I Need Blue
I turned around to see a masked man pointing a gun at me. It was just the beginning of a series of events, including robbery and abduction, which changed my life forever. I Need Blue, hosted by Jen Lee, is a podcast series featuring lived-experiences from survivors of life events. I NEED BLUE creates space for survivors of trauma to feel they BELONG, are LOVED, UNDERSTOOD and EMPOWERED! I called 9-1-1 and they provided me with life-saving directions to help my customer who was having a medical emergency. Law enforcement rescued us and caught the robber. Our first-responders face unique traumas every day. I NEED BLUE provides space for them too!
I Need Blue
A Drunk Driver Took Claudia's Life; Remember for Change
From Grief to Action: Honoring Claudia, Preventing Tragedies
When Tim and Melanie lost their 33-year-old daughter, Claudia, to a drunk driver on February 7, 2021, their world was shattered in an instant. Claudia, adopted as a teenager from Guatemala, was a vibrant part of their blended family—full of love, complexity, and growth. In the wake of unimaginable grief, Tim and Melanie chose not to be silent.
Supported by Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD), they turned their heartbreak into a mission. Remember for Change leads the charge in prevention through impactful education:
- Drunk buster goggles that simulate impairment
- Teen pledges to drive sober
- QR-coded coasters offering safe ride options
- Recognition for DUI enforcement heroes in local law enforcement
But their most touching initiative is the Annual Memorial Drive—a moving event where the community gathers to speak aloud the names of loved ones lost to impaired driving. It’s a moment of unity, healing, and powerful remembrance.
Contact with Tim and Melanie:
Email: RememberForChange@gmail.com
Website: https://www.rememberforchange.org/
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Purchase my book or Audiobook: Why I Survived: How Sharing My Story Helped Me Heal from Dating Abuse, Armed Robbery, Abduction, and Other Forms of Trauma by Jennifer Lee
https://whyisurvived.com/
Imagine when you share your darkest hours they become someone else's light. I'm Jennifer Lee, a global community storyteller, host, author and survivor, guiding you through genuine, unfiltered conversations. Together, we break the silence, shatter stigma and amplify voices that need to be heard. Each episode stands as a testament to survival, healing and reclaiming your power. Listen to I Need Blue on Apple Podcasts, spotify, youtube or your favorite platform. Learn more at wwwineedbluenet. Trigger warning I Need Blue shares real-life stories of trauma, violence and abuse meant to empower and support. Please take care of yourself and ask for help if needed. Now let's begin today's story.
Speaker 1:Tim and Melanie's dream was simple family. Their journey began with Alex Through an open adoption in California, where they were living at the time. They embraced the miracle of becoming parents. After his birth, melanie stayed close, sleeping beside him in a spare hospital bed, her heart swelling with a quiet, fierce love that only a mother knows. Seven years later, their family grew again when they traveled to Guatemala to bring Claudia home. She was a teenager then, 15 years old, and with her arrival their lives shifted in beautiful, unpredictable ways. Claudia grew up, got married and had a child. The family tree was blossoming, each branch, stretching toward a future they could feel in their hearts but hadn't yet fully imagined. Then everything changed.
Speaker 1:On February 7th 2021, tragedy struck. Claudia, just 33 years old, was killed by a drunk driver. In an instant, plans were shattered, dreams halted, and the kind of pain no parents should ever know became their new reality. Months later, they gathered in the quiet of the night, surrounded by flickers of candlelight. They honored Claudia's life, and in that sacred space, another flame was lit. That flame became Remember for Change, a nonprofit rooted in heartbreak. Empowered by hope, tim and Melanie have become fierce advocates for community safety. Through this organization, remember for Change works to reduce underage drinking, impaired and aggressive driving, and with this important message they show up, educate and lead, not because it's easy, but because it matters. Their mission is clear People can make a difference. Clear People can make a difference. Together, we can make choices to prevent the preventable. Tim and Melanie, thank you for being my guests today and welcome to the. I Need Blue podcast.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much for having us.
Speaker 1:You're so welcome. Thank you so much for being here. Let's go ahead and get started talking about families.
