How to Build an IT Director:
Fake Records, Fuck the Vendor, and Then Cry About It

The people who know her best cannot speak. I am her son, which used to make me one of them. Then she filed the protection order and I ran out of reasons to stay quiet.

Her name is De Tapia. You may know her as De Meyers. She is the IT Director at Community Transit and was the IT Manager at Sound Transit, where she resigned in lieu of termination. Phil Tapia is her husband. He used to be her vendor, and his bid came in accurate to the last penny while they were still together and she was overseeing the procurement.

I grew up inside this. I watched the moves get built before I understood I was watching anything. The Sound Transit HR testimony from May 23, 2014 describes her management style, and every word of it lands right, because she practiced the method on me first, in a house, for years, before she had direct reports.

She filed the protection order to discredit me before I could say any of this. That is the move she makes against people who know too much. She knew what I knew because I am her son.

Kyle Hughes, Veralee Estes, Scott Eastman, and Rachel Woods are named in a lawsuit. If your name is not in it yet, now is a reasonable time to consider which side of this you are on.

Step 1: Fake the Record

The record is the whole game. Loosen it early.

At Sound Transit, my mother announced she was taking time off to write meeting notes for a meeting that had not occurred, before an audit of a two-million-dollar public contract. She said this out loud, to colleagues. The Contract Review Panel had voted to dismiss the Anthrotec vendors. The Contracts Department, through Giorgiana Justiniano, told the panel to consider them. The audit went fine.

She did not lower her voice. She had calculated that Sound Transit would not hold her to account, and she was right. She resigned in lieu of termination. Community Transit hired her. The problem got a new badge.

She resigned in lieu of termination. Community Transit hired her. The problem got a new badge.

I grew up watching the story change when it needed to. That is not hindsight. That is childhood.

You are supposed to nod and move on. If you refuse, you become the problem. I am her son. I am the example.

Step 2: Cry About It

Once the record is soft, she reaches for feelings as the instrument.

In the HR investigation interview dated May 23, 2014, she told subordinates: "You are hurting my feelings." And: "You were repeating what I said and you were taking the credit for it. It hurts my feelings." She said this to subordinates, during an HR investigation, about the work.

It worked. The HR process stopped examining her conduct and started managing her reaction to her conduct being examined. She reframed feedback as aggression and disagreement as cruelty. The staff spent their energy on her emotional state while the work deteriorated in a quiet, organized way.

She uses the move to center her feelings. The investigation stops examining her conduct and starts managing her reaction to it. A subordinate described the problem near a person with feelings, and now we are all dealing with that. Very urgent. Please stop looking at the Anthrotec file.

She ran this on her staff and on me first. By the time I understood what I was looking at, I had been looking at it for decades.

Step 3: Punish the Helper

She asked Jim McClendon to help her. Jim helped. The next day she screamed at Sean Freyholtz for letting Jim help. Fifteen minutes after that she went back to Jim and asked for more help.

She expected the staff to treat this as normal workplace behavior.

You were wrong whenever it served her to say you were wrong. Once the staff understood that, they stopped making decisions and started tracking her mood and which version of events would cost them the least to repeat later. She did not need to be consistent. She needed her staff ground down.

After long enough inside that system, you stop trying to understand the rule and start trying to predict the weather. Then you forget there was supposed to be a rule.

Step 4: Fire Everyone

On Sean Freyholtz's first day, she offered to fire his entire staff and rebuild from scratch, all of them, before she had assessed the work, evaluated a single person, or identified a problem beyond the fact that these people existed and she had the authority to remove them.

She later tried to fire one of his employees through a performance plan so unreasonable it did not survive review. She used the plan as cover. She wanted the person gone.

If someone is inconvenient, they become a performance issue. If someone understands the work better than you, their job becomes miserable and you call it accountability. You build the file, apply the pressure, and wait for attrition to do what you cannot defend doing openly. She has done this at Sound Transit and at Community Transit. I watched her rehearse it at home.

Step 5: Punish Them After

Marjean was already gone, no longer employed, when my mother worked with HR to pursue her over radios she claimed belonged to the agency. HR investigated. The radios did not belong to the agency. She was wrong. She took the shot anyway.

The staff still employed watched this. They concluded that leaving might not buy peace and being right might not protect them. She did not need to win the Marjean situation. She needed people to see her try.

She filed a protection order against me, her son, no longer in her orbit, to make sure people would see her try. The Marjean move and the Henk move are the same move. I am the version with worse optics for her, which is why she had to move faster.

If you work at Community Transit and you have watched all of this and stayed quiet: I understand the calculation. I ran it too. I also know that staying quiet gets more expensive the longer you do it, and you have now watched what she does when she runs this play on her own son. That is information. Do with it what you want.

Step 6: Get Protected

At Sound Transit, the Contract Review Panel had voted to dismiss the Anthrotec vendors. The Contracts Department, through Giorgiana Justiniano, told the panel to consider them. A two-million-dollar contract came back into play. At the same time, my mother was in a romantic relationship with a competing vendor whose bid came in accurate to the last penny.

At Community Transit, a subordinate built an interception rule on her emails. Rachel Woods, Public Records Officer and Executive Programs Manager, told a colleague to narrow the search parameters so they would not pull all of her email traffic.

No memo said to protect her. They made small, clean decisions that all landed in the same direction. Reconsider the contract. Narrow the search. Treat the record as the threat and the person asking questions as the nuisance. If you work at Community Transit, you understand the institutional position. That is why you are quiet.

