“Portland, We Have a Problem”
March 23, 2019
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It was a Sunday. Four weeks ago. We were coming home from a bike ride. For several months Sam had been building up his strength and the signs of his progressive healing were becoming obvious to both of us. During these months we did everything we could to make the best out of pretty grim circumstances. We embarked on a journey to help other TBI survivors. We formed an alliance with a national non-profit organization and began working with a world-renowned cycling apparel company to help further those efforts. Members of the Ultra Cycling community around the world also began to show their support. The love and kindness we were receiving from these people, who previously were complete strangers, was saving Sam’s life. We were starting to see glimmers of hope of a life that was not completely mired by tragedy.
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In the weeks leading up to that Sunday, Sam had been working on a new training route that went along a nearby stretch of countryside with a beautiful river crossing towards the end. We had been trying to make this a regular Sunday ride. He would ride his bike up, down, and around the hills and valleys, alongside ranches and land dedicated to remote vacation rentals, and I would follow in our SUV to protect him from other vehicles. We had an agreed stopping point where we would load the bike into the back of the SUV and then drive back home. While the distance was not quite the same as what Sam would have ridden on a daily training ride prior to the crash, it was more than he had been riding and we were building our way to longer distances.
On this particular Sunday, after loading the bike into the car, we decided to drive around what looked like the beginnings of a high-end master-planned community situated across the highway from our stopping point. Maybe 20 years from now the area will have extravagant second homes and luxurious getaways strategically placed throughout in expert master-planned fashion, but for now, it’s mostly an area with nicely paved roads that twist and turn through an otherwise relatively untouched thousand plus acres of southwestern Texas Hill Country. We had fun exploring and taking in the views, looking at the couple of houses that have been built, the various “for sale” signs for lots, and feeling so grateful for living in this area in the home we have made for ourselves.
On the final stretch home, we stopped by the mailbox, which, because we live in a remote area, is about a mile or so from our front door. That’s when I saw it. An envelope with a label that immediately told me it was something from Brady’s mother’s attorneys. My heart jumped up in my throat and the pit of my stomach suddenly hardened. We only recently discovered what actually happened with the court case Vikki (Brady’s mother) launched once the old man kidnapped Brady and took him to Vikki’s house. Apparently, the original court date that Sam was not well enough to attend (but that he submitted a twenty-something page declaration for) was moved; and, through a game of pretending not to know where Sam was, Vikki’s attorneys purposefully served the papers at the wrong address, including the order that issued afterwards, which was about as bad as a family court order could get. By playing the legal system, they took advantage of a brain-injured person and essentially tricked him out of his son. We were still in the process of trying to deal with that order and then suddenly, on a sunny Sunday afternoon, I find myself staring at the same attorney’s address label. For the first time the label was addressed to us at the right address; an address she pretended not to know the last time she was supposed to send us what turned out to be the most devastating piece of paper I have ever laid eyes on.
For a split second I debated on whether we should wait until Sam had at least taken a shower and possibly a nap before dealing with this. But instead, I blurted out the news, and before I knew it, I was holding my breath as I opened the envelope.
A quick glance revealed this was a court document. At the top of the page was a case caption that told me this was something involving Brady. Then I began reading the title of the document: “Motion to Dismiss for Lack of Standing…” what??!! I skimmed the document long enough to learn that apparently Sam’s father, the old man, was now going after Vikki…for custody of Brady. And, he was trying to do so without Sam’s knowledge, once again abusing the legal system to deceive his own son and, ultimately, his own grandson.
How could this be? What on Earth could possess this unemployed pre-Alzheimer’s 69-year old with a well-known drinking problem, who never had custody of his own kids, and who now faces a potential SEC investigation, to believe he should have custody of his grandson? Though we can only attempt to understand his behavior the way one tries to understand the mind of a serial killer when watching a crime-based documentary, we have concluded that two main things have emboldened the old man to this level of lunacy: his vengeful and hateful ego, and his cat-litter-of-a-soul wife.
Upon further investigation, we discovered that not long after Vikki and the old man colluded to alienate Brady and take him from Sam, the wheels started to catapult off the crazy train. Though we suspected the bond between these two former enemies would have a limited shelf-life, having had absolutely no communication with any of them, we were not privy to any of the details…until now.
