A Memorial · Maintained Since 2016
The Uncounted
No agency records these deaths. No institution counts them. We do.
The mothers and fathers on this page were separated from their children through the family courts and did not survive it. Every entry is documented from public sources — reporting, obituaries, final letters, and their families' own words. These deaths happened inside proceedings staffed, at every stage, by licensed mental-health professionals — in a country where the profession's own 2014 research names this abuse as harmful as sexual abuse, and where no professional body has ever counted the dead. Domestic violence through the loss of your children, family court abuse, and being told by the system that you were imagining it, will not bring these parents back to life. This page exists so that they are not erased twice.
Some of the dead were children. Their names are deliberately withheld, to protect their families. As you read the parents' names below, know that this wall is incomplete on purpose — in the most painful way a memorial can be.
The Wall
Each entry is kept with its source in the archive. Families who wish a name added, corrected, or removed may contact this site; their wishes govern in every case.
Christopher Mackney
Father of two. Separated from his children through the courts. Died 2013. His final letter is public — he asked the world to read it.
Publicly reported; final letter published.
Catherine Youssef Kassenoff
Mother of three. Attorney; former federal prosecutor; special counsel to two New York governors. Named her family court case in her final public statement. Died 2023.
Nationally reported.
Darrin White
Father. British Columbia, Canada. Died 2000. The National Post reported that his death became "a rallying cry for fairness in court" — a quarter century ago.
National Post, April 2000.
Mick Downworth
Father. United Kingdom. Died 2021. His brother's public appeal named parental alienation as what broke him.
Family's public appeal, 2021.
Philip Heron
Father. Separated from his children. [CONFIRM: year, one-line story, public source from archive.]
[Source in archive — confirm before publish.]
Ira Scott
Father. Separated from his children. [CONFIRM: year, one-line story, public source from archive.]
[Source in archive — confirm before publish.]
Jonathon Edward Underwood
Father. Separated from his children. [CONFIRM: year, one-line story, public source from archive.]
[Source in archive — confirm before publish.]
Rod Burba
Father. Separated from his children. [CONFIRM: year, one-line story, public source from archive.]
[Source in archive — confirm before publish.]
Bill Sardis
Father. Separated from his children. [CONFIRM: year, one-line story, public source from archive.]
[Source in archive — confirm before publish.]
[First name] Buchholz
Parent. Separated from their children. [CONFIRM: full name as family made public, year, source.]
[Source in archive — confirm before publish.]
Jeramey A.
Father. His story was reported nationally. [CONFIRM: surname if family made it public; year; source link.]
[Source in archive — confirm before publish.]
Three Mothers, United Kingdom
Their names are kept by their families. They died during ongoing family court proceedings in which "parental alienation" had been claimed against them — documented by a national broadcast investigation, 2023.
BBC investigation; University of Manchester study of 45 mothers.
A note on why this wall is incomplete: when a parent in a custody case harms their child, it makes the news — and those parents can never stand here. When a parent harms no one and quietly ends their own life, it makes no news at all. The dead who harmed no one made no headlines. That is why no one counts them — and why this wall exists to. This page currently documents [N] deaths from public sources and family statements. It is a fraction.
The Arithmetic No One Would Do
How large is the fraction? No agency counts. But the government's own data permits the arithmetic.
The CDC records roughly fifty thousand suicides a year in the United States — and cannot say how many of them were parents fighting for their children, because no institution has ever been willing to ask. Investigators do not ask. The box does not exist.
Peer-reviewed analysis of the CDC's National Violent Death Reporting System — 402,391 adult suicides, 2003 to 2020, across 48 states — found that one in five was known to involve intimate-partner problems: divorce, separation, break-up, conflict. That is roughly ten thousand deaths a year. The only published custody analysis of that data found child-custody issues documented in about six percent of such cases — and custody appears in this system only when a police or coroner's narrative happens to mention it.
Six percent of ten thousand is six hundred deaths a year — as a documented floor, drawn from narrative fragments alone. Account for the custody circumstances no narrative recorded, and the honest band runs to as many as 2,500 parents a year.
Across the decade this record spans:
between 6,000 and 25,000 mothers and fathers.
Every one of them died inside the American family court system — and during the same years documented on this site: the years the American Psychological Association's own letter to the President called the separation of a child from a parent a cause of trauma, depression, and suicide, while its only answer to the parents of the family courts remained "no official position."
We do not say the APA killed them. We say the APA was told — in 2014 by its own journal, in 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2021, 2024, 2025, year after year, president after president — and these are those years' dead. The ceiling is uncounted, because counting was never in anyone's official position. That is why this page exists.
Sources: CDC WISQARS annual suicide counts; Stanley et al., American Journal of Preventive Medicine (2023), NVDRS analysis of 402,391 adult suicides, 20% intimate-partner-problem related; NVDRS-based custody-circumstance analysis of female decedents with intimate-partner problems (~6% documented custody issues). Full citations retained in the evidence file. The figures above are transparent estimates from government data, stated with their derivation; the documented floor is the only number asserted as fact.
Criteria for This Memorial
A documented death · a custody or family-court context established by public reporting, official record, or the family's own statement · no documented findings of violence by the deceased · and the family's wishes honored in every case — names appear as families made them public, and any family may have a name added, corrected, or removed by contacting this site. Sources for every entry are retained in the archive.
This page is a memorial and a documented archive. It attributes no death to any person or organization; it records who died, in what documented circumstances, and what the institutions of the profession knew and said during the years in question. If you or someone you know is struggling, please reach out for support — in the United States, call or text 988. © Kenneth R. Gottfried.
