4. Everyone and their lawyers.

For the organization things came to a head when Drew demanded a copy of the Stillbirth Certificate be sent to him directly from the Vital Records Office. He would not accept the document Kayla had in her lawyer's possession. The only way this could happen was if Kayla signed over permission. We agreed that Kayla would sign this permission over to the lawyer that the organization was forced to acquire. He would receive the document and forward on to Drew's lawyers. Simple transfer. Kayla, me, our board chair, and our lawyer met in a conference room where she signed all the documents giving power of attorney for this matter. The lawyer made it clear to her that he was the lawyer for the organization and not for her personally if that was at all in question. She agreed, signed the papers and we all left.

Except an hour later I received a phone call from the lawyer. He asked if I knew that Kayla had come back to his office after our meeting - I didn't. She was supposed to meet me in our new office space so we could get some work done and hadn't shown up. This was typical over the past year or so, so it didn't really phase me. Instead of meeting me, she had gone back to the lawyer's office to rescind permission and said she would be getting her own personal lawyer for the matter. Stubborn, I thought. So damned stubborn! This is your chance to have this over! What are you doing?!

At the very end of my patience for this, and her feelings about it, and after speaking with our board chair, I simply said - either you allow this document to go where it needs to go by next Monday or we will need to put you on administrative leave until you can personally sort this out. Since you have decided to not accept help from us or our attorney this is sadly how it has to be. I wanted her to have time to figure this whole mess out, and it was clearly affecting the organization. This was the first time since this had all began that I felt like I had taken back a bit of control of the situation, and I was actually relieved.

The date came and went though, and that was it. The administrative leave document was drafted. In the meantime, she left her apartment because of the restraining order (which was directly above Drew’s workplace). She had moved there after selling her house in West Fargo since she sadly no longer needed the space for a nursery. Downtown had the vibe she was looking for and she could walk to the places she loved. But now without her apartment she had been bouncing around staying with friends and for a brief while, my sister. I let her know the email was coming, and then asked a few clerical questions. I would need any passwords to anything I don't have ready at hand including our Gate City Bank account if it had been changed, the QuickBooks login, and the website credentials. She agreed to provide all of this to me. Through the Spring of that year, I had expressed concern about not having a local accountant/bookkeeper on top of our financials. We took a recommendation for a local business to begin handling these things. Kayla let me know that the new company had access to and information for all of our accounts, and I could get them from her.

I could not believe how far down this road we had come. By this point I couldn't tell if she was stubborn, or shocked to her core at it all, or oblivious to why this was so important. She continually said she wasn't eating, wasn't sleeping, that all she could do was weep about what was happening to her. She would reach out to our friends saying, "I just don't know what they want from me", "nothing will be good enough for them to believe me". She quoted her new personal lawyer saying that he said not to give up the document because they wouldn't accept it anyways. She was simply going to follow her lawyer's advice. "Maniac" I thought. We all tried to reason with her. She knew exactly what they wanted. Finally she said to us, "I'm not giving him the certificate because he doesn't deserve it. He hasn't been a father to Hope at all, so why does he care so much now?". I remember her distinctly saying she didn't want his hands to touch something so precious to her. But the plan still stuck, she was on leave, and with Drew's lawyers pressing harder on the organization we decided we should get an insurance policy for the directors and officers of the organization to protect them from this whole situation getting ugly in a way we couldn't really imagine yet. That I could do. I got the application, asked Kayla a few questions about our finances and sent it off. To my surprise it was declined in underwriting. It was declined because there had been a claim against the organization in the past few years which denied us from securing a policy. Another headache. I dug into the information. It didn't make sense at all to me and had to be a mistake which I reiterated to the insurance agent. I would find that the past had come back to haunt. That pesky claim against HHP by the video company was listed as the reasoning. The claim that had been settled and dropped. Immediately I grabbed the phone and called the lawyer who had helped us the year before with this. After reminding him about the claim, he responded to me with "oh yeah, how'd that turn out for you?". I responded nervously with, "well you had worked it out with the other lawyer I had thought." A few clicks on his end and he says to me," it looks like you satisfied the judgement, did you pay it then?". Crickets. My stomach drops an inch. In my mind I thought, no way, no freaking way does she pay over $6000 without telling me. No. Not possible.

It's Monday and I'm headed to the bank. I don't have passwords to our bank account, they had been changed. I have one check to deposit, and several questions. The treasurer and I sit down with a private banker to look into the account. Quickly we find the transaction we were looking for. The $6,047.35 paid out in December of 2020. She paid it. She lied about it, and just paid it. Why? I looked to Jessica and just said "why would she lie?", and she responded calmly with, "has she lied to you before?". Shit.

We went through the statements with the banker screen by screen, when he finally looked up and said, "you said this was a business account? It looks more like a personal account." Transactions unlike any I'd ever seen were showing up with descriptions that didn't make any sense to me or the banker. My hands began to tremble, I could feel a mist of sweat form on the back of my neck, and I became dizzy. I stood up and instructed Jess to get printouts of it all and meet me in the car. They changed the bank passwords and access immediately. In a blur we met with the board chair and our lawyer once again to share what we had found. After an emergent meeting with all the board members it was decided we would call her and confront her with the findings. The call was recorded with ND being a one-party consent state. Kayla denied knowledge of the transactions from the strange descriptions, alleging those had been some type of fraud and we should call the bank. She did however admit to completing cash withdrawals from all around the Fargo area in the thousands of dollars in the past weeks. Oddly, she attributed those to something none of us were prepared for.

In her words, she detailed a situation where an anonymous person had been blackmailing her for months. She claimed they had threatened her friends, and her family. They wanted cash to keep these individuals safe. So, she was taking the cash and leaving it in envelopes all around town in different places for them to pick up. She was scared for what might happen if she didn't follow directions. Our mouths all hung open. "But what have they threatened you with?" we would ask. "They know where my friends live, and my family" was what she said. Had she called the police? Surely, you have, right? No, she hadn't. Her blackmailers had strictly instructed her not to contact authorities. This was all getting to be just too much. Encouraging Kayla to contact the police was our advice, and then to perhaps get her house in order to take some steps for self-care. When the call ended, I was stunned silent. I am not kidding - a part of me believed her. I didn't want to be the first to speak so I waited. I waited until everyone else let out their held breath and said, "well that was bizarre". Shit. Ok, yes right, we don't believe this insane story - thank you! After that we did terminate her employment on the spot and encouraged her to seek some rest and perhaps respite care somewhere. She needed to find some help for whatever this was. We started digging into the financial documents and making a plan to sort everything out.

The next morning, to my somewhat surprise, I was getting my kids out the door for the day when the doorbell sounded. A man was there at 7:45am. With papers. He was serving me papers. Perfect. By this point Drew had found out Kayla had been terminated, and he wanted to know the reason. He thought that it was because we knew the answer to the ever-present question of whether Hope existed or not. We didn't. We also were not ready to share about the embezzlement until we were able to speak to the police. The subpoena was requesting all of the employment documentation we had for Kayla Sorum including her termination letter. "Who was that?!" my kids yelled from behind me. Just a guy dropping off some work for mommy, I said. Never thought my kids would see me being served, so that was an impromptu conversation I wasn't ready for. We did however respond back letting them know their presumptions on her dismissal were not what they were suspicious of. Thankfully, they accepted our explanation that the matter was not related to whether or not Hope existed. A reprieve and maybe the first time our two sides agreed on anything. Now it's time to call the police.

We carefully prepared documentation - evidence for the police before our report. Looking through bank statements for each month one by one and highlighting transactions that were not familiar was the first step. Then we went through credit card statements. From these items alone we could see that she had basically been using the organization's funds for the past three months to suit her lifestyle. She hadn't been staying with a friend in Minneapolis, she was staying at hotels. She purchased hundreds of dollars of merchandise at Target and Scheels in Eden Prairie. We waited for the bank to provide us with every deposit record for the account dating back to the date opened in 2018. This was when it hit us. She had been taking funds since the beginning. The first ever deposit into the account was from the Cycle Studio fundraiser. On February 8th, 2018 she deposited a check for $975 only to hold back $875 of it in cash. She did this consistently over 4 years, almost always keeping back at least a few hundred in cash with each deposit. To be very clear, the organization did not, and had no need to pay for any supplies, vendors, or bills in cash. The details of these transactions do not show up on bank statements. The amount deposited is shown, but unless you had reason to request the images of each deposit slip, you wouldn't ever see this documented anywhere. The process of sifting through every transaction over 4 years was a daunting one. However, every time we got out that highlighter, we found more. By June of 2021, after we had confronted her, it looks like that was when things really took off as far as her spending habits. There are charges from her organization debit card for hotel stays in the Minneapolis area, Trader Joes, Target, Scheels. Then back in Fargo there were charges for Waxing the City, Catalyst Spa, and even a $1,039.46 charge to pay her Xcel Energy bill. July brought on massages, more hotels, and mysterious withdrawals. August was littered with withdrawals from hundreds to thousands of dollars in cash at a time. In August of 2021, she wrote herself a check for $900, and forged my signature on it. She wrote on the memo line "doula work" and deposited it into her personal bank account. One of the more egregious charges was on August 30th, a $3,000 charge to SW&L Attorney's in Fargo. That personal lawyer she decided she needed was paid out of the organization's bank account. Upon this realization we called the law firm who responded saying that it was a retainer fee, and she had already "used up" the services from that $3,000 so they simply could not return it to us. This had stunned me. I agree that everyone deserves to be compensated for their time, but couldn't they simply invoice her personally for the amount? We shared with them the nature of our concerns, and they simply stated they couldn't be of any help. They were her counsel after all, so we probably shouldn't have expected anything different.

