I'm about to tell you about something they don't have a word for yet.
Someone should invent one.
Because it's not death. Nobody died. It's not estrangement — that word means two people chose to walk away. This is different. Worse, maybe. You watch someone you love get swallowed whole by an institution that profits from keeping her exactly where she is, doing exactly what she does, asking zero questions about why.
My mother exists. She has a pulse. She works at Community Transit. Draws a salary. Holds a title. Her husband's companies? They've pulled in $1,644,084.75 in public contracts she was supposed to have nothing to do with. When I sent a family court document to her HR department, they had armed officers responding inside forty-five minutes. One of her direct reports compiled twelve pages of my emails — headers, metadata, everything — stripped out my explicit request for confidentiality, and submitted them on agency letterhead to support her protection order against me.
The institution gave her everything.
It took her son.
And it helped.
Let me be clear about something.
I've got another article. That one's got the receipts. The dollar amounts. Metadata forensics. Procurement violations laid out like an autopsy. Court filings. Public records. That article doesn't need feelings. It has numbers.
This one doesn't have numbers.
This one has the thing that happens at 2am when your ribs tighten and you realise you can't remember the last time your mother said your name outside a legal proceeding.
I'm what they call "highly sensitive." Not a quirk. Not something I mention on dating apps. My nervous system runs hot. Joy hits harder. Pain hits harder. Grief doesn't fade into background noise. It's furniture. I wake up and have to walk around it every single morning.
So when I say losing my mother felt like death, I need you to hear me: I'm not exaggerating.
I'm being exact.
I watched her marry Phil Tapia.
Flew across the country by myself when I was twenty-four. Nobody else from our family came. Didn't matter. I was there.
Years later I bought her a Burberry coat. Twenty-seven hundred dollars. I just wanted her to have something beautiful.
That person doesn't exist anymore.
She's alive. She goes to work. She has a protection order with my name on it. When I tried to raise concerns about her welfare, the agency she works for called it a security incident. Her colleagues chose institutional convenience over acknowledging I'm her child.
There's no greeting card for this. No support group in the phonebook. English doesn't have a clean word for what it feels like when your mother's alive, employed, protected by the system that erased you.
Community Transit didn't kidnap her. Didn't brainwash her. I'm not making conspiracy claims.
What they did is simpler. Harder to fight.
They made it easy for her to never face what she's done.
Here's the mechanism.
Your mother's husband runs a company. That company gets public contracts from the agency where your mother works. HR writes a memo. Acknowledges the conflict. She's directed: zero involvement. Everyone signs. The contracts continue. Money flows. Nobody asks uncomfortable questions because uncomfortable questions threaten comfortable arrangements.
Your mother gets promoted. Director of IT now. Her husband's company? The not-to-exceed cap jumps to $400,000 annually. No competitive rebid. Then a new CEO arrives — the same guy who held senior leadership at Sound Transit when your mother worked there before, back when her tenure ended with "resignation in lieu of termination." He signs the expanded contracts himself.
You see how this works?
I keep staring at that number.
Forty-five minutes.
Not days. Not "we'll review this and get back to you." Forty-five minutes from the moment my mother filed a protection order to the moment three departments inside Community Transit had mobilized.
June 4, 2025. She files the paperwork. That same afternoon — before anyone stops to ask "Wait, is this actually our problem?" — she emails the order to four Community Transit officials.
Two minutes later, Security Services has it. Five minutes after that, Risk and Legal are distributing it further. By the next day, the Snohomish County Sheriff's Office Transit Police Unit is coordinating with agency security.
Three departments. Forty-five minutes. A billion-dollar public agency treating a private family court filing like an active shooter situation.
Here's what makes my stomach turn: I hadn't set foot on Community Transit property. I hadn't threatened anyone. I hadn't done anything except send a single HR email asking if my mother was okay.
Because I hadn't spoken to her in two years.
Because we'd been estranged for six.
Because something felt deeply, fundamentally wrong.
And the institution's response wasn't "Let's make sure everyone's safe here." It was: Perimeter breach. Contain it.
I don't need my attorney to explain the legal problems with that. I need you to sit with what it feels like. What it means to discover that before you ever filed a public records request — before you ever typed the name Philip Tapia or Chaos Theory Studios or mentioned $1.6 million in no-bid contracts — the institution had already decided you were the threat.