As it turns out, within months of Brady being taken to Vikki’s, Vikki’s latest husband, moved out of their house. Within another several months, Vikki filed for divorce seeking claim to the house he bought, all of his money, and even his car. Vikki, who has not had a steady job in about a decade, apparently believes she is entitled to be supported by whatever man or woman she happens to have recently slept with. Then, suddenly within a few more months, Vikki decided she wanted to move across the country and take Brady with her. Where exactly and when? There was no telling from what we could see. All we know is she set her eyes on a certain state in the Pacific Northwest where marijuana is legal. Details beyond that are nonexistent. Although the specific location is not revealed, what was clear from the documents was that this act of defiance against the old man sent him into orbit. And now we are seeing these two unstable people, the old man and Vikki, who shared not a love for Brady but a hatred for Sam, turn against each other in an epic battle, once again proving the old adage to be true, “there is no honor among thieves”.
What we read in the papers told a familiar story. Apparently, the old man attempted to carry out a similar pattern against Vikki that he carried out against Sam a year and a half before. As he did with Sam, the old man pitted Brady against Vikki, filling him full of more venom than he already had towards a mother that for most of his life had abandoned him. As he did with Sam, the old man contacted CPS with allegations of abuse and started taking Brady from school without Vikki’s consent. The old man’s accusations of child abuse against Vikki, however, included allegations of drug use, child neglect, and endangerment occasioned by having loaded guns strewn around the house.
The thing is, with the exception of the guns, all of the things the old man is now accusing Vikki of are things he knew about her before he kidnapped Brady from Sam and took him over there without Sam’s consent. The old man has always known that Vikki had a habit of driving around under the influence and with drugs in her car. The old man has always known that Brady would come home from Vikki’s disheveled, unbathed, and unfed. The old man has always known about the real child abuse Vikki subjected Brady to when Brady was younger. For example, when Brady was 4 years old, Brady told Sam and his pediatrician that Vikki slapped him in the face repeatedly and held his head down on a glass coffee table in a fit of rage, and on numerous occasions left him alone in her apartment, telling him to “be brave” and take care of himself while she went out to run errands, walk her dog or smoke cigarettes with her friends. This conduct resulted in Vikki having to have court-ordered supervised visitation, and the old man knew about all of this. The old man knew about subsequent violent episodes Vikki had with Brady, one of which landed Brady in the emergency room the summer before Sam’s crash, in which Vikki told Brady not to tell Sam and to lie about what happened to him if ever asked. But when it served the old man’s interests, he took Brady from his safe and stable home (with Sam) and dropped him off at Vikki’s Den of Chaos. When it served the old man’s interests, he manipulated, brainwashed, and used Brady as a tool to take out his own vengeance against Sam. And, now, he is doing the same thing again, but against Vikki. None of this, however, has ever had anything to do with Brady’s best interests—it’s all been about the old man’s ego and untreated mental illness.
How does Cathleen, the current wife, fit in? Never before in Brady’s entire life had the old man tried anything so bold. In fact, every time he had a blow up with Sam, he’d simply disappear and not even attempt to reenter Sam and Brady’s life for months or sometimes years at a time. But for Sam repeatedly extending olive branches to the old man (and, eventually getting hit by a car), he never would have reentered Sam and Brady’s life. The point is, never before Sam’s crash did the old man try and take Brady from Sam or Vikki. He knew Sam was a far better father than he ever could have hoped to be, and he knew Vikki was train wreck.
How then, did the old man become so bold so as to first knock Sam out of the way, take Brady to Vikki’s, and now pull the same moves against Vikki to get Brady to himself? For starters, it simply had not served the old man’s self-image to try to take Brady away until more recently. After all, he spent most of his adult life chasing damaged or vulnerable women in a grandiose effort to convince the world (as he saw it in his mind) that he wasn’t gay. Apparently, he rationalized collecting trophy women as a way to cancel out his use of male escorts. Maybe he thought it gave him plausible deniability if anyone were to ever publicly question his sexuality. Regardless, none of the women he had been with prior to Sam’s crash would ever have encouraged the old man to try and destroy his own son and grandson. This is where Cathleen fits into the picture. Venomous, self-righteous, and cut from the same cloth as the old man, Cathleen is a perfect counter-part for someone already prone to bad behavior. Like the old man, Cathleen’s personal life is marked by disappointment, including ruined relationships with some of her own adult children, a checkered post-divorce past, and delusions of grandeur highlighted by a hero complex. Cathleen is one of those women who would make a perfect villain in a movie; the kind you hope befalls a tragic death as soon as possible because she is that evil. The timing of when she married the old man helped too. She married the old man the year before Sam’s crash and during that first year of marriage Sam and the old man were not on speaking terms. This means she had a full year of listening to the old man complain about how much he hated Sam before Sam’s near death experience inspired Sam’s mother to call the old man and bring him back into Sam’s life. With Cathleen by his side, the old man gained new hate-driven confidence to do whatever he could to destroy his son who had embarrassed him for so many years. After all, Cathleen treated her own adult children like garbage—she was a perfect model for the old man to learn from.