Step 7: Rules Are for Staff

From the May 23, 2014 interview: she drank a bottle of alcohol a night, spent twenty minutes vomiting at the team holiday party, forgot scheduled meetings on a rolling basis, and took turns telling Sean Freyholtz and Mike Berman—the Mike Berman at Sound Transit who still works there—how terrible the other one was. She complained that Jennifer Dice's promotion should have been hers. She showed her staff her performance review and explained where Jason had gotten it wrong.

A regular employee with any one of these gets a file opened on them. Leadership filed her conduct as sensitive and left it there.

The department had a favorite day. Wednesday. She went to her therapist on Wednesdays and worked from home for the rest of it. An entire team counting down to the one day the building felt safe enough to work.

I know what it is to count down to a day she is not home. I grew up doing it.

Step 8: Don't Know the Work

She asked Sean Freyholtz for a server outage report. He gave her one. She said she wanted the raw data. He gave her that. She asked him to turn the raw data into a report.

He was back where he started, with everyone's time gone and nothing resolved.

If you understand the work, you have to defend what the data means. If you understand the decision, you have to defend what follows from it. Sustain the confusion and you keep room to maneuver. When something fails, the person who understood the least has the most space to assign blame, because nothing they said was specific enough to pin down. The people who do understand cannot say the obvious thing without consequences, so they do the translation again. They save copies, because they know where this loop ends.

She sent this translation back. I kept a copy.

Step 9: Fuck the Vendor

My mother had a romantic relationship with Phil Tapia, owner of Tapia Productions, while Tapia Productions held a Sound Transit contract and Phil was actively bidding on new ones. Sean Freyholtz testified to a staged breakup, announced to colleagues so Phil could pursue more Sound Transit work, while they were still together during the active RFP. Phil's bid came in accurate to the last penny. Freyholtz also testified to early payments to Tapia's company before work was completed.

My mother told a colleague: "I hope you pick the right vendor."

Freyholtz did not see her for most of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. On the last day he saw her there with Phil. Three months before that testimony, they had been to Hawaii together. The RFP went out in March.

She is De Tapia now. She married Phil. I could not have written that before the protection order was filed. Now I can write whatever I want.

Step 10: Recruit a Mike Berman

At Sound Transit, Mike Berman was a peer of Sean Freyholtz. My mother triangulated between them, telling each one how terrible the other was. That Mike Berman still works at Sound Transit.

At Community Transit, she recruited a different man with the same name. Same name, same proximity, same slot in the configuration she builds around herself at every agency she occupies. The Community Transit Michael Berman collected evidence for her private protection-order hearing. Against me.

The name is coincidence. She needed that function and she filled it.

She applied the same personnel strategy to her own son that she applied to every workplace she has been through. She identified the threat, recruited someone close, built the file, and moved. I am the Marjean who did not go along with her exit.

Step 11: Use the Order

I had not been served with the protection order. I was in Las Vegas. The Community Transit board meeting was in Everett. I had no idea the meeting was happening and no plan to attend it.

On June 4, 2025, at 3:06 PM, my mother used her official Community Transit email to distribute the unserved protection order and photographs of me and my partner to agency executives. She cited no specific physical threat.

At 3:24 PM, Veralee Estes, Senior Manager for Employee Engagement, returned an internal intake assessment form. To the question of whether I might attend the board meeting, Estes wrote: "Yes, there is a concern that they will attempt to slader [sic] protected person at the Board meeting."

Estes identified the threat as speech.

Six minutes later, Kyle Hughes, Senior Program Manager for Security Services, sent Estes this email:

Source: Community Transit internal communications, June 4, 2025.

Scott is Scott Eastman, Senior Manager for Security and Emergency Management. Rachel is Rachel Woods.

Twenty-four minutes. My mother distributed the order at 3:06. By 3:30, Kyle Hughes had a plan to deny my First Amendment rights at a public board meeting I did not know existed, in a city I was not in, using a court order no one had served me. Estes said it in writing: the concern was that I would speak.

Twenty-four minutes. The concern was that I would speak.

This is why there is a lawsuit.

Act Surprised When It Happens Again

Commit to the surprise. She has made it work for years.

Add up what is on the record: the fake notes for a meeting that did not happen, the May 23, 2014 HR interview and the feelings routine, Jim McClendon and the fifteen minutes, the attempts against Freyholtz's staff, Marjean and the radios, the Anthrotec contract and Giorgiana Justiniano, the search parameters, Jennifer Dice, the server report that went in a circle, Phil Tapia and the bid accurate to the last penny, Las Vegas, Hawaii, the wedding, the resignation in lieu of termination, the new job at Community Transit, the two men named Mike Berman, the protection order, and the twenty-four minutes on June 4, 2025, in which Kyle Hughes, Veralee Estes, Scott Eastman, and Rachel Woods put their names on a plan to silence her son at a meeting he did not know was happening.

She ran the same pattern at every building, under a new last name.

HR files stay sealed. Background checks catch titles and dates and miss the part where this specific hire is a documented operational hazard. Institutional memory lives with the people who are gone or afraid, doing the math on what speaking costs.

She counted on the people who knew staying quiet. Kyle Hughes, Veralee Estes, Scott Eastman, and Rachel Woods counted on it too.

I kept copies. That is why there is a lawsuit, and why you are reading this.

Document everything.