The Dirty South

Hello and welcome to episode 6 of the Mind Deluge with your host Elizabeth Brousard. I want to dedicate this sixth episode to my son Austin. He was my world. He was my heart. He was my soul. It's hard to believe that it's actually been six years. Six years since I kissed him goodbye for the last time. Six years since I felt his heartbeat.

On Good Friday in 2019, my phone started ringing, like crazy. I thought it was my son and he thought he got in trouble because the number that was calling me was a Spartanberg number. You know, you never really expect to get a phone call that something happened to your child. I don't care what kind of neurotic parent you are, you never expect to get that phone call. I certainly didn't expect to get that phone call. Or maybe I secretly thought that phone call was coming. Probably more the second than the first.

You see, my son had developed a drug problem. Now, before you start judging his drug problem, he more had a life problem and the drugs just help him cope with life. You see, my son was heavily abused by my ex-husband. My ex-husband would do cruel things to him like stick him on uneven cans when I would go to school and then put thumbtacks right side up. So, if he fell off the cans or got off the cans, he would be met with thumbtacks. That was his punishment to my son. These punishments were terrible.

My daughter and my son would tell me about all of these horrible things that their adopted father was doing to them. And I kept thinking, "Okay, Beth, you got to figure out a way out of this. You got to figure out a way out of this." So, my son had endured years of abuse from my ex-husband. When I left my ex-husband, my son and my oldest daughter were just having all sorts of issues. They were sleeping with knives under their pillows. I asked them why they slept with knives under the pillow. They said, "Because if Dad comes in our room, we got to protect ourselves." I would have to remind them on a regular basis he no longer lived with us. But see, the problem was he did still live with us, just not physically, but he lived in our minds.

My son seemed to get the brunt of it. He seemed to get the most physical abuse from my ex-husband out of all the kids. My daughter was mocked for anything she ate. My ex-husband would ask her where she wanted that put on her body when she ate something. Didn't matter what it was. I would wake up in the middle of the night and sometimes meet my kids in the kitchen when we were sneaking food. We had to sneak food on a regular basis with him because if we didn't, he would mock us. He would ask us where we wanted that on our body. He would ask us, um, how we liked that cinnamon buns on our bun. We wouldn't even be eating a cinnamon bun. If we had lasagna, we weren't allowed to have, um, garlic bread because we already had bread in the lasagna. Bread was pretty much outlawed in our house. It was the devil. We weren't allowed to eat certain foods if they were his foods. He would duct tape his blueberries up and then scream at my children. I'd wake up in the middle of the night sometimes with him screaming at them about his blueberries and how he was going to have a heart attack. It became an inside joke for us for the longest time. We didn't even touch blueberries. Every time we saw Blue Bear, we're like, "Oh, I'm I'm my ex-husband. I'm going to die from a heart attack." No, you're going to die from being a douche. And that may not actually be true. I think he's going to live on for a bit to torment the rest of the world. But that's my opinion. Pardon me this evening. But this is a hard day for me.

You see, my son didn't have to die. When I left my ex-husband, I thought I lived in America. I thought that when I was getting divorced, I was getting divorced in American courts. But South Carolina, specifically Charleston, South Carolina, does not act very American-like. They allowed this man to torment me and my children. My children were afraid to open up the blinds at our house for years, years, because my ex-husband had was either outside taking pictures of us or he had a private eye outside taking pictures of us. I had to move to a neighborhood that had one entrance in and one entrance out of it in order to be able to file charges against him. At which case, he just hired private eyes. My neighbors would tell me all the time, "There's another private eye we chased out of the neighborhood. He said he was working for your ex-husband." I did not get to live. My son did not get to live. My children did not get to live. All of my children's vacations were taken from them because of court costs. Even when we were done with the ridiculous court cases from all of his lies, he was never punished. He was never made to pay me back any of the money except for one time. And then my attorney sucked up all the money like a vampirous straw having conversation and counseling sessions with my ex-husband. He also did that when I paid him to, uh, represent my daughter in her court case when I was helping her, uh, keep custody of her son.

