May 6 – June 10, 2022
Chapter Three ended on the eve of the hearing. This chapter covers the five weeks after it. For most of them, a court order said my sons were mine to protect. I spent those days trying to keep the three of us safe and keep my boys’ days happy, while two sets of lawyers filed motions about us in a courthouse I mostly saw through a phone.
Friday, May 6, 2022, 4:55 AM: “I have been trying to contact you”
The day started before dawn with a text from my lawyer, Kimberly Valenti: “I have been trying to contact you.”
At 7:31 AM I sent my husband the kind of message I’d sent a thousand times: “Please drop off [my Older Son]’s gym clothes to his school they’re not at the house.” He answered four minutes later: “I was planning on putting them in his book bag yesterday after I picked him up from school as usual - but I didn’t know I wouldn’t see either of my sons yesterday. Yes, I will drop them off for him.”
As usual. By then I could hear the calendar in every sentence he sent. At 8:59 AM: “I would like to pick the boys up from school today and drop them off after track practice.” At 9:02 AM: “We need to be able to converse and work together for what’s best for our children Careyann.”
At 12:43 PM I asked a sitter I trusted, “Are you available to watch my kids for me again today? More court stuff.”
His messages kept coming all afternoon. Just after 1:00 PM he sent pictures of cupcakes he said he’d made for a little celebration at our Younger Son’s school, two dozen of them, with homemade frosting. In the ten years of our marriage, I’d never known him to bake a cupcake. At 1:17 PM: “Please don’t keep my sons away from me Careyann.” At 3:20 PM: “Since you picked the boys up early again from school and refuse to communicate with me about our sons, I just wanted to let you know that track practice is as usual 6:30-8:00 …”
In my timeline entry for that day, I wrote down what I thought those messages were: “posturing for court.” I still think so. Every one of them reads like it was written to be printed out and handed to a judge.
Late afternoon: “He is monitoring every move I make”
That afternoon I sat with Kimberly Valenti in front of Magistrate Stephan Collins in Summit County Domestic Relations Court. It was late enough in the day that the clerk’s office had already closed by the time we finished.
Kimberly told him the divorce papers had been served on me only days before, and how. “Well, actually,” she said, “the plaintiff drove the process server.”
“In his car,” I added.
The magistrate asked who the process server was, and answered his own question: “Petrasek?” When she said yes, he said, “He drove Petrasek? That’s weird. … Huh, because he usually does his own work.”
Then he asked the question the whole day had been building to: what had my husband “allegedly been up to that brought you here asking for a civil protection order?”
I gave him the truest sentence I had: “He is monitoring every move I make.”
I told him we’d separated “after he got violent with me,” on February 15. I told him my husband had been arrested. Kimberly explained that the criminal case had been pled down after his mother called me and he got on the phone, “threatening and telling her to dismiss.”
Magistrate Collins granted the order. He gave me exclusive use of our house. And then, from the bench:
“Carey Ann [married surname] will be sole custodial parent. … I am going to suspend the parenting time because that’s what I always do until they work it out.”
He set the full hearing for May 18 at 10:00. Because the clerk was closed, I’d have to come back Monday to get certified copies, and the sheriff would serve my husband after that. He suggested I bring a copy to my Older Son’s school. Then he said something that turned out to describe the next five weeks:
“Until then make the best of it.”
Kimberly told him what I hadn’t yet said out loud in that room: “she’s staying in a hotel right now.”
That evening, my husband’s texts went on arriving. At 6:58 PM: “Where is [my Older Son]? We have track practice. Everyone is asking where he’s at…” At 7:38 PM: “I would like to FaceTime the boys. I’m getting concerned that you’re not responding. Is everything ok?”
What I wrote down
There’s a reason I was in a hotel.
When I wrote my timeline entry for May 6, I put the reason down in one sentence. I’d gone to court, I wrote, “to file for a request for a protection order on myself and my children since father came to my home and attempted to rape me and I further found out he had tracking devices on all my electronics and vehicle as well as having the neighbor Gary spy on me” and report to my mother-in-law “my activity and any activity that went on in my home, what cars came in and out of my driveway etc.”
