Dear Casey – On your 11th angelversary, I share this letter I wrote about 100 days before you left us, not knowing the fireball that was about to come. Your guidance counselor at Redwood, Mr. Kelly, asked me to write about you so that he could incorporate it into his college recommendation; he was new and didn’t know you very well. Eleven years later I wouldn’t change a thing. You were about being true to yourself, being authentic and not selling out. You were a far bigger person than I ever was. I never showed this to you because I thought it might embarrass you. You will never ever ..read more

For years we’d dreamed of taking Casey to Europe to show her the sights. The high point – revisiting Poland, where she was born and where Erika’s family is from; a number of Erika’s cousins still live there. Unfortunately Casey had zero interest in her birth mother, her birthplace or Poland in general (unless of course Casey had found that she was descended from King Casimir himself.) So Erika and I made that journey without her. Though writing a book helped enormously in learning about the attachment issues that could’ve led to Casey’s demise, it didn’t dispel our obsession with learning ever ..read more

  Aaron Duffy is a friend of Casey’s who studied media arts at the prestigious New York University Tisch School of the Arts. I share videos and slideshows I’ve done on iMovie but Aaron’s work is on an entirely different plateau (as well it should be; NYU is to media what Julliard is to music.) His Youtube video, I Heart Casey, is a powerful and moving tribute to Casey as told through her Marin friends’ Facebook posts. Aaron has given me permission to share this. Erika and I have had the pleasure and privilege of getting to know Casey’s friends, and I can’t think of a more talented, comp ..read more

A photo slideshow for Casey’s tenth angelversary, 1/29/08 – 1/29/18.  ..read more

A great report I saw yesterday in my San Francisco Chronicle. Global effort to get kids out of orphanages gains momentum. Essentially, worldwide countries are moving from an orphanage to a group home/foster care type system. This is what the U.S. did after WWII and, to my knowledge, what Poland began in the early 2000’s. Group and foster homes are far from perfect but they are a vast improvement over orphanages. I estimate that the caregiver-to-child ratio in Casey’s Polish orphanage was roughly 10:1 which seems consistent with other reports. But that assumes each caregiver gives ea ..read more

Photo credit: San Francisco Chronicle I was stunned to read in my local paper, The San Francisco Chronicle, this morning about a story titled “Son gives emotional sex-abuse testimony” about a 24 year old young man named Denis Flynn, adopted from Russia, who was routinely sexually abused by his adoptive parents, Ralph and Carolyn Flynn. They are described as “two high level marketing executives” living in the wealthy Silicon Valley neighborhood of Los Gatos. Suffice to say that justice was served to Mr. and Mrs. Flynn. This is nauseating on so many levels. Of course sex abuse occurs in biolog ..read more

Though I’m hesitant to inject politics into this blog, I couldn’t help but shake my head over the GOP tax bill written by adoptive parent, Kevin Brady (R-TX), which does away with the adoption tax credit capped at $13,460 as reported here in the Washington Post. When my wife Erika and I adopted our daughter Casey in 1991, we paid about $15,000 in legal fees, all cash, plus travel costs. At that time we were a few years shy of the Adoption and Safe Families Act which was signed into law by President Bill Clinton in 1997. It would’ve been nice to have had that around in 1991 ..read more

evidenceinmotion.com One thing that became painfully clear to me in researching and writing The Girl Behind The Door is how much emotional baggage many (but not all) adopted people have, given their early separation. That trauma can sap ones coping skills, ability to self regulate, connection with others and sense of self, to name a few. Our 17-year-old daughter Casey, adopted at 14 months from a Polish orphanage, suffered from all of these before she took her life almost ten years ago, and yet my wife and I were utterly oblivious to the root cause – her infancy. We tried therapist after the ..read more

I am just posting this article I saw in my local paper yesterday (April 14, 2017) without comment ..read more

I’ve been invited back to Book Passage, 51 Tamal Vista Blvd., Corte Madera, to speak about my book, The Girl Behind The Door, which has been released by Scribner in paperback. It chronicles my search for answers to my daughter Casey’s suicide. Casey was a Redwood High School senior who leapt from the Golden Gate Bridge on January 29, 2008. My search led back to her infancy in a Polish orphanage, a trauma which we learned too late was likely at the root of her demise. Casey’s story has touched a great many readers, with two literary awards and over 100 extremely satisfied Amazon customers. Rece ..read more