Speaker 3:I think we talked early, even before we got married, that children could certainly be a part of our marriage, of our life together. When we were ready to start doing that, we had trouble with that and the subject of adoption and foster parenting came up. We had started out together near Chicago. I had a job in that area and then I got a job in California and that's where we began the process of training to become foster parents. We had I think it was three different foster children, two of which we are still in touch with. One, a female, is married now and has a family of her own. Another one of the boys we've lost touch with but the other boy joined the army, is an Iraq war veteran and he now in turn is taking care of some of his relative children in a very admirable way.
Speaker 3:But foster parent training taught us a lot about difficulties that children can go through and the different feelings and needs we may have as parents as we go through that. So I was glad we did that. That has been an ongoing help to anybody young in life. You know, thinking about getting married or just getting married. Even if you don't ever do it, there's something to foster parent training that I would recommend Now. That led to some adoptions and we adopted our son, alex, one day after he was born. We were taking care of him and then six months later, there's a six-month probationary period. He became then legally our son. After that time and that was the word I use is intense. Sometimes it's really great and funny and happy, and sometimes it's really hard when you're waking up several times in the night and anybody who's been a parent knows about that, and I'll turn it over to Melanie to pick up the story from there.
Speaker 2:We had when we were dating had talked about even if we had biological children we had talked about adoption. My great-grandmother was adopted and my grandmother was a house mom and nurse at the Thompson Orphanage orphanage in Charlotte, north Carolina and my mom, for part of her upbringing, grew up in an orphanage, though she had her mom there, so that was part of my DNA is adoption. So we just weren't aware of the fact that that would be the way we would grow our family. When we did the open adoption in California, we didn't know if we were going to have a boy or a girl, and we were blessed with a boy and we are still in contact with his birth parents with his birth parents. Then, as the years went by, we wanted a girl and were able to do that when we moved back to Florida.
Speaker 2:The reason we went with Guatemala I have cousins from Guatemala. At the time Guatemala was still open it is not anymore, to the best of my knowledge and the social worker who facilitated that adoption actually ended up becoming Claudia's godmother At the time in 2004,. If you went to the country and visited first, then the minute they stepped on United States soil they became United States citizens when we all went down there to finish the adoption, including Alex. When we brought Claudia back with us, she was immediately a citizen.
Speaker 1:Alex was seven years old, so you have two children in the household then at this point, a teenager and a seven-year-old yeah, and you have a girl and a boy, so I know they're different.
Speaker 2:to raise. Foster parenting that was very wise and we did not pay attention to was do not upset the birth order when you are fostering and adopting. We should have followed the directions to not do that, but I rationalized that they were totally different genders and age groups and it wasn't going to be what they warned us about, but it still was. So there was that. So to everybody out there who's thinking of fostering or adopting don't upset the birth order.
Speaker 1:You know? That's great. I never would have thought about that. And can you share one other tip that you've learned from the foster care class that you were like? Oh my gosh, everybody needs to know this about best practices for foster parenting.
Speaker 2:They didn't teach us best practices for handling the dysfunctional adults that caused the kid to be in foster system in the first place. Have respite care lined up for yourself. Yeah, you're going to need breaks. You're going to discover that you are not Superman and that you are not Superwoman. You're going to discover that you are not Superman and that you are not Superwoman. You're going to need breaks. No one's asked me my advice about that before, but that's what comes to mind. I don't know what Tim would say. Tim, you want to?
Speaker 1:add something.
Speaker 3:What sticks in my mind is to not solve every problem for the child is to ask them what are they going to do when they find themselves in a pickle and they're turning to you. Ask them, what are you going to do? And then usually what results is some kind of mixture of things they do and things you do about the situation. But if they can carry the whole ball, you want them to do that, to develop those problem-solving techniques. You know somebody who might go into foster care. You can get in kind of a rescue mode and you're going to make everything better and it's really important for the child to develop their skills in solving problems.
Speaker 3:The adult part is to keep them reasonably safe. My foster son. We were at the Grand Canyon. We were at the edge of the Grand Canyon and he saw a ledge below, just like three or four feet below. Well, he jumped onto that ledge so he was even closer to the ledge. That was one of those moments where oh, I'm not doing good on the keeping them safe part, you do have to look to their overriding security and it was a good thing I was an athletic young man at the time to keep them safe in some situations.
Speaker 2:Yeah, are in that situation because they are from severely dysfunctional homes and have been modeled severely dysfunctional ways of handling conflict. So the thing that I would suggest and I found very helpful you role play other ways of handling conflict. Our foster son got suspended for one day because a little girl was being bullied and he stood up for her on the playground by using his fists and he kept her safe, and so we had to practice with him other ways of being protective that didn't get him in trouble. We would recommend to foster parents practice all different ways of handling different situations so that they don't revert back to what they've seen and they've practiced, but their knee-jerk reaction is what you have practiced with them and that will help them a lot in life.
Speaker 1:What you just shared is so valuable, especially when I look back kind of to my childhood. If you did something wrong, you just got punished, like the whole way of. Let's talk about how we could do this differently or react differently.
Speaker 2:Practice it, not just talk. They don't relate to talk. They relate to doing. These are kids, they have to do it.
Speaker 1:Yes, and part of the reason we wanted to do this episode today because there are a few, but one of them was to honor Claudia and her memory. How about you, Tim? You got any fun memories?
Speaker 3:Claudia had a culinary arts class up at the Vero Beach campus of Indian River State College for a semester and she needed a ride two times a week to that class and it was about 45 minutes. So that was a time when we got to talk there I guess about 32 times about all kinds of different subjects and I remember us expanding our understanding of each other and me getting to be a daughter's father on a lot of subjects, and so that was a special time for me and I hope for her too. I think it was.
Speaker 1:Now we have progressed and Claudia is now married and had a child of her own. What was that like being grandparents?
Speaker 2:We were not grandparents at the beginning. It was really really bad at the beginning. She lived with us for three and a half years, she and her husband. For three and a half years she and her husband. There was a family member on her husband's side of the family who was mentally ill and moved in with them and would not move out, and she would not let Claudia talk to us, even though Claudia and her husband lived with us. They were yards away from us. She would go walk the dog and I'd be taking my walk and she would get afraid that someone would see her talking to me.
Speaker 2:It was a horrific time and then, when the baby was born, we were not allowed to see the baby and then they moved her. I didn't even get to say goodbye to her. They moved her and they moved her on the street. That is the street that's known for having the most fatal accidents. That's what happened, and it wasn't until the baby was three. We had met the small child now a couple of times with supervised visits, as if we were the dysfunctional people. Talk about a role reversal. After Claudia was killed and the husband had therapy, he realized about the dysfunction in the family member, and that family member is no longer present and we got a call out of the blue asking if we wanted to see the grandchild for her third birthday, and it's been a road to healing ever since.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, it was a gut-wrenching time on many levels, so that I understand you lost her, but you never got to experience her family with you, like your daughter, the child and the husband and you guys all together.
Speaker 3:Not in a normal fashion, no, not in what we'd call a customary fashion.
Speaker 2:Customary is a nice way of putting it. It was very dysfunctional. I specifically asked because my mom is 92 now if we could have a photo of the four generations, and we were denied that and then Claudia was killed. So that will never happen.
Speaker 1:I think sometimes people forget how precious life is and you know we take it for granted. And then something like you said when I talked with you you think it won't happen to you until it does.
Speaker 2:And because she was married, we were no longer considered next of kin. We were not allowed to be told anything because we were not considered next of kin anymore.
Speaker 1:How did you find out about Claudia?
Speaker 3:Well, I got a phone call from my son-in-law and here we are in the midst of COVID. Okay, it's Superbowl Sunday and he's calling from me, from the hospital, and asking me to come to the hospital. Claudia has been in a crash and I was in a real dilemma. I have a great immune system. I can get through pretty much everything, but Melanie has an overactive immune system that's so overactive it has to be suppressed. Well, if you suppress your immune system, you know you got to be careful exposing yourself.