I don’t know the exact date. It happened in my own home, after his arrest. It was the last time he was ever at my house: the day he said he would help me put together my indoor waterfall. My notes hold very little more than that. On one page, between a list of my sons’ teachers and a note about a coach’s schedule, there’s one line I wrote so I wouldn’t lose the day:
“Attempted rape day he put together waterfall”
The waterfall was an indoor fountain I’d bought. On April 1, my timeline records, he was “offering to get me groceries again and offering to build a waterfall I got so he could mark it on his fake calendar he created for two months to align with his false narrative.”
On May 20, under oath, my husband told the court about that day himself, in his own way. Asked whether I had good reason to be afraid of him, he answered that “since March 17th, at least five or six times, she’s asked me to come to the house,” and that “it didn’t seem like she was very afraid when she was asking me to come over to the house and build these fountains that she bought that I put together for her on the inside of the house, and she was – it was just me and her at home.”
It was just him and me at home. That part, we agree on.
Years later, in a statement about why I couldn’t be forced into contact with him, I wrote it plainly: “After his arrest for domestic violence, he continued his campaign of coercion by attempting to rape me in my own home, using emotional manipulation and threats in a desperate attempt to regain control.”
That’s all I’m going to say about it here. By the first week of May, on my lawyer’s advice, I was no longer sleeping in that house.
Saturday, May 7, 2022: The bikes in the driveway
The next morning I asked the Sagamore Hills police for an escort so I could get my belongings out of the house. Patrolman Glenn Lucore came. It was, he would later testify, his first escort.
While he was there, my husband was calling the police again and again. The neighbor diagonally across the street, Gary, had seen the police car, and, according to the officer, called my husband. He told the officer he’d filed for divorce and I’d taken the children. The officer told him the children were safe and with me.
He wasn’t satisfied. After talking to his lawyer, he asked the police to issue an Amber Alert for our sons. He asked them to file kidnapping charges against me. They said no. As the June 8 order put it, an Amber Alert wasn’t issued “as the parties are still married so it is not a kidnapping.”
Here’s what the officer actually saw that morning, in the judge’s own summary of his testimony:
“The children were safe and in good condition at the time he observed them and they were happy and riding bikes in the driveway.” He also testified that he saw no cameras on the outside of the house or in the garage. What he did see was how my husband always seemed to know who was in my driveway. The neighbor picked up the phone.
At 9:04 that night my husband texted: “I would like to talk to my sons.”
Sunday, May 8 – Friday, May 13, 2022: Somewhere safe
Sunday was Mother’s Day. That evening I took my boys and got on a plane. My lawyer, Kimberly Valenti, and her father, Milo Valenti, had arranged the trip for our safety. Milo paid for the Airbnb where we stayed.
I’m not going to say where we went. I wouldn’t say it under oath either. On May 20, when my own lawyer asked whether I’d taken the children out of state, Kimberly cut in, “John, she’s not going to want to disclose where,” and I answered: “I took my son for his birthday somewhere, but I can’t say where because I don’t feel safe.” I was not out of state that day. During the hearing my sons were at a local hotel with my parents.
At 8:46 that morning, my husband had written: “Careyann, I love you and I love my sons. I hope and pray that you and the boys are safe and sound.” At 9:43 PM: “I love you Careyann.”
Those messages arrived on my phone, the same number he’d been texting all spring. Hold on to that for a few pages.
We spent the week the way I’d always spent time with my boys. On Monday we went to a children’s museum and a playground. On Tuesday we went to a trampoline park. I came down with Covid that week. Once I realized how closely I was being watched, I also went through our phone records to see who he’d been calling. On Wednesday, May 11, my lawyer told me to stand by for a Zoom hearing in case the court needed me, so I found a babysitter to keep the boys busy and away from it. That day, I later wrote, Kimberly explained to Lisa Dean that she had advised me to buy all new devices to keep my husband from harassing and tracking me, and that I was having security cameras installed at the house.
The man who would do that work was Charlie, a tech expert Kimberly hired to help me. He installed the security cameras at my house, wiped the keylogger off my computer, and swept my car and my devices for anything tracking me. That week he flew down to clear my computer where we were staying.