The abuse started after he adopted my adopted daughter. At that point, he felt he had complete control over us. Before I left him, he had pulled my children out of school. He had decided we were going to start homeschooling them. He would mock them when they needed help with their schoolwork. The only time he ever jumped in to help them with their schoolwork is when I was helping them because he had to one-up me. It's ridiculous. Actually, it's like a freaking competition all the time. So, anyways, my daughter was obviously bored and stressed out 'cause she was at home all the time. So, she had a job, part-time job. She was making pretty good money going to work every day and I was going to college. Well, one day we, I was dropping her off at work and she was telling about this cute boy that she liked that happened to be her manager and, uh, I was telling her about this guy in college that I absolutely couldn't stand. We pull up to her work and we both point to the same guy and we're like, "That's him." It's hilarious because I'm actually friends with him now. So, but, so she would go to work, they became friends, she wanted to date him. My ex-husband became so controlling, he wouldn't allow her to get on birth control. So, we had to sneak birth control. Um, he wouldn't allow us to do anything without micromanaging every single detail of every single thing that we did. So, anytime my daughter wanted to do anything, she would have to follow all these rules and it was just, they would change constantly. They were moving rules that he had. He had moving rules. They were never solid rules. And I was trying to always keep up with his new rules that he had for the house.

Anyhow, one morning I woke up to my ex-husband standing over me. You see, I had told him, we got up for coffee that morning and I told him I was going to go lay down and take a nap before I had to study for school. I went and laid down and took a nap. I laid the girls down and then I got woke up from my nap with a camera in my face with him screaming at me saying, "Why did you leave the girls unattended all day long? They hurt themselves in their room." I was like, "What are you talking about? You were in the living room, Bob. I just came in here to take a nap before I had to study for school. Why the girls were napping? What are you talking about?" And he would do this [ __ ] all the time. He'd wake us up in the middle of the night and accuse us of different things and then record our responses. Then he would submit our responses to his attorneys and to all of his friends to make us all look like we were insane.

I once watched him kick our adopted daughter across the floor. I remember he came home from being a home inspector, which was our company. My ex-husband immediately went and picked up our biological daughter that we had together when our adopted daughter came toddling over to him for attention. And she was so sweet, so little, came toddling over to him, barely walking, to get a hug from him. He told her to get away from him. I remember the look on his face. I remember what TV show was on. It was Dr. Phil. I felt like it was very ironic that he was acting like such an [ __ ] during Dr. Phil. But my daughter, my adopted daughter, came toddling up to him. And when she did, he kicked her across the room and said, "I told you to stay away. I'm trying to spend time with my daughter." She flew across the floor into the TV. That is how hard he kicked her in the stomach to get her away from him. So he kicked my daughter across the floor. I went and picked her up. I was just blown away by the fact that he could harm a child, but he didn't care. This is what I had to deal with on a regular basis. Everything we did had to be private, like eating. We had to eat privately, not around him. Had to sneak the kids off to do stuff that they needed to do or wanted to do that were normal teenage things that we couldn't do because of his control.

My son Austin would tell me when I left for school, "Mommy, disconnected all the phones. He kicked my sister out while you were gone, while you were at school." At this point, I was going to school at night, so I had to switch to day-to-day school. Because if I didn't, my daughter wouldn't have a place to go in the evening. At least during the day, she would be able to go to school because I reenrolled her in school after this event happened with my husband. So, the event that happened to where my children were enrolled back into school was, I came out of the room one morning after my husband was freaking out, telling me that he read my phone and on my phone it said, "Are you going to be on FB later?" And he googled it and he said FB meant [ __ ] buddy. "Are you going to be on [ __ ] buddy later?" Not Facebook, [ __ ] buddy, because that's where his head went. Now, the message was from my daughter's boyfriend, the one that I told you about that I said I didn't like him and she said I like him. He knew that the only way he could get a hold of my daughter was through me. So he would text me and then he would ask if I was going to be on Facebook later and I would let him know my daughter could be on Facebook or she can't be on Facebook. I would let her use my computer so she could talk to her boyfriend because my ex-husband was so controlling that he had every single thing on lockdown in that house and he searched through all of our electronics all the time. But I didn't think he looked at mine. But I guess he did. So the conversations my daughter had with her boyfriend, he thought I was having with her boyfriend.

