Her father was a serial killer — a horror that forced her into hiding as a young girl. Now, she's sharing her experiences and helping other kids who are stigmatized for having parents in prison.
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00:00I'm the daughter of Michael Bear Carson, also known as the San Francisco Witch Killer.
00:05I definitely feared that I was a monster, you know, the bad seed, you know, Satan spawned
00:13something that somehow that this was in my very fiber and that I too would become violent.
00:30As I'm finding out that the hands that changed my diapers stabbed a young woman to death,
00:46I keep thinking that if daddy can become violent, anyone can become violent.
00:51And so I was incredibly frightened for my own safety.
00:55I was extremely suicidal after I was told about the murders.
00:59My first suicide attempt was at age nine.
01:02I was trying to drown myself in the bathtub.
01:04I was hoarding pills.
01:16After my father's arrest, the experience I had with relatives and people close to me
01:22just drastically changed.
01:24As a nine-year-old, I had two adult male family members take me aside and say, you need to
01:31change your name.
01:32I had another family member who had a few drinks in the evening and turned to me and
01:39said, you know, you little, look what you brought into our lives, you know, and you
01:44better not talk about this.
01:45We left and went into hiding.
01:47So often people blame family members of violent offenders and why didn't they do anything?
02:01I had a child sent to my office who was hysterical and was making up stories.
02:07I had him draw a picture of what had occurred.
02:09I realized that a SWAT team had busted down his door.
02:13He was physically run over by the men.
02:16His father was grabbed, thrown face down, was handcuffed, dragged out of the house.
02:23Especially with our ultra-violent offenders, our mass shooters, our serial killers, we
02:53want to see them as monsters that came out of nowhere.
02:56We don't want to think about their mother or their child.
02:59And so these individuals are largely invisible and they're stigmatized in society and they
03:06experience a lot of shame.
03:08They often have issues that they're dealing with like poverty, parental substance abuse,
03:14parental mental health issues, and it's just layers and layers of challenges that these
03:19kids face.
03:20We have this mass incarceration and it's impacting our children and they need help.
03:33There was a childhood onset mental illness that wasn't properly treated.
03:38He began to use drugs at a very young age.
03:43We didn't have very good treatment for substance abuse at the time.
03:48And he had long-term drug use.
03:59Most serial killers in the world are American.
04:02Why is that?
04:03Let's talk about it.
04:04Let's look into it.
04:05Let's pour some federal funds into research about violence, including mass violence, family
04:12violence, incarceration, children of prisoners, and let's do research and fund these issues
04:20so that a generation from now, we don't have a mass killing every week on the news.
04:26It's breaking all of our hearts, isn't it?
04:27It's breaking my heart.