On Friday, May 13, we flew home. We had been asked to come back for a hearing, and Charlie flew back on the plane with me and my boys. A week later, when I was getting ready to leave again, I texted him that I was “going back to safe spot you came down to.”
Somewhere on the way home, there was a rainbow out the window.
Monday, May 9, 2022: Served
The written order was journalized Monday, May 9, in case DR-2022-05-1201. It listed me as a protected person, and under me, both of my sons. The sheriff went to my mother-in-law’s house to serve it. She put the deputy on speakerphone with my husband, who was, by his own testimony, at his lawyer’s office. About an hour later he met the deputy and was served.
That same day, his lawyers filed an emergency motion asking the court to give him custody. They filed it with the protection order already granted and the boys already in my sole custody. On May 20, Kimberly would stand up and describe that motion to Judge Steinhauer:
“The motion Attorney Dean filed was an attempt to usurp the Court, by coming to the Judge, of the power that was given by it to a magistrate to, in fact, hear and decide whether or not to grant a CPO. What she did, in effect, was try to get a motion to you without advising you that there was a CPO, to get a judge in this Court to sign without that knowledge of a CPO.”
The judge answered that she wouldn’t strike it, “and if that was her intention, it has failed. I’ve not usurped anyone from any authority.”
Around the time he was served, calls went out to three private investigation firms in Florida: Treasure Coast Investigative Services, Cooper Investigation, and Shields Investigation. My family lives on the Treasure Coast. In court he testified that he hadn’t hired an investigator, and that his father, who happened to be in Florida, “may have made those calls.” The judge’s order noted that his father “made the initial phone calls and asked Husband to follow up, but Husband did not.”
Friday, May 13, 2022: The affidavit
The day we flew home, Lisa Carey Dean filed a motion asking the court to hold me in contempt. It said my husband believed I had “changed the residence of the parties’ minor children with the intention of removing the children from the jurisdiction” of the court. Attached was his sworn affidavit. Paragraph 3 was the “stay-at-home father” line I wrote about in Chapter Three. Paragraph 7 was this:
“I immediately tried to contact Defendant and found that her cell phone number was no longer in service.”
The day he was describing was Thursday, May 5. That morning, at 8:38, he’d texted me that he’d be picking up the boys “as I have been for the past two months plus.” I answered him from that number at 8:40, twice at 8:41, and again at 1:08 PM. On Friday morning at 7:31 I texted him from it about the gym clothes. Over those four days he sent at least eleven more texts to that same number, and every one of them landed on my phone: the gym clothes, the cupcakes, the track practice, the FaceTime, “I love you Careyann.” My number was in service. What had changed was that I’d mostly stopped answering.
On my own copy of the timeline, next to his paragraph 7, I typed: “FALSE - my phone worked just fine.”
May 13 – 23, 2022: Hotels
Back in Ohio, the security cameras I’d ordered for the house still weren’t installed, and I wasn’t going to take my boys back there without them. So we lived in hotels. The pictures from these weeks are from the new phone my lawyer had me get, so he couldn’t track the old one.
At 4:53 PM on May 13, I texted an old friend from my new number: “Hi it’s careyann I got a new number my husbands been doing surveillance on me and I’m in the middle of a divorce so I haven’t been able to be online the last week.”
On Saturday, May 14, we stayed at a Holiday Inn. On Sunday I drove the boys to Great Wolf Lodge in Sandusky to celebrate my Younger Son’s birthday. They posed with the big bear out front at 5:13 that afternoon.
On Monday, May 16, I called Mark Frisone at the battered women’s shelter, looking for somewhere we could stay while the cameras went in, so I didn’t have to keep moving us from hotel to hotel. I asked friends whether we could stay with them. That night we were at a Holiday Inn Express in Westlake. At a restaurant that day, one of the boys colored.
There was a dinosaur that night, too.
On Tuesday the boys swam in the hotel pool and did crafts in our room, and then I took them to Urban Air.
That afternoon I asked a friend, “Would you be free to watch my kids for me Friday while I go to court? Court is at 9am.” In the end, my parents watched my sons at a local hotel during the hearing. That evening I texted another: “Yea we’re at a hotel.”
On Wednesday, May 18, at 7:25 AM, in a text about a birthday party, I told another friend: “[He] is trying to take the kids” and “I’m in the middle of divorce - court Friday.” At 7:46 AM: “I’m having to stay at a hotel till after court - he’s got surveillance cameras all over my house.” That night we moved to a Quality Inn and Suites.
I want to say something about these photos. Every one of them was taken in the weeks when Lisa Dean’s motion told the court I had “changed the residence” of my children “with the intention of removing” them. Look at them. My boys were swimming, coloring, making crafts, jumping, grinning next to a bear. They were with their mother, who was moving them from hotel to hotel so they wouldn’t have to sleep in a house a neighbor was watching.
Thursday, May 19, 2022: “An improper collateral attack”
The day before the hearing, my lawyers filed our answer to Lisa Dean’s two motions. John E. Chapman had joined Kimberly Valenti on my case, and they both signed it. It asked the court to strike the emergency motion and the contempt motion as frivolous, and called them “an improper collateral attack upon this Court’s Order of May 9, 2022.”
That evening I texted a friend: “Court is tomorrow.”
Friday, May 20, 2022: The hearing
The hearing Magistrate Collins had set for May 18 became something much bigger. On Friday, May 20, everything was heard at once before Judge Susan K. Steinhauer: whether my protection order would stay, and Lisa Dean’s motions asking the judge to take my sons from me. Kimberly Valenti and John Chapman represented me. Lisa Dean and Sarah Heid represented my husband. It went all day. Near the end, the judge warned the lawyers that “we have seven minutes until we get kicked out of the building.”
Officer Emily Roxbury, who had come to our house on February 15, testified about that afternoon. Patrolman Lucore testified about the escort and the bikes in the driveway. Gary, the neighbor, testified too. The judge later summarized it: he “shares information” with my mother-in-law “regarding any vehicle at the marital residence he does not recognize.” He testified that he’d watched the boys get into my car, which was full of luggage, and, in the judge’s summary of his testimony, that he “witnessed Wife move out.” He was outside the day we left for Great Wolf Lodge. What he reported as us moving out was me putting our luggage in the car for a week’s stay there, to celebrate my Younger Son’s birthday. On the Monday after, he’d called the police on a man in my garage and sent my mother-in-law a picture of the man’s vehicle. He said no one had asked him to watch.
My husband testified that there were “no cameras or surveillance of any type at the marital home,” and that he couldn’t be monitoring me electronically “because, if he was, he would know where his children are.” He testified that the calendar of his “two months” was one he’d “started keeping, actually, at your advice,” speaking to Lisa Dean. And he told the story of the fountains.
Then John Chapman called me.
I told the court what had made me file. “He would text me every time someone pulled in my driveway saying, What is this red truck in the driveway? What is this black car? What is this – this vehicle doing? How do you know that? You’re not here.”
“I didn’t know – he was – he was surveilling me. I even text messaged him, Are you stalking me? How do you know this? I did not feel safe at that point, so I got a tech guy to come out to look through all of my things. I even – I changed my number twice because I thought my phones were compromised. I got rid of my computer. I haven’t even been able to work.”
I told the court that he’d choked me, “with his hands around my neck, in front of my sons,” and that my little one had asked, “Mommy, are you going to die, mommy?”
He asked me whether I’d decided to take the children and leave our home for a while, and why.
“For safety.”
Was I afraid that once he was served, he might become violent again? “Yes.” If the order were lifted, would I be at risk? “I do.” Could he hurt me or the children if given the chance? “Yes, I do because he has in the past.”
That’s when Judge Steinhauer spoke up. “Do you have a Kleenex, ma’am? Attorney Valenti, bring over the box of Kleenex for your client. … Bring your client the box of Kleenex.”
I told the court what he’d done since he was served. “He called my Range Rover company,” the company that leased me my car, which could be located by an app. “He’s called my children’s schools, both of them, and he’s called investigative companies.” He’d called my mother. He’d called my family in Florida.