Aside from Cathleen, another and perhaps more significant contributing factor to the old man’s newfound “courage” was that Sam got run down by a car, nearly lost his life, and was left with Traumatic Brain Injury. It’s noteworthy that it was not until Sam became disabled that the old man had the “courage” to retaliate against Sam for all the times Sam pointed out to him that he was breaking the law, or the time Sam discovered the old man’s dirty little secret of cheating on his wife with male escorts, or the time Sam stood up to the old man for being an unreliable flake in Brady’s life.
In other words, the old man’s boldness does not come from a place of courage, it comes from some dark corner where it is somehow okay to take advantage of disabled people and it is somehow okay to treat a child like an instrument to manipulate and hurt others, and it is somehow okay to lie, cheat, and steal your way through life. This is how the old man has convinced himself that his depressing dark hole of a life is where Brady belongs.
Oh, and as though all of this is not enough to make us want to invest in a vomit bag company for the sake of the discount, within days of receiving the news of the old man trying to get custody of Brady from Vikki, we also learned that Catherine, Sam’s mother and the old man’s ex-wife from over 38 years ago, has been helping the old man’s recent attempts from behind the scenes. Before we learned about the battle erupting between the old man and Vikki, but after the battle had ensued, Catherine sat down at a restaurant with me, looked me in the eyes as she professed her belief that the old man was wrong in what he did to Sam and Brady, told me how sorry she was she never stood up for the truth and that she ever let the old man take Brady in the first place, and she even sent an apology text to Sam shortly thereafter. Catherine The Not-So-Great, who has lived a life of chasing after emotionally unavailable men, usually alcoholics who help her play the martyr for being with such disasters (except for her second husband, who was a hard-working, self-made success, who she falsely accused of abuse when he grew tired of her instability), apparently continues to carry out her ex-husband’s bidding. It’s no wonder the old man behaves as though he has a God complex—he literally has his ex-wife acting as a spy and soldier for him. These two have been working together to take advantage of their brain-injured son so that they could keep their grandson all to themselves. It’s sick. It’s also textbook parental alienation, which is child abuse. And the reason Catherine won’t try to get Brady for herself by herself—simple, aside from generally not genuinely caring about anyone other than herself, she has yet another alcoholic living with her. This one has a handful of DWI convictions, has been known for going on such severe benders that he ends up in the hospital for days at a time due to his drinking, and was someone so unstable that when Sam knew him before the crash, he did not allow Brady to be around him due to concerns for Brady’s safety. Yes, I know this is a lot, and it might sound unbelievable to some, but it’s all so devastatingly and shockingly true.
For the years of his life before Sam’s crash, Brady’s life was already prone to a certain level of challenge because his mother was a diagnosed sociopath who flitted in and out of his life without warning. But Sam was able to protect Brady from most of the consequences of that situation because, for thirteen years, Sam provided Brady a stable and loving home. It was the old man coming into the picture that changed everything. By alienating Brady from Sam and driving a wedge between them, then taking Brady to the same person’s house that the old man himself had talked about being such a danger to Brady that he thought she should have her rights terminated, the old man created this situation where now that same woman can take off with Sam’s son and move to another state, never to be seen again.
So, what’s next? We’ll have to tell you in the next post. As we write this today, we have no idea what the future will hold. All we can say is that as we move through this, we continue to hope with every cell in our bodies that truth and love will prevail and bring Brady back into our lives. And, we humbly ask that if there is anything you can do to help, even if just with words of encouragement and support, please help us. We need every bit of positivity, love, and support we can get as we take our next steps through unchartered territory. We have no idea what to expect, but what we know is that through a series of sickening events, a man and his son have been torn apart and ripped away from each other, and we want to do everything we can to bring them back together.