Speaker 3:Well, you know, if I go to the hospital and pick up a set of bugs from the hospital, including COVID, and come home with that, that could be big trouble for Melanie. And so here's this dilemma of well, I want to go be with my daughter and son-in-law in her last moments, if that's what's going on. And here's my wife, who I have to consider. Oh my gosh, we're in this pandemic emergency and I have to be careful about, you know of all places, going to a hospital that's treating COVID patients and I'm like it was terrible. I had to say I can't come. That was bad.
Speaker 2:And he wouldn't let me go, and part of the husband's resentment towards us in addition to being whispered lies about us by this family member was that we didn't come and I had to tell him why we couldn't come. It was a long road back towards healing, but things are going very well now with him. We have unsupervised visits with our granddaughter, grandma and opah. We had grandma and grandpa, but when she first started she couldn't differentiate between the two, so we had to make the words different. So it's really good now.
Speaker 1:Tragically the way that happened, tim, with you having to make a really hard decision that probably other people with COVID, they had dying spouses and everything and, like you, they had to make a really tough emotional decision.
Speaker 3:I'm hard-pressed to think of a more difficult moment in my life in having to make that choice. My son-in-law was feeling somewhat responsible for what had happened. I said you're fine, you're fine, you know that there's nothing between him and I about some you know inadequacy there. It was out of both of our hands and so, yeah, today I see our granddaughter and I see my daughter a bit and that's, that's a real treat and she's a real, she's a real fun character.
Speaker 2:We call her a happy tornado.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I want to give a lot of credit to my son-in-law and his new spouse. They're doing a wonderful job as parents and they've been wonderful toward us in us getting to have some time with our granddaughter.
Speaker 2:I want to say one thing that when we were being alienated from Claudia, and then later being alienated from her husband and our granddaughter, people would try to comfort us by saying different things that really just made it hurt worse. We had gotten to the point it was so bad we assumed we would never get to meet our granddaughter until she happened to show up at age 18 and knock at our door. We weren't at peace with that, of course, but in order to make it through each day, we had to accept that that was going to be the reality. When my sister-in-law's husband died, he was Jewish and the community came in and cried with her, sat with her. That was so cathartic. That was so healing. I learned something If people want to comfort people who are going through trauma, just sit with them.
Speaker 1:Melanie, share with us where you found support and advocacy.
Speaker 2:I happen to think of Mothers Against Drunk Driving. I called them and that's when there was incremental progress in feeling like someone was in our corner, there was a victim advocate. We found out what our rights were rights were. We found out that you can get free grief counseling from your local hospice, even if your loved one was not in hospice, and I did not know that. Mothers Against Drunk Driving suggested a candlelight vigil and it was from the candlelight vigil that one of our first board members suggested that we had momentum and we had buy-in from the community and there was energy to continue and that we should keep going. So I wanted to give credit where credit is due, to Mothers Against Drunk Driving for having suggested it.
Speaker 1:I have one last question before we get into Remember for Change. If you could each say one thing to her today, what would it be If?
Speaker 3:you could each say one thing to her today. What would it be? Oh, my feeling is, if I were to get on the other side of death and it worked out this way, I'd kind of say hi, God, and I'd be running for her. There's a story of Claudia from my mother. My mother went to pick up Claudia at the airport. We sent her to go visit her grandma on something of an adventure. And my mother said she was at the place. You know, if you're not a passenger, you have to kind of wait outside the terminal. And she said she saw this little person run out of the gate area and run all the way up to where she was waiting, and it was Claudia. And there's this big hug. So there's, there's no words, there's, there's just this, this action of coming together. So after I have that, then you know well, whatever I have to face up to with God, that'll happen. After that, I would kiss her on top of her head.
Speaker 2:Yeah, claudia was four, nine. Oh, that's so sweet.
Speaker 1:Thank you for sharing that. Now let's get into, because I know this is so important. Is talking about Remember for Change, how it evolved, what people can do to support you in your mission.
Speaker 3:A starting point for me in Remember for Change is something I wanted to affect in the court proceeding where the young offender was found guilty in sentence, and we get to be a part of that. That. I had to address him in the court was to go through Claudia's life and say her full name over and over again Claudia Jane Trewin, then her last name. The young offender had a lot of people from his family there, so I got them all nodding and acknowledging the name over and over again and finally I got to ask the defense attorney can I ask your client a question? And he said yes. I said will you say my daughter's name? And he did, and I give him credit for that.
Speaker 3:The state of Florida sentenced him to a little more than four years in prison. Wow, for killing somebody. He did not intend to do that. Of course, if he had been a bit older he'd have gotten something more like 15 years, and that was a bit of an adjustment for me that well, he's going to be out in four, four and a half years and he's out now. But what I did in that is I made sure that everybody in that room was going to remember Claudia's name, because I said it about two dozen times, with interjections of things from her life and her connections to other people, and then asked him and made sure he knew her name. So he may be out of jail, but I think he remembers her name. Now that's his life sentence is that he remembers her name. So he may be out of jail, but I think he remembers her name. Now that's his life sentence. Is that he remembers her name.
Speaker 1:You kept saying her name over and over and over again. That is so powerful.
Speaker 3:Melanie and I are part of the Episcopal Church. Part of the memorial service that they set aside as an item in the order of service is the naming of the dead, to say the name. And that's where I got the idea and I said I'm going to take that into court. His father said to me yes, we know your daughter's name now from that. So we picked that up again on the Memorial Drive. In other locations sometimes we'll have a naming of the dead. That is a very simple but seems to be profound thing for people to do.
Speaker 3:So part of me for Remember, for Change, is we invite people to come and say the names of people who have died. We do the Indian River Memorial Drive on February 7th or that week and we go up into River Drive and we drive very slowly. We create a parade and then we pull into the old Fort Park and part of it is inviting people who come to say the names of people who have died in these types of tragedies. And it's a very touching moment and of course the change is to reduce the tragedy of people's lives here in St Lucie. You know the statistics look better for St Lucie County than they used to. Well, that's very satisfying to hear that there's a little less, and that's what it's about for me. And now I'll give Melanie a chance.
Speaker 2:We have expanded from St Lucie County to the Treasure Coast, from St Lucie County to the Treasure Coast. So we say working to reduce underage, drinking, impaired and aggressive driving on the Treasure Coast, because that also includes Martin County, Indian River County. We've been in conversation with people that are even farther south through Florida Department of Transportation, spreading the message through them. The Remember part of our name is we have a memorial page that has just been created on our website. There's going to be a link to a form in which they can put the name of their person that they want to remember. They can include pictures, they can include a little biography. The page is public, it is read-only so nobody can comment the change part of it.
Speaker 2:We do different events throughout the community and I am a certified, vetted, fingerprinted teacher and I'm happy to come and speak to youth groups, young adult places, churches, schools, wherever, and we have drunk buster goggles that we do with our young people and the adults where it simulates being up to and over. We have different levels of goggles of impairment and we have preschool puzzles that they have to try to put the preschool puzzle together, or for the teenagers, we make them walk the line and we have the pledge that Mothers Against Drunk Driving two different law enforcements, Drug Free St Lucie, have helped us put together. People can sign the pledge that they will not get in the car with someone who is impaired, nor when they are old enough to drink, If they choose to do so. They will not drink and drive. We have messaging wristbands that then they get as our thank you for participating in the Drunk Buster Goggles or deciding the pledge.
Speaker 2:We have coasters that have been donated to us, and the coasters have a QR code on it that if a patron needs a safe ride home, they can scan the QR code. In Fort Pierce, they have freebie where this electric vehicle will take them home for free. In Vero Beach, there is a gentleman who does it for free. He's a recovered alcoholic and he wants everyone to get home safely. The other thing that we really need is we need volunteers. When we are doing these booze, we need help, especially young people, because young people relate to young people better. So that's some of what we do.
Speaker 3:There's another thing. There's what we call the brain poster. We do. There's another thing. There's what we call the brain poster and these are, as we say and anybody who's seen this they'll recognize my words real scans of real brains, different people putting different bad stuff in their bodies. And up at the top of the brain poster we've got two images of a healthy brain. And then they see these brains that really give merit to the statement hole in the head. They're areas of lower brain activity created by different substances. Picture's worth a thousand words and they might recognize my charge to them keep your brain healthy. So they get the brain poster.
Speaker 3:Another thing I'll chip in here on Remember for Change is we have a neighbor across the street who was a DUI officer, among other things in law enforcement, and he was an exceptional one.
Speaker 3:Well, he creates plaques, these wonderful plaques that we give to law enforcement officers that have been selected by their administrations as doing an exceptional job, any officer who goes above and beyond in confronting people about driving under the influence. That's an important thing we do. I hope every listener will stop to think. Who comes to these scenes of crashes over and over and over again and sees these tragedies and has to do the process of gathering evidence, but then restoring that site to normal life goes on. This affects them and they are very interested in having fewer crashes because they, as they say, they need to put all that in a box and leave it at work so they can go home and have a life after all the stuff that they see. So we always take this opportunity to thank our law enforcement for being responsive to these situations, and I have a sense of partnership with them. I've really learned more about their humanity in all of this and that's been a good experience.
Speaker 1:I would like to ask you what does the journey of forgiveness look like for each of you?
Speaker 3:It's to repeat the thought that this young man did not intend for that to happen. He didn't intend for that. It would be harder to forgive if he did. So that helps. That's the thought.
Speaker 3:I think that's something that's incomplete. I think at different points in life you revisit something in a new way because you have changed, and so forgiveness happens at these different points in life where that comes up, and so I wouldn't say I'm done with that. I don't know how I would be For some folks. I understand. You know death's the end. I didn't know anything before I was born. After I'm dead, I'm not going to know anything. The Stoics epitaph I was not, I was, I am not, I don't care. I was not, I was, I am not, I don't care, I'm not that way.
Speaker 3:I think there's been enough experiences and I have personally heard a person talk about their experience, which lends to the possibility that some of us is still around afterward and I think if the forgiveness process gets completed, it gets completed on the other side and I suppose the materialist would say, well, yeah, it's done, you're done feeling bad about it. So don't be too hard on yourself if you feel like, well, I really haven't forgiven somebody. I don't know that you can. I don't know, I don't know. Therefore, a lot is possible. I don't know everything, I don't know. Therefore, a lot is possible. I don't know everything.
Speaker 3:People believe they can do something and they'll be persistent, and what we try to encourage them to do is to say you know, sometimes it's a good idea to stop persisting and take the goggles off, stop the activity, make a change of course. There's people today driving impaired because they believe they can, because they've done it over and over again, and all I would say to them is you know, you're slower, because that's what our little test shows you You're slower and someday you might have to be very quick, like that young man needed to be really quick that day and stay in his lane and he couldn't do it because those substances had slowed him down. When you're slowed down, take the goggles off, stop drinking, stay with people around you, get a ride. Please, slow down. You're going to need the extra time.
Speaker 2:Regarding forgiveness, having worked at the detention center for youth, in a way I have found it easier to forgive the young man Now. When I had to face him in that courtroom, I was very astonished at myself. I became livid, I had to step out because I had never faced him and fortunately the victim's advocate was there from mad. My biggest difficulty has been forgiving the parents. The kid was a teenager. His brain wasn't fully grown. The parents knew better and they needed to get him help.
Speaker 2:Like I had told both of our own children, if you ever become addicted to any substance, know that you will be in a substance treatment center so fast that it will make your head spin, and it won't be local where you get to see your friends who are reinforcing these bad addiction. It will be in another state. Claudia became an orphan because both of her parents were alcoholics and abandoned her at age seven and she was picked up by the police and, mercifully, were taken to an orphanage and so I knew she had the alcoholism gene and I let her know, and our son as well. So parents admit that you can't fix it yourself. As much as you want to, as much as you want to keep it private want to as much as you want to keep it private. Go get your child help before your child ends up in jail having killed someone or they end up dead themselves. Please.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for sharing I mean you all shared so much valuable information today. Thank you for what you do for our community as well. Tim and Melanie, thank you for being my guest today on the I Need Blue podcast.
Speaker 3:Thank you.
Speaker 1:Thank you. You're very welcome and thank you for listening today. This is Jen Lee with the I Need Blue podcast. To learn anything and everything about I Need Blue, check out my website, wwwinadebluenet, and remember you are stronger than you think. Until next time you.