Then Lisa Dean cross-examined me. Near the end, she asked whether I’d felt that my husband tried to isolate me, and I tried to answer.
MS. VALENTI: “Lisa, don’t do that to her. She’s been a victim, and you’re being very dramatic.”
A few lines later, after Kimberly objected again, the judge said: “Attorney Dean, you know better than that.”
“Sorry,” Lisa Dean said. “I’m just tired.”
“I understand,” said the judge. “We’re all tired.”
A moment later she asked whether I’d felt isolated “when you flew to London,” when the children were “in his care.” I answered: “I felt like I was away from my abuser.” And I corrected her: “They were in his mother’s care.”
That night at 9:20 PM I texted a friend from yet another number, a Verizon one. I was going to close my old account, and I asked whether my old phone would be safe to use. I’d need my work computer mailed to me, I wrote, “if it’s safe,” and that I was “going back to safe spot you came down to.”
Saturday, May 21 – Monday, May 23, 2022: “At hotels”
On Saturday evening I tried to explain my life to friends, with my boys always beside me. “Hey girl I can’t call when my kids are around and they’re always around lately.” Then: “My dumb neighbor also with the big window keeps calling [him] and his mom when cars are in the driveway.” Later, to someone else: “With the kids.” “At hotels.” “he’s got a protection order against him so that’s breaking the law.”
On Sunday I looked up the therapist we’d seen years before, Stephanie Young, so I could sign my boys up for therapy. On Monday morning, May 23, at 11:02, I wrote to another practice: “I’m going through a divorce at the moment - would you be able to help my kids and I? We were badly abused - my kids need therapy and so do I.”
That same morning, Kimberly Valenti and John Chapman filed a motion asking the court to hold him in contempt. Page two said what I’d been trying to say for weeks:
“Petitioner, as the children’s mother, had every right to take the children to a safe place. The Order of Protection expressly granted exclusive custody to the Petitioner. … He had no right to the children, and she had every right to take every action he was complaining about.”
The motion laid out the rest: the calls to three detective agencies, the neighbor reporting through my mother-in-law “for months,” the call to the company that leased my car, the thirty-one times he contacted me while the Stow protection order was in place. It described the emergency motion and the contempt motion as “a willful disregard of the Order of Protection by the Petitioner and the attorneys who colluded in his misusing the court proceedings.” It asked the court to admonish his counsel “for any assistance they provided.”
Those were my lawyers’ words, in a court filing. My own belief is the same as it was at the end of Chapter Three: that the story he told the court was built with Lisa Dean’s help, and that her motions that May were part of it. No court has found that.
Tuesday, May 24 – Sunday, June 5, 2022: Two weeks away
At 9:10 AM on May 24 I texted a friend: “On my way down with the kids.” Once again, Kimberly and Milo Valenti had arranged a place for our safety, and once again Milo paid for the Airbnb. I took my boys somewhere far from that cul-de-sac, where no neighbor was watching the driveway, to wait for the court. I had sole custody under Magistrate Collins’s order, and it didn’t limit where I could take them. On May 28, I told a family member: “I’m not telling mom or anyone where I am until the court stuff is over.” On May 29, to a friend: “my stalker ex hired an investigative service on the treasure coast to find me.”
So I’ll keep that place to myself here, too, and tell you only what we did there. We stayed in that Airbnb. On May 27 we went to the beach, hiked a state park, and caught lizards.
On May 28 we went to a wildlife garden. On May 31 I took them to a salt spa for massages and to play in the salt room. At 10:51 that morning I sent a friend pictures: “Kids first time in a salt cave.” Then: “He’s loving the Sauna lol I miss my sauna.”
That afternoon they caught more lizards with the neighbor, and we examined an old computer motherboard together.
On June 1 we went roller blading and scootering. That evening I wrote to someone I worked with, “im currently displaced from my home and hiding from my stalker husband.” The same day I wrote my lawyer that I needed my work computer: “I haven’t worked in over a month.”
On June 2 we went to a trampoline park and caught lizards again. On June 3 we went to a pottery workshop with my Older Son’s friend, then lunch, then home. On June 4 there was a playdate, a hike, the beach, and the trampoline park. That night a friend watched the boys, and at 8:57 PM I texted her: “Just getting out to dinner without the kids was nice.” On June 5 there was another playdate, and we went fishing.
These pictures are from the phone my lawyer had me get. Put them next to the motion that said I meant to keep my children away “with the intention of removing” them. My boys were at the beach, in a salt room, taking apart a laptop, and catching lizards.
Monday, June 6 – Wednesday, June 8, 2022: The Jeep
The new Jeep I’d taken delivery of in May had started leaking through the roof when it rained. On June 4 I wrote: “My jeep is leaking water through the eyeglass holder.” I asked whether I could swap it for the car I’d originally ordered.
So on June 6 my mother stayed with the boys for a few days. At 10:39 AM I wrote, “it’s nanas turn to enjoy the grandkids.” I drove the Jeep back to the dealer in Ohio. I stopped for the night on June 7. On June 8 I traded it in. At 3:34 PM I told a friend, “I just came up to swap out my car.” At 3:48 PM I hearted a message from another friend:
“Your a wonderful woman I pray for you and your children I ask God to put a Hedge of protection around you and your kids”
By then the order had already been issued.
Wednesday, June 8, 2022, 2:00 PM: The order
At 2:00 PM on June 8, Judge Steinhauer issued her twenty-eight-page order. I told the core of it in the Prologue: she found that “until May 6, 2022, Husband was the primary caregiver for the children,” and she made him the temporary residential parent and legal custodian of my sons. I was given supervised visits at a visitation center. The order told any police department to help return the boys to him, and said: “It is NOT violation of that Order to return the children.”
There are other things in those pages, written about the same weeks this chapter covers. On the neighbor:
“it is clear that the neighbor diagonally across the street has been feeding information to [my mother-in-law], thereby accounting for Husband knowing information that would seem unlikely unless he had electronic surveillance.”
The court accepted that my husband knew things about my driveway he had no business knowing. It accepted that a neighbor was the one telling his mother. That neighbor’s “moving out” was a car packed for Great Wolf Lodge. It accepted that a police officer found my boys happy and riding their bikes the morning I left. And it gave him my sons anyway. On page 21 the order itself acknowledged that “the only court order concerning custody is the ex parte issued 5/9/22 granting Wife sole custody.” I had been following that order.
Thursday, June 9, 2022: Without the boys
At 7:45 AM on June 9, the same judge signed my full civil protection order. It protected me from him for a year. The lines where my sons had been listed were blank. I showed that page in the Prologue.
At 6:20 that evening, Sarah Heid, the second lawyer on his team, filed a motion asking the court to order me to disclose where the children were and to deliver them to the Sagamore Hills Police Department “no later than 5:00 p.m. on Friday, June 10, 2022,” where they would be “retrieved by the paternal grandmother.”
My sons, who had been protected persons on a court order just a month before, were to be handed over at a police station to the mother of the man they’d been protected from. She was the one the neighbor had texted a picture of a stranger’s vehicle at my house.
At 11:57 that night, John Chapman filed a motion asking the court to stay its order. I never saw a ruling on it.
My lawyer called me while I was driving and told me I had to get the boys back immediately. My parents brought them.
Friday, June 10, 2022: “For now”
At 10:20 that morning I asked a friend to set my things aside for my mother to pick up later: “I’m having to stay in Ohio.”
At 2:26 PM I texted a friend:
“Judge ordered the kids to him for now”
At 2:48 PM, to another: “My husband just forced temporary custody of my kids.” A minute later: “Ands judge had the lack of discernment to actually put them with an abuser.”
For now. The order itself said a guardian ad litem would be appointed. I didn’t know yet how long “for now” would last.
The next day, Saturday, June 11, I drove to a park in Medina to meet my mother and my boys. I’ve told the rest of that day in the Prologue, by the clock, the way it happened. This picture was taken at 3:09 that afternoon. I’m holding my Younger Son. He’s wearing the same orange shirt he wore to Great Wolf Lodge, less than four weeks earlier.