So the morning I got woken up, I got woken up to hearing, "Get your [ __ ] ass out of bed. I know what you've been doing." He had locked us completely in the house. He had taken my car keys from me, all of my IDs, all of my credit cards, and every bit of cash I had. And he sat me, my son Austin, and his sister down to have a conversation about their mother being a [ __ ]. My daughter kept saying, "That's my boyfriend. She was covering for me." And he's like, "You're covering for her." This man was losing his freaking mind. He had complete control over every penny that we made from our company. What I didn't know is he was collecting food stamps for the whole family, which he continued to collect for a year after we were separated. He collected food stamps, he collected cash money, and he collected all the insurance, too. But he didn't tell me that we had insurance. He didn't tell me he was collecting food stamps, but he did get the business. I gave him the business, my business, my home inspection company business. I gave it to him just so he would hopefully allow us to have a peaceful divorce. But that's not what he did. He used that money to torment me even more, to torment my children more. My children couldn't sleep. My children were terrified to answer the door. They were terrified to open up their blinds in their rooms in the house. They were terrified to go see their friends because he would show up at places they were at. I couldn't figure out for the longest time why. He had placed a tracker on my car. He then admitted he placed the tracker on my car when he removed the tracker from my car because I was furious. He said, "Well, the battery died on it anyways, so it really doesn't do any good." Like, that was what he said. Not, "I'm sorry for putting the tracker on your car." Not, "I'm sorry for invading your personal space, even though we're legally separated." Not, "I'm sorry that the day you let me borrow a vehicle when mine broke down that I put a tracker on your vehicle so I could know everything you were doing." So, my children were terrified because he showed up at every place we were at because he had a tracker on my vehicle. When I expressed this to my attorney and to the courts, they didn't think it was a big deal because nobody was murdered yet. Since then, the laws have been changed, but at the time, they weren't. At the time, he was legally allowed to stalk me. And there was nothing I could do about it. Just like there was nothing I could do about the fact that he kidnapped our daughters. I didn't know where they were for three months. I had just weaned our daughter. I nursed her for over two years, just weaned her. He took them for the weekend and I didn't see them for three months. And next thing I know, I am the most horrible mother on the face of the earth. No guardian ad litem would hear my older children talk about the abuse. They said it was irrelevant. How is it irrelevant that he abused five of his seven children so far and you find it irrelevant? And really, five out of seven was giving him just the benefit of the doubt. But really, he abused six out of seven children he had. Would you find that irrelevant? His psychological evaluation actually showed that he had, um, signs of being an abuser. But he didn't believe me when I said that he was abusing me and my children because my psychological evaluation said I was stronger. But then my psychological evaluation also said that I had no addiction problems whatsoever. No tendencies to become addicted to anything. But because my ex-husband said that I had a drinking problem because I had a CDT test that came out .1% over .1% over a 10% test, which means that one night, which was the night I went out to go celebrate me leaving my ex-husband with my best friend when my kids weren't around. Like, none of my kids were around that weekend. I went out and had a girls' weekend. Harrah, harrah. I left the monster that tormented me and my children. I finally did it. It was such a fun weekend. I felt so free. I remember dancing on my counters in my kitchen. I was like, "I am free from that monster." And then the knocks and the doors started to come. "We are being served. We are being served." Every single time my ex-husband sat outside my house and took a picture of something.

The courts in South Carolina, specifically Charleston, South Carolina. The main hub, I want to make this very clear. It is a main hub of Charleston, South Carolina, because everybody just looks at Charleston, South Carolina and thinks this is a beautiful place to live. It sure is. As long as you don't need any kind of legal help, medical help, or family help. Okay? Okay. So, if you just come here to spend money and visit the beaches, you should have a very good life. But if you get divorced, let me just tell you what, there are some laws you need to know about. So, my ex-husband, I had actual things I was concerned about, like his abuse of my children. They sounded so crazy because he already put crazy [ __ ] on the table. Like, it he might as well have said I was an alien from another planet and I came here to take it over. Like, that is how ridiculous his lies were. But he's a good con artist. Real good con artist. So keep in mind my children were going through all of this horrible abuse. I left him. I was going through all of this horrible abuse. Still going to school full-time, then working because I gave him my business. I mean, all I needed to do is one home inspection a week and that would have covered all my bills. But I gave it to him out of in good faith. And in good faith, he took my good faith and he was like, "Thank you for your weapon. Now I'm going to use it against you."

So, now, this is not a pity party recording. This is me standing up. This is me. This is me finally saying what happened to me and to my children after my mother passed away. He came to me and asked for forgiveness. So I did. I forgave him. I thought he's turning over a new leaf. Okay, I'll turn over a new leaf with him. I will forgive him. So I worked very hard on my end to co-parent. Meanwhile, I was dealing with all sorts of stuff with my two children, my two oldest children, and then my, my adopted daughter. She was going through hell for being with him. Hell. I can't even tell you the times I had to pull her off the windowsill from her, holding on to it, screaming, "Mommy, please don't make me go with him. Please don't make me go with him." Him, not Daddy. Him. That is how abused she was by him. But I couldn't do anything because the courts wouldn't listen to me because he filed first. He filed first in South Carolina. So that what that means is that everything he said was true. Even though he filed first with no evidence. What he filed with was just his statements. He had no testimony witnesses, no character witnesses. It was just all him and him telling the court, "Well, her family said this. Her dad said this." You have no idea how much my dad was a real POS during this whole entire situation. Instead of coming to his daughter's aid, he was going to the man he hated, which was actually his age. So, I guess they could, I guess they could have been best friends.