Finally, putting the pieces together we discovered a series of PayPal transactions as well as "Moonpay" showing up on bank statements. With considerable research we found that to be a form of Cryptocurrency she had purchased which is fully traceable thanks to photo identification requirements at purchase. She had purchased some of the Cryptocurrency using PayPal. PayPal had been a way we accepted donations through our website. We finally put together after missing payments, that donors had said they made, that the organization's PayPal account was actually linked to Kayla's personal bank account, and not the organization. She had in fact created two accounts. One that went to the organization and one that went directly to her. She simply made a choice as to which she offered to someone to make a gift to the organization. Before you might think it strange or obvious which would make sense to give through - the one with the handle @KaylaSorum59 was actually the one tied to the organization's account.

Through careful review, it also became clear that not only had she withdrawn thousands in cash, but cash was not shown to be deposited into the account. On several occasions we had collected cash donations through our fundraisers mainly, but also through events held by families in honor of their children. One in particular was the event the Pavek Family put on for their son, Rhett each year. In the summer of 2021, they held a bean bag tournament at their home along with a meal, fireworks, and a penny auction to honor their baby.

Kenzie and Jake, Rhett's parents, had indicated they would like to set up a special scholarship fund in Rhett's name, and Kayla had told them absolutely she could facilitate that for her. Over $1,500 dollars were raised at that event that year. Kenzie put the money in an envelope and handed it to Kayla to take care of. The cash was never deposited into the bank, and there is no record of what happened to it to this day. This family not only were huge supporters of the mission, but Kayla had also served as a private doula for them during the birth, after care, and funeral for Rhett. Kayla had become so close to this family over the years since their loss that they entrusted her to watch their twin boys at times.

It became increasingly clear that tracking down every dollar and every angle in which she stole from the organization was going to be a big task. It also became clear that the families and friends that entrusted her with their most precious memories and moments were of no sentiment to her. She so easily stole from this family and others who had let her into their world simply because she too had experienced the deeply devastating experience of stillbirth. Stillbirth. It had faded during the daytime hours of reconciling accounts and furious rage as to the dramatic dip in our operating funds. The thoughts that plagued me all summer, and the nagging feeling that it wasn't adding up would come to me every night when I finally rested then woke in the middle of the night. I would go over all the reasons that no person would ever, ever lie about something like this. I began keeping a list in the notes app in my phone. The list included the mementos she had shown me, hospital bands, the certificate, the photos, the tattoo of Hope's name on her arm, and finally, my number one that was underlined and highlighted - Who would choose the life of a bereaved mother? Who would WANT that burden, to carry it with them to their work, to new friendships, to a dating scene? Consistently she told me it was difficult to meet men who accepted her as a mother. They would be uncomfortable about her loss and how much of an impact her daughter had on her everyday life. Again, her social media presence was a stream of beautifully captured photos of her and Hope, including maternity photos.

At this point everything felt like it was crumbling into thousands of tiny pieces. Each one impossible to pick up and find the right fit to put it back. My head was spinning constantly going over conversations we had had over the years, things we had laughed about, things I had told her that were sacred to me, how she seemed to perfectly enjoy all the same things I did. This narrative of her just did not fit my time with her. Or maybe it did. Maybe it was all too perfect. Maybe she was too much of what I leaned on in those days of grief and building the organization. Could it have been a perfectly crafted persona to match what I said I needed? Did I know this person at all? What don't I know? These were the questions keeping me up and keeping my mind completely elsewhere at all times. Eventually I would find out.