**Content Warning** This piece discusses sexual violence against children as well as the death of a child (resources available at the bottom of this page)
If you need help, call The National Sexual Assault Online Hotline in the US at 800-656-HOPE (1-800-656-4673). You can also find resources and get help online at RAINN (https://rainn.org).
The Stolen Innocence
The day started out like any other day. My daughter, Deondra Mae, was in the hospital again with pneumonia. My husband and I went home for just a little while to take a shower and change clothes. On the way back to the hospital, we stopped to grab something to eat. When we returned, my daughter told me that a doctor she had never seen before came in and examined her. He put his finger in her vagina and asked her if it hurt. I immediately called the nurse and demanded to know what the hell was going on. Why did the doctor come into my daughter's room and inappropriately touch her? The only reason she was in the hospital was pneumonia. Security came, and my daughter told them what happened. A trauma surgeon had molested my daughter while she was in the hospital at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. To find out, she wasn't the first child who had made this kind of accusation. There had been at least four other terminally ill girls with similar stories. Pointless to say, from that point on, we never left her alone again. We made sure to always have a sitter come in if we had to go home.
We filed a lawsuit against the doctor, and he went to jail, and we settled out of court for $150,000; only to have the courts put it into a trust fund until my daughter turned 18, which even her doctors argued she wasn't going to make it that long. The doctor only got six years for the crime that he committed. It seemed like the courts had let me down again. I feel his charge should have been life without parole. My life was like a two-sided coin, and one side was how I felt about myself, and the other side was what I wanted others to see.
Troubles on the Horizon
Carlton and I decided to get married on April 3, 1999, for the sake of my daughter, so she would have a father. We didn't marry for love, for God knows what we had wasn't love. We had a lot of problems in our relationship. But we managed to act like a family. My mother had moved out into her own place again, and we weren't on the best of terms.
In September 1999, I lived in a two-bedroom condo in Green Hills, which the courts had paid for me to stay in. It was a nice two-story condo with a large living room, dining room, kitchen, and half bath downstairs. Upstairs, it had two large bedrooms and a full bath. We had a deck overlooking a stream, and I would spend hours sitting and enjoying nature. I saw chipmunks, squirrels, and plenty of fish. It was refreshing to sit in amazement at God's creations.
But I continued to get high until one day, I decided to go to outpatient rehab through VITA at Vanderbilt Psychiatric Hospital. I completed the program and tested negative on my graduation day. I walked across campus to the children's clinic, where my daughter was with my mother, and they ended up admitting her into the hospital. A DCS worker was there to give me a drug screen, and she said it tested positive for cocaine. I told her that it was impossible because I had graduated from my program this morning with a negative drug screen, and all I did was walk across campus to the clinic. There was no way I could be testing positive, but she put it in her report that I had. The day my daughter was released from the hospital, a DCS worker was there to take my daughter from me and put her in foster care. I never got my daughter back. She died in a foster care home.
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