So, as I'm dealing with going to school, paying all my bills by myself because, well, there Steve was collecting for the whole family. The whole family making money off the business I gave him, lying to the state about it. I actually brought the state of South Carolina our bank records. When I finally found out that he had been collecting welfare for all of us for a year, I brought him our bank records showing that we made over $100,000 in deposits during the time he was collecting a loan. And you know what they did? They made him pay it back. And then six months later, he got to apply. He has been on welfare ever since. And he lives in a half-million-dollar house. Okay? So, I don't want you guys to feel sorry for him. Half-million-dollar house has a golf cart. But every time I started making money, I was back in court 'cause welfare Steve needed more money. This man used every gesture of kindness I gave him as a weapon against me. Anytime I thought we were having conversations between friends, he was plotting his revenge. To be clear, none of these court cases were about me being an incompetent mother. None of them. Charleston, South Carolina allowed my ex-husband to file in a different court system altogether. Allowed him to continually do it to get new judges. Meanwhile, my children were going through hell. I couldn't get them the proper health help they needed. I had to get Medicaid for them. And then I had to, I had to prove to the Department of Social Services I actually had custody of the children he was collecting on so I can get their insurance transferred to me so I can get them the medical help they needed. My oldest daughter was constantly threatening to commit suicide or trying to commit suicide. She never actually got that close while she was living with me. After she moved out, she did. But while she was living with me, she was constantly calling me while I was at school. "I'm going to kill myself. I can't take it anymore." So, I'd have to take her to the emergency room. I had to pull teeth to get her just to graduate from high school. But in her graduation party, she introduced her brother to drugs where all of her family was in the back doing family stuff. She and her friends were in the front doing drugs with my son. He told me this. So then as the years continued, he used that to heal his pain because I was too busy dealing with court to help my son. I wasn't able to parent. You have to understand, every moment has been preparation for court. What is he saying now? How do I defend something that never happened? There would be blurred pictures in the files. Blurred pictures. And he's like, "My ex-wife's a [ __ ]. Bring her to court." I asked the judge one time if it would be him or the guardian ad litem that would put the scarlet letter on me, because this was [ __ ] ridiculous. I have been legally separated for over a year. He keeps coming into court saying that we've had sex. That postpones it for another year just because he says so. So now my children are going through this turmoil. I can't move on. I was told by attorneys I shouldn't even, I'm not even allowed to ask for child support for the kids he adopted. But he was allowed to ask for child support from one of our children that we adopted when he was trying to get full custody of our two children. Not because he wanted our adopted daughter. He wanted to hide his abuse. He was investigated twice for suspicion of sexually abusing our daughter. During one of those times, my daughters were removed from my custody out of suspicion of not being married and living with my paramour. The guardian ad litem had our marriage certificate. She knew we were married and she fraudulently put into the courts to defend him that I wasn't married and the children needed to be removed. All of my children needed to be removed because I wasn't married. First of all, that's [ __ ] up that that's even a law in South Carolina. Secondly, I was married. And did she get fined from the courts for lying to them? No. She just hightailed it back to New York when I left my ex-husband.

It was so sweet. So sweet. Still even through all the abuse. He was so sweet. But then his sister introduced him to drugs and then he started having heart problems and then he had to go have surgery and then the hospital gave him pills that were way too strong for a child. That was the turning point. After that, I pretty much lost my son. He was 15 years old and he was doing pills. I just wish he would smoke weed. Kept begging him like, "Why can't you just smoke weed?" No, he just went to straight hard drugs. I sent him to a ton of rehabilitation centers, the ones that I could afford to send him to because I couldn't afford to send him much else because I was paying for so many court costs. You have to understand, court costs consumed the vast majority of my income. All the attorney fees. Every, the last rehabilitation facility I sent him to was in Spartanberg. And, and I remember the guy. He's like, "We're going to bring your son back a man." My son found every loophole, every way to still get high. The pain was still there. But the thing is, I couldn't help him other than just showing up during emergencies because I was always putting out fires that my ex-husband kept starting because I didn't put my foot down. We were getting divorced. I was so scared. I didn't know that this could happen. I didn't know that this could happen in America. What happened to me? I didn't know that anybody can go to court and say whatever they wanted to say with no proof. And that became God's word.

So, in the middle of all of this garbage, I'm trying to raise my family. I'm trying to grow flowers in glass shards. My nervous system was so screwed up from being married to him. You have no idea the things he made me do. Nobody did anything to stop him. Nobody. Not the state, not the guardians. Nobody protected my children. Nobody protected my son. Nobody protected my daughters. Nobody protected me. If they cared about the children, they would have cared that he put my son on uneven cans with pins standing up. My son bled from it and I couldn't do anything about it until my first husband's father gave me money so I could leave him. And then South Carolina made me send my kids back to this monster over and over and over again. My son is in a casket because of that monster. I need a second. Six years ago today, I had to say goodbye to my son forever. At the funeral, I didn't know how to actually, how to run a funeral. So, I did an early life retirement party for my son and I had balloons and I did pictures of his life and music he liked. I told everybody if they need, if they were not playing any music, uh, that they traditionally play at funerals, because if they wanted to be reminded that he was dead, they could look in the casket. I even had shots at his service to toast him. I had his eyebrows plucked and colored in. I had his goatee colored in because he really wanted a big beard and mustache or a nice little goatee, but he had a little scraggly one like Scrappy from Scooby-Doo. I dressed him in a, in a white suit, one that he could dance to heaven in or the great beyond. I let that monster come to my son's funeral and he did everything he could to make it about him. I brought, uh, my wedding album from my first marriage just because there was a picture of it of my son I loved and I didn't have a frame and I just, I couldn't get a frame. I couldn't, I could barely, I couldn't barely even buy his clothes. I had to go out the car while my husband bought the clothes. I just said that one then I had to go outside. You don't know what it's like to pick your child's last outfit out for them. It is horrible. It is horrible. The cashier at Cole's told my husband, she saw the tug. She's like, "Oh, somebody's going to have an ice problem." And then she saw nothing but black after that. He was too young to die. And I couldn't help him not die because I was too busy dealing with my ex-husband. My son meant everything to me, but I didn't have time to help him when he needed me the most because I was dealing with all of these lies.

So my husband and I were not allowed to have a marriage. We had so many court costs that he had to go on the road. He was on the road for the vast majority of our marriage until COVID hit. The fact that we're still married is literally a bloody miracle. But we're here for the miracle and we're both happy for the miracle. But up to that point, we didn't have a chance to be married. You see, there was always three of us in the marriage. Me, him, and my ex. We couldn't parent our children the way we wanted to parent them. We couldn't go on vacations with our children. We had one small stint, one summer of vacations. It was nice. And then another small stint of vacations, but as soon as we got vacations, my ex-husband got court-happy on us. He wanted to go to court so he can get more money 'cause welfare Steve didn't want to work for himself. He spent so much money on court costs he just needed more money so he can spend more money on court costs or hookers because no woman in their right mind would actually be with him. You know, he had candles around his house that said, "Smells like vagina." At the same time he was taking me to court. Those were his candles. Smells like vagina. And he was the better parent according to Charleston court judges because they didn't take time to read. If they did, they would have seen that my daughter's testimony was a lie. My ex-husband's testimony didn't line up with my daughter's testimony, which means that it was a plot. The fact that I was able to run all the companies I was running after my son died showed that I had a strong mental capacity for stress and for pain and for tolerance and for life and dealing with it. I was mentally the most stable person in the room at all times, most times. And I was falling the [ __ ] apart because I had no choice. I wasn't allowed to say this is unfair. Every time I said this is unfair or I said what happened, I was told, "Don't play the victim." I'm not playing the [ __ ] victim. I was a victim and nobody did a thing in the state about it.

So, as I'm fighting that, my son who went through all of this abuse because he was seeing all of it and telling me what was going on. "Mom, he's doing this. Mom, he's doing this." I couldn't help him because I was too busy trying to put out the biggest fire. And unfortunately, my son's mental health was not the biggest fire until it was. And by that time, somebody had introduced him to heroin. See, you know, the one drug I never thought my kids would ever become addicted to was heroin because they had the same fear that their biological father had of needles. They didn't want anything to do with them. Heroin was the one drug I never feared. And that's the one drug that put my son in the hospital. But not what killed him. What killed him was the organ donation facility that took over his healthcare the second day he was there after they did a brain dead test and found out he wasn't brain dead. They made him brain dead. I watched them take him from this to barely beeping. I told them they were starving my son of oxygen to his brain. They sent in the most ridiculous model club ever to pretend they were doctors and nurses with the same name of the actual doctor I talked to beforehand. But Dr. Taziki doesn't sound like a name for a guy who, who has blonde hair and blue eyes. The other Dr. Tziki, he definitely looked like Dr. Taziki, but that doctor, he did not. And all the nurses I came in with their makeup fully done, their hair fully done, look like models. We had somebody placed outside of our room to interrupt any kind of conversations we had. They placed covers over my son's bags, fluid bags, when they were helping him, so I didn't know what toxins they were putting in his system. I got a sample of his blood. The guy who worked for the organ donation facility was so worried about the fact that I got a sample of my son's blood because I found out my son was O. Not O positive, not O negative. He was O. My son had golden blood. My daughter has AB negative blood. She basically has secondary golden blood. So it's the rarest blood types in the world. We carry every nationality in our bloodline. And then some they don't even know about yet. So, I wanted to preserve his blood. I don't know why I felt like I wanted to preserve his blood, but I think secretly I knew I was going to have it tested and find out exactly what they put in my son to murder him. Mainly because that same facility, organ donation facility, is now in Charleston, South Carolina. Their vehicles are running all over the place. My son was an organ donor. That's the reason I couldn't rescue him from being murdered because on his permit it says organ donor. I was the one that told him to become an organ donor. I said, "Well, if you're going to die, you're never going to use those organs anyways." What I didn't know is there was a secret underground organ donation facility that actually harvests people and their organs. So, if you're in a car accident, for instance, and I verified this through multiple sources, and I encourage you to to research it yourself, but if you get into a car accident, there's two of you there. One of you an organ donor, the other one isn't. They're going to to attend to the non-organ donor first. The organ donor, they're going to wait. They're going to wait. So, your life is in danger by having that little heart on your driver's license. If you are an organ donor, I assure you, your life is in danger. If you end up in one of those hospitals, specifically in Charleston, South Carolina, as an organ donor, and you don't have any family around you, you are screwed. That's what happened to my son. He got sent to a special ward. A special ward that there's only one entrance in and one entrance out for the public, and then the emergency room entrance in and out. That's it. Everything is on lockdown. There's no bathrooms for the guests. There's no comfortable seats for family members to sit in on the ward anywhere near their relative. The beds are even smaller than the normal-sized hospital beds. I know because I've spent enough time in hospitals. Between my daughter's mental issues, my son's drug problems, and my pregnancies, I have been in hospitals, but their beds were smaller. So, if you were a loving, caring mother who wanted to lay next to your dying son, you couldn't. I tried to lay on the floor. I tried to sit on the seats. They have the most uncomfortable seats possible. But they have great comfortable seats outside of all of the other rooms. I found out all the other rooms were people waiting for my son's organs. He was never going to leave that hospital alive ever. The first doctor that was supposed to be there the whole weekend, his name was David. I remembered his name because it's the same name as my father. I said, "David, come here." And I gave him a great big hug. I said, "I know you'll take care of my son." I didn't see David again. Keep in mind, David told me he would be there until the end. The next day, Cheryl showed up. I said, "Hi, Cheryl. Let me give you a hug." She goes, "Don't touch me. Please, just don't touch me." because she couldn't murder my son if I hugged her. Dave couldn't murder my son, so he didn't come back. One hug. Cheryl didn't want that to affect her income, so she didn't take my hug. He would have made it out had he not been an organ donor. But because he was an organ donor, he was not leaving that hospital.