They didn't know what I knew yet. They didn't need to. The reflex was already wired in: Someone's asking about De. Lock it down.
That's not procedure. That's a system that's been conditioned to protect one person's comfort. My mother didn't have to ask for that response. It was already built into the walls. She just had to show up with the paperwork.
Michael Berman
Now let me tell you about Michael Berman.
Berman reports directly to my mother. He's her subordinate at Community Transit.
When she filed for the protection order, Berman compiled twelve pages. Not testimony he wrote — emails. My emails. With headers and metadata intact. He stripped out my explicit request for confidentiality and packaged them on official Community Transit letterhead to support his boss's case in a private family court matter.
Stop and think about that for a second.
A public employee. During work hours. Using public resources. Compiling a document designed to help his supervisor get a court order against her own son. Not as a witness to workplace events. Not in response to a subpoena. As a voluntary participant in his boss's personal legal strategy against her child.
I'm going to tell you the part nobody else will say out loud.
A subordinate doesn't do that unless the institutional culture has already decided which side it's on. Berman didn't go rogue. He read the room. The room said: protect De. And he did — using my own words, stripped of the context I'd explicitly asked to remain confidential.
And then the Microsoft Teams messages between Berman and my mother were deleted. After litigation was reasonably anticipated. Federal courts call that spoliation. It creates an adverse inference — the legal presumption that destroyed evidence contained something unfavorable to the party who destroyed it.
I don't know what those messages said. Nobody does now. But the law operates on a simple principle about evidence destruction: people don't delete things that help them.
The Part I Can't Write Clinically
I've tried writing this section six different ways. Too angry. Too measured. Ranting. Performing composure I don't actually feel.
So I'm done calibrating.
I miss my mom.
Not the version of her that filed a protection order against me. Not the version that let her workplace arm law enforcement to intercept me. Not the version whose subordinate compiled twelve pages of my emails on agency letterhead to help ensure I couldn't contact her.
I miss the version before all of this. Before Phil. Before Community Transit learned that protecting her meant protecting a $1.6 million vendor arrangement. Before the institution became the architecture of our estrangement.
I miss being someone's son instead of someone's security threat.
I'm thirty-three years old. I process grief the way I process everything — loudly, thoroughly, and without the option of looking away. My nervous system won't let me compartmentalize it. Won't let me reduce it to a legal matter or a blog post or a case number. It presents the full weight of it every single day.
Every single day I have to decide whether to keep going or collapse under it.
I keep going. Not because I'm strong. I hate that word. It's what people say when they don't want to sit with your pain. I keep going because the alternative is letting an institution that spent $1.6 million on my mother's husband's companies also take the last thing I have: the willingness to say what happened.
What I'm Not Saying
I'm not saying Community Transit conspired to destroy my family. Conspiracy requires planning.
What happened is worse than conspiracy because it's more sustainable: an institution discovered that one employee's personal arrangement was financially valuable. Then it built an entire ecosystem of protection around it. An ecosystem that incidentally — or not — made that employee unreachable to the people who might have noticed something was wrong.
People like her son.
Why I'm Writing This
I am about to tell you why I'm writing this.
Not because you asked. Because I couldn't put the grief anywhere else.
See, the Tapia article already exists. Court filings. Metadata. Dollar amounts. Procurement violations. Judge Tana Lin has it all sitting in the Western District of Washington right now. Evidence documented. Sourced. Waiting.
But here's what evidence can't do.
It can't grieve. Documents don't miss their mother. Case numbers don't lie awake at 3am wondering if there's a version of this story where it ends differently.
This is the part the court record can't hold.
The human remainder. What's left over after you subtract the legal strategy and the public records requests and the forensic analysis of 16,886 files.
A son who lost his mother to an institution that decided she was worth more as an asset than he ever was as a child.
I remain the threat. The security incident. The name on a protection order that three departments mobilized to enforce before I'd done anything worth enforcing against.
My mother remains employed. Protected. Unreachable.
Inside the machine.
I am the plaintiff in Meyers v. Community Transit et al., Case No. 2:25-cv-02463-TL (W.D. Wash.). A protection order prohibits direct contact with certain parties referenced here. All named parties are free to respond publicly. Everything in this article reflects my personal experience and documented events.
Related: Philip Tapia, Chaos Theory Studios, and $1.7 Million in Public Contracts: What the Documents Say | The Man Standing Behind Her