I went to didn’t really offer sports that much. The middle school did, but I was never in a real middle school, just the reform school. I wondered if I had a chance to play a sport that maybe I would not have turned out as bad as I did.
“I’ll see about getting you into a league for kids your age. Would you like that?”
Nate beamed. “I’d love that dad. Do you have time for that? Do you have time to get me to the practices and games and everything?”
“For you, buddy, I’ll make the time. No matter what.”
“What about grandma? What’s going on with her case? Aren’t you going to be taking a lot of time out for that?”
“I’ll make the time to make sure that you can play basketball. I have to make you a priority in my life. You and your sister. It’s just the three of us. And the two of you mean more to me than anything else in the entire world.”
I thought about Audrey Blackwood, and about how devastated she was. How empty she was. How I looked around her house, and I saw all the evidence of her love for her daughter, and now her daughter was no more. She had nobody else in the world. And I wondered how I would be if something like that happened to me – I lost my two kids. How broken I would be. I would be just as broken as Audrey Blackwood appeared to be.
I was going to do everything in my power to make sure that both my kids were safe and sound.
Chapter 8
The first thing I did the next day was my due diligence on the Tracy Dunham case. There were just a few things that were nagging at me. A few things that were not sitting well with me.
I wondered how it was that a pain management doctor would have become addicted to opioids. And I really wondered why it was that he would been taken street drugs, and not prescription drugs. Harper accused me of being naïve when I said that I thought that he would not be able to get ahold of prescription drugs, unless he had some kind of a diagnosable condition, even if he was a pain management doctor. After she accused me of being naïve,
I realized that she was probably right. There were ways he could have gotten ahold of opioids and been in possession of them.
One of the main ways was to get into a close relationship with a pharmaceutical rep, for the reps were the ones who typically gave out the drug samples to doctors when they would get a new drug in. The doctors could then give the samples to their patients. They were not supposed to take them themselves, but my research showed me that there were quite a few addicted doctors who would take those samples for themselves, whether or not they needed them.
However, this didn’t work with opioids. As a Schedule II drug, they were not given out as samples.
Addicted doctors also had access to pharmaceuticals because patients would turn over leftover pills to them for disposal. Doctors would then take those pills and pocket them. Sometimes, a particularly resourceful nurse or doctor would sell them on the black market. Doctors would also use their own prescription pad to write out a prescription to themselves and get it fulfilled at a pharmacy. That was clearly illegal, but doctors did it anyhow.
Granted, it was illegal for a doctor to pilfer pills in these ways. Doctors were not supposed to take advantage of any of these avenues to get pain pills. Yet, it seemed to be a common problem in the medical profession. That was how they got ahold of prescription drugs, which meant that they didn’t necessarily have to go on the black market and get actual heroin from a dealer.
Yet, Dr. Dunham apparently did get heroin from a dealer. From a street dealer. That was also illegal. So I wondered why it was that he just didn’t go the more safe, albeit still illegal route, of getting prescription drugs for his problem. I knew something about street drugs, and I knew that it was always a crapshoot when you got them. You never knew what was cut with those drugs – sometimes rat poisoning, sometimes Fentanyl, a drug that is 30-50 times more potent than heroin and is deadly to touch in its purest form. Other times, the dealer would sell drugs that weren’t very pure, and then another dealer might sell drugs that were much more pure. That was a reason for a lot of overdoses according to my research – a user might be used to a certain level of purity, which meant that if they got a batch that was more pure than what they were used to, it was too strong for them, and they overdosed.
Until Proven Guilty Page 6