So I remember getting the call. We were at the hotel, my husband woke me up and he said they just pronounced Austin dead at 2:22 on Easter Sunday, April 21st, 2019. My son was gone. I didn't save him. I could have done anything, but I didn't know what to do. Everybody I told was going on. They either wanted his organs or they were like, "That's not a possibility." Do you know how many phone calls I got asking for my son's organs? The one I wanted to give it to, the one that had a rare blood type like my son, they didn't give it to her. They threw that out in the garbage. It could have saved her life, but she didn't have the money to pay for it, so she didn't get his organ. One promised me she would get his organ. We prepared her for surgery. He was her friend. She was his. He would have loved to have brought life to one of his friends, but instead he brought life to somebody that could pay for his organs. One person got two lungs. Two. Typical organ donations, you get one lung. This person got two. They had some money. I was told I'd be able to meet all the people that got his organs and his tissue. Nobody got his tissues. Nobody got his eyes. They just got the expensive parts. They stripped him like a car and threw him in the morgue the next day and then pronounced his death a suicide. He was in the hospital two days before. His friends said he was suicidal. The hospital, the same hospital, did nothing. I can't sue them, but I can't expose them. Spartanberg Hospital, you allowed my son to be murdered by your organ donation facility. Now they're murdering people in my town. Our tax dollars were paying for a set hospital and they have a facility killing people for their organs for people that are more important. My son died not because of his drug overdose, not because of his abuse, but for his organs. He was murdered. Nobody wants to call that that because it happened in a hospital, but he was murdered. My son endured a lifetime of abuse only to be murdered by a hospital in South Carolina. It's fitting because so far South Carolina has not proven to be fit in any area. Their medical system is broken. I mean, I went to a doctor, the same hospital that's harvesting organs. I went to their doctor's office for 22 years. 22 years. And they missed the fact that I was dying for a couple of years, even though all my blood work came out irregular, which was the same irregularity that came out during the court cases, which called me a drunk, but I wasn't. I was anemic. And when you are anemic, you will naturally make more carbs that they're looking for in their CDT test. My ex-husband knew that and he used it against me. Every attorney I talked to, such an idiot. "You can't do that. That's impossible. Do you know how they work? Have you read any study on them?" No. None of the judges in South Carolina have read any of the studies. They prefer to stay in ignorance. None of the judges in South Carolina know that you can pass a drug test, a hair follicle test, by dyeing your [ __ ] hair. None of them know that if you take iron pills, you can pass your CDT test as well in excess. So, take iron. If you drink, you'll pass the CDT test in South Carolina if you're a woman. If you're a man, you'll naturally pass it. Men can go in there. I actually talked to the doctor. He said he talked to a guy who told me he drank 12 beers before he came in to take his CDT test. He passed it with flying colors, but he was also 300 lb. My ex-husband was a big guy, over 200 lb. He would drink so much. Sometimes he would black out. One time he puked between the cushions of our couch. Another time I found him passed out in the bathroom. Like all the things he was accusing me of, he was actually the one doing it the entire time. He was, he was older than me by 20 years. Nobody wanted to see that. Nobody wanted to see that it was like a father-daughter situation where I did what I was [ __ ] told until I was done being told what to do. My attorney literally told me that, "I thought you partied your ass off like everybody else did." Who is everybody else that you're talking to? I worked. I worked all the time because I had court costs all the time. I was either paying off past court costs or getting ready for new court costs. But either way, I had court costs. None of the money I ever made I got to spend on me or my family. We didn't get any vacations. My children have still yet to be to Disney World except for my daughters. They get to go because welfare Steve has scammed the system a lot. So every time he scams the system, the kids get, his daughters got to go on vacation, but my boys never got to go on vacation because we were always paying for court costs except for the small window of five years where it was just DSS visits and no court costs. Those were the every six months, sometimes every three months DSS visits. This man always had somebody in my house. I don't see for the record why if I get a babysitter for my children for the entire weekend and I go out and I want to party my [ __ ] ass off. I want to drink like a [ __ ] banshee. Why then two weeks later I will lose custody of my children because of something I did responsibly away from them. But in Charleston, South Carolina, you will lose your children. You will lose your children if you go to court and your ex-husband knows about that CDT test. I was the fastest licensed foster parent in South Carolina. Three weeks. Three weeks. It normally takes six months to a year to become licensed, but I was that efficient at everything that it took three weeks before I became a foster parent. And then two years later, South Carolina is looking at me like the most abusive mother in the world because this POS that I left who abused all my children, who sent my son to the grave, continued to lie. There was no system to count how many times he filed the court hearings. I mean, sometimes there were emergency court hearings. During emergency court hearings with him. This is what unlimited emergency court hearings will do to a family. My son is in the grave. I don't talk to two of my three daughters. My three youngest sons have never had a real vacation with their parents. Not they've had local vacations, driving vacations, except for the one time we went one summer we went to Legoland when my youngest son was a newborn. 11 years ago. 11 years ago. He has never been to an amusement park because of court costs, but my daughters have been. I don't know a good way to close this out other than to say if you have an ex and you're getting divorced in Charleston, South Carolina, this is my advice to you. Bleach your hair, take some iron pills, and file first. No judge actually reads anything in Charleston, downtown Charleston. I don't know about surrounding towns 'cause I've never actually been able to go to my town's family court because my ex-husband wouldn't win there because they would see that he was just being abusive to me and my children. In the last 15 years, there has been over 32 court judges in South Carolina. On average, there's 16 court judges. They also hold two different districts. So, not just their position in Charleston, they have a position in a different court district. If you have money, you can buy the system. At least that's my opinion of it. Because why else would Charleston, South Carolina allow an abusive father to get custody of his children? Why would they even allow him in court? He should be in jail. But not in Charleston. In Charleston, that man is walking free, collecting all sorts of welfare. He's got every single kind of disability. Do you know he's even collecting death benefits on his ex-wife that he didn't pay child support alimony for? He's collecting her death benefits. What a nice guy, right? What an amazing father. So to wrap it up, let's check it out. Man has candles that smell like vagina. Oh, did I mention that he set my daughter's hair on fire and burned her, her whole face? Yeah, he lit a candle up, told my daughter to smell it. Lit her hair on fire, burned her whole face, and the court system in Charleston, South Carolina was still like, "Well, it was an accident." Really? You don't say. He asked the child to smell a candle. That's not an accident. That's bad parenting. She had hair down her butt. It was always in her face 'cause he didn't know how to brush it. He never brushed the girl's hair. They would come to my, my house and their hair would be tangled up with

stuff growing in it. There was a time they kept coming back from his house with lice in their head. And I've shut down my whole house to get rid of it every time. Like grown lice like that big from his house.

But he was a better parent cuz he's a guy and he just wants to participate. I had three attorneys for family court and I represented myself at least six times in court. I won every time I represented myself because I wasn't scared to say what my attorneys were scared to say.

But the guardian at light that was a paid guardian at light by the state. Her first job they give the most complicated [ __ ] job. She failed at it miserably. Miserably. I remember when she came my house, she's like, "Oh my god, you got to get an attorney." I'm like, "You don't say." cuz you didn't come to my house. You just took his word for it. They all took his word for it. See, that's the thing. Nobody did their job. They took his word for it. And then I was made to look the bad guy.

So since she went to court cuz she got stuck in New York for a family vacation for an extra two weeks. So our court day got postponed for an extra month. So my kids were taken away from me months over Christmas. my daughters. My other children got to stay with me because apparently it was okay for them to be living with me and my parent more, but it wasn't okay for my daughters, which is a complete and utter oh hypocrisy. It's legal enough for my other two children to live with me, but illegal enough to take two of my children from me. It sounds like a setup by judges that were unprepared for my husband's lies.

One DSS worker actually walked in, took one look at my husband, and said, "I can't do this case. I know him. So, she must have been involved in a case I was unaware of because she knew him and couldn't take the case. This man was not a good man. This man was arrested several times and put in jail several times during our child custody case. But Charleston, South Carolina, the guardian at Lightams, their paid guardian at Lights found it irrelevant.

But do you know who came to my aid? The volunteer guardian at Lightum and the DSS worker. Those were the only people that came to my aid because I couldn't afford an attorney because again, I wasn't preparing for court. But my ex-husband wanted some of my new husband's money. And he tried to figure out every way he could to get that money. He did. He's like, "Put him on the court dockets. Make him take drug test. Make him get a psychological evaluation. Psychological evaluation. My ex-husband put my husband in on a court document so he can try to get child support from him. He was that desperate for money. He was that desperate to make me suffer and everybody in my life.

I'm still not on the title of my house after 15 years of marriage because my husband didn't want to put me on the title of the house so my ex-husband couldn't come try and take our house from us because that is how terrible my ex-husband was and Charleston, South Carolina allowed him to do it. But what saved me in the court case that gave me a 5-year reprieve from court was a DSS worker and the guardian at lied him. They both stood up and said, "Your honor, I can't stand for this. I'm sorry, but what they're saying about that woman is a lie. Every time we called her up for a visit, a surprise visit, she stopped everything she was doing."

The SS worker said, "I was I called her. She was at the grocery store. She came home and I helped her unload the groceries. She had a car full. She didn't know I was coming and her house was spotless. Guardian at lied on the volunteer one. Not the paid one. The paid one didn't do her [ __ ] job. The volunteer one did do his job. He said I called her. She was on a treadmill at the gym in her neighborhood. I sat in her driveway until she got there. She had no time to prepare. Her house was immaculate. I don't understand, your honor, why she had she's being put through this.

That judge finally ruled in my favor. Understand? Anybody that ever represented my husband once they met me, they would never want to have anything to do with him again and all his disgusting lies. My son is dead because of that man's abuse. None of his other children talked to him because of the abuse. I got to hear a judge yell at me. For that, for things my daughter did to my sons while I was working, I got to hear what an unfit mother I was. I'm like, how is this really happening to me?

It's been two years. I have barely adjusted to my son not being here. And my daughters are being ripped out of my life by a monster that I can't stop because South Carolina has way too many judges, allows way too many emergency court hearings because it brings in way too much revenue for them to do anything to actually protect the children. I will never get to kiss my son again. I will never get to hold him. He will never have children. All of this could have been avoided. The South Carolina would have just stopped that monster at the beginning. I could have gotten my kids the help they needed. My adopted daughter wouldn't have the issue she has now. My biological daughter would know that her mother loves her more than life itself. And that her father turned her against her mother for his own selfish needs. Not because I was a bad mom, but because he was pissed that he could no longer have me. and this state allowed him to do it.

There's more I'd like to say about the death of my son, but for right now, it's opened up so many wounds I can't even track the story anymore. I want to leave us with a statement to my son. Austin, I still feel you. I still know you're with us and protecting us and helping us. I miss you every day, every moment. This has been the hardest video to write because if I had done anything, if I had just been able to be strong then, you would still be alive. But maybe that's not either one of our destinies, is it?

You guys, this is Beth Brussard. I've gotta go. I will see you on episode seven of the mind deluge. Until then, please like, share, and subscribe. Okay, bye bye.