Sarah's story | What is the Hixson Opportunity Award?

SARAH BREGMAN'S first day of college at the University of Kansas was surprisingly normal, at least by her standards.

On her first day of school the year before, she arrived at Smoky Valley High School in a sleepless daze. She had spent the previous night listening to her mom’s incoherent screams.

Two years earlier she had been committed to Prairie View, a mental health center near Lindsborg, her most recent home. Her aunt and uncle, then her guardians, thought she was suicidal. Though she denies their claim, Sarah had certainly lived a difficult life — a life marred by mental illness, drug abuse, neglect and sexual violence.

But that was the past, something Sarah tried not to think about as she walked down Jayhawk Boulevard in her strapless, tie-dyed sundress.

“I really wanted to be this new person,” she said.

She even cut her hair and dyed it hot pink as if to emphasize her point.

Ironically, Sarah’s story of personal hardships — and her ability to overcome them — led directly to her winning the Hixson Opportunity Award, a $20,000 scholarship that finances most of her four years at the University of Kansas. The Hixson is unique among KU scholarships, most of which are awarded based on a combination of academic achievement, extracurricular involvement and need.

Though a well-rounded application is important, it alone doesn’t qualify students for the Hixson. Like Sarah, applicants need to have overcome significant challenges in their personal life to be eligible. Having heard about the award, Sarah’s high school guidance counselor considered her the perfect candidate. Sarah’s essay outlining her old life won her what she now thinks of as her new one.

Gone were the parents who neglected her, the babysitter and foster brother who raped her and the aunt and uncle with whom Sarah regularly fought over strict rules during her teenage years. Gone were the judges, social workers and child psychologists who insisted they were only doing “what was best for the children” when they took them from their parents. Gone was the money Sarah won from a lawsuit filed on her behalf against social services in Colorado. Gone were the 12-hour shifts she worked at a nursing home to help support her bi-polar mother who attempted suicide more times than Sarah could remember. Gone were the custody battles that left her mother bankrupt and divided her family. And gone were the drugs she took to escape: marijuana, cocaine, alcohol, her aunt’s Lortab and the prescriptions she had taken intermittently since she was nine.

They were all gone, or at least far away from Sarah’s new life as a student in Lawrence. And she didn’t want to think about them. She wanted to move on.

“I refuse to allow my past to cast a shadow over my future,” she wrote in her Hixson scholarship essay.

She had come too far to let that happen.

SARAH WAS born Dec. 3, 1990, in Steamboat Springs, Colo., a small ski town just west of the Continental Divide. Her mother, Anita Neilson, was a musician at Club Majik’s, a local dinner theater. As a talented pianist and the daughter of a minister, Anita also played the organ in a nearby Methodist church. Sarah’s father, Barry Gross Sr., worked as a cook in small diners around town. He was a burly man with a booming voice and an aggressive temperament. He said police arrested him 15 times for charges ranging from trespassing and driving under the influence to child abuse and domestic violence.

One of Sarah’s earliest memories is of her dad hurling her mom’s keyboard at the windshield of their car as her mom drove it away, fleeing one of their frequent fights. The yelling usually started in the evening. Anita would accuse him of something, most often cheating on her. He would deny it. Before long they were both screaming while Sarah and her brother, Barry, listened from the living room.

Social services took notice after neighbors complained about the late-night fights. Not long after Sarah’s third birthday, Colorado officials gave her mom an ultimatum: She could either leave her husband and keep her children or hand custody over to the state.

Anita refused to give them up. She secured a restraining order on Barry Sr. before moving with Sarah and Barry 50 miles west to Craig, Colo. There they lived in a low-income apartment complex on the west edge of town for the next five years. Anita and Barry made the separation official when they divorced on Jan. 15, 1995.

ANITA STRUGGLED as a single mom. She couldn’t hold a job and depended on welfare and food stamps to support herself and her two children. She now blames social services for the divorce that she says “the system” forced her into. Her mental health worsened as her frustrations grew and a psychiatrist diagnosed her with bipolar disorder, though Sarah said she refused to acknowledge the disorder for more than a decade.

Sarah noticed that when her mom started to use drugs, she lost her appetite and only sporadically bought groceries or cooked. Sarah remembers TV dinners and mustard and mayonnaise sandwiches as staples of her childhood diet.

“One of our meals sometimes was a spoonful of peanut butter,” she said.

Sarah and her brother said that drugs consumed their mom’s life. Sarah remembers nights not knowing where she was or when she would return. When her mom finally came home, Sarah said, she would sleep all day.

While Sarah worried about her mom, she relished the newfound independence gained from her mother’s inattention. She and her brother became talented dumpster divers away from the watchful eyes of grown-ups. In the dumpster by their apartment, they found ropes to swing from and discarded needles to use as squirt guns. She could ride her bike anywhere, watch limitless TV and play Metroid Prime on Super Nintendo whenever she wanted.

“She wasn’t the best mom at first,” Sarah said, sounding forgiving, almost apologetic. “I hate talking bad about her.”

Even today, Sarah finds it difficult to blame her mom for anything that happened to her.

SARAH'S FATHER kept in touch with his ex-wife and children after they moved to Craig. Despite the restraining order, he visited them several times a year. With no car and little money, he resorted to hitchhiking to make the 50-mile trip. Barry Sr. usually brought marijuana for Anita and cash for Sarah and Barry to buy groceries. He worked a series of maintenance jobs to help cover child support.

“I was Barry the paycheck,” he explained.

Barry Sr. grew resentful toward social services and his ex-wife for taking away his children, especially after he learned about her drug use and diminishing mental health. He considered himself the more stable parent, never knowing what Anita’s state of mind would be when he visited. One time she accused him of stealing her cigarettes and sprayed him in the eyes with the insecticide Raid before kicking him out of her apartment. Other times she called police, accusing Barry Sr. of abuse or trespassing and telling them to arrest him.

Despite her mom’s erratic behavior, Sarah looked forward to her dad’s visits. He added a fleeting sense of stability to her life. He scolded her for misbehaving, cared for her when she was sick and cooked her breakfast.

She remembers him for his eggs Benedict; Sarah’s brother remembers him for his tough love.

“He was the only form of discipline there was,” he said.

EVENTUALLY ANITA started hiring babysitters when she went out. None lasted long, especially the strict ones. Sarah and Barry bombarded them with eggs and soda cans while perched on a shelf inside their bedroom closet.

“I don’t think she was able to get very many after a while,” Sarah said.

Then came John.

John was the son of one of Anita’s friends, a slightly overweight teenager with short blond hair. Before going out, Anita would send her children to his apartment in the same complex.

Sarah liked John at first because he was more lenient than their previous babysitters, and he paid attention to them.

“He made us feel like we were people,” Sarah said.

John started inviting Sarah, then only eight, into his bedroom while her brother watched TV in the living room. There he physically forced her into having sex. Though she tried to resist, John, who was in his late teens, easily overpowered her.

The rapes happened regularly for several months — always in John’s bedroom. Sarah said he threatened to hurt her family if she told anyone. She worried that doing so would ruin her mom’s relationship with John’s’ mother.

“I hated being this problem child,” Sarah explained.

Finally, when she could no longer take it, she told her mom, who then told her dad. He immediately called police.

Anita panicked. She knew what it meant if police got involved. Sarah said social services were already monitoring her mom. If they heard about this, Anita worried they would take away her children for good. She loaded them in the car and drove aimlessly through the countryside for more than an hour. Police were waiting when they returned home. They rushed Sarah to the hospital. She said her mom told her to keep quiet, that social services would take her away if she talked.

Sarah didn’t take her mom’s advice, but in the end it didn’t matter. She said police had no physical evidence other than her statement. Sarah said John denied the allegations. All it meant was that social services had one more strike against her mom for neglecting her children.

John’s real name was changed for this article because he was never charged with raping Sarah.

ANITA'S MENTAL and physical health worsened after she gave birth to Brittany, Sarah’s younger sister who shared the same father, on Oct. 8, 1998. She was hospitalized several times because of a collapsed lung and eventually had it removed.

Ten months later she unexpectedly asked Sarah and Barry if they wanted to move to Lindsborg, Kan., a small farming town 15 miles south of Salina, to live with her parents. Sarah eagerly said yes. She didn’t know about the upcoming court date her mom was running away from.

They left at night and arrived in Lindsborg the next morning. Anita had driven more than 600 miles straight through. Looking back Sarah said it was easy to see now that her mom was acting manic.

“It was totally impulsive,” Sarah said about her mom’s behavior.

But she was nine years old at the time; she hadn’t even heard of bipolar disorder.

Police arrived three days later and arrested Anita. By the end of the week, Sarah and her siblings were back in Craig. They spent the next two years in foster care with two different families. The only times they saw their mom or dad were during supervised visits.

FOSTER CARE wasn’t entirely new to Sarah. She and her siblings had spent a week in state custody after her mom was hospitalized earlier that year. They moved back in with the same couple when they returned from Lindsborg.

But this time it was different and Sarah knew it. She dreaded going back. Sarah didn’t understand what her mom had done or why she had been taken away from her. Why couldn’t she stay in Lindsborg with her grandparents? Why did she have to move back to Craig? None of it made sense to her.

“I was a furious kid,” she said.

Then came court-mandated counselors, supervised visits and bouts of depression for Sarah. Doctors first prescribed her Paxil to treat post-traumatic stress disorder when she was nine years old. Counselors tried to comfort Sarah by taking her out for ice cream and to swim at the lake. None of it seemed to work. She would flee therapy sessions when counselors refused to talk about her mom’s situation.

“I was told that was adult stuff to talk about,” Sarah said, “that I wasn’t supposed to worry about those kinds of things.”

To make matters worse, she once again became the victim of sexual abuse.

SARAH WAS playing in the bedroom her brother shared with two other foster children the first time Joaquim, her 16-year-old foster brother, raped her. He had told his younger brother, Jessie, and Barry to hide in the closet. That same week their foster mother had taken Brittany to Florida. Their foster father was asleep on the opposite end of the trailer. Barry said he wanted to stop Joaquim, but that he was too scared to move.

Soon after, Joaquim started sneaking into Sarah’s room. The alarm clock on her nightstand almost always said 12:01 when the door slowly crept open. Joaquim kept quiet as he shut the door and crept to her bed. Sarah often pretended to be asleep; it was easier not to look at him. Though she said it was painful, she never fought back.

What made the abuse difficult for Sarah was that during the day she liked Joaquim. He protected her from his younger brother, who would chase her around the trailer they now lived in and show her his self-inflicted scars. But at night she was terrified of Joaquim. She would lie in bed watching her clock, waiting anxiously for 12:01.

After several weeks Joaquim abruptly stopped. The last time he snuck into Sarah’s room he apologized and started hitting himself. He told Sarah that he knew it was wrong, but that he couldn’t control himself.

“I’ve never held it against him because of that moment,” she said. “Even though I was so scared of him at night and knew he was going to hurt me, I still believed he was a good person.”

But that didn’t stop Sarah from telling her therapist. She said Joaquim wanted her to, that he thought it would help him. As a result, he and his brother were removed from the foster home. Nancy Smith, Sarah’s court-appointed guardian at the time in Colorado, filed a lawsuit against social services on Sarah’s behalf. The case was settled out of court.

Smith said she was unable to comment on the case because of a confidentiality agreement included in the settlement. The court awarded Sarah an undisclosed amount of money. It likely ranged from $20,000 to $40,000, according to estimates provided by Sarah and relatives familiar with the case.

IN MARCH 2000, Sarah, Barry and Brittany went to a new foster home. Sarah felt safe with her new foster parents, but she also felt increasingly depressed. She fought regularly with her new foster mom and fantasized about killing herself by jumping out of a car on the highway.

Sarah also grew frustrated with tedious therapy sessions and mind-numbing medication. None of it seemed to relieve the guilt she felt for what happened to her and her family. She blamed herself.

“I didn’t really have any hope,” she said. “It was a really dark place in my life.”

After Sarah had spent 18 months in foster care, social services scheduled a family unity meeting. The goal of the meeting was to keep the three children together and to return them to their biological family. Anita sought to regain custody of her children, but the court ruled against her. Instead, the judge granted shared guardianship to Sarah’s grandmother and her aunt. Had they not accepted, Sarah and her siblings would have likely been put up for adoption and possibly separated.

Anita wouldn’t talk to anyone after the meeting. Her brother, Dave Cepure, said he followed her as she walked back to her apartment. She screamed the entire way.

Sarah tried to stay optimistic. At least she would be with family in Lindsborg. The court had directed her mom to a treatment plan that would have allowed her to regain full custody once she completed it. Anita moved to Lindsborg shortly after her children did. Sarah thought her grandmother would give her and her siblings back to their mom.

But that was before her grandmother lost her half of the guardianship two years later as the result of another court hearing. The court transferred full guardianship to her aunt and uncle, Daina and Doyle Rhodes. Although Barry remained largely apathetic about the decision, Sarah adamantly supported it. She hated living with her grandmother, a first-generation Latvian immigrant with a stern presence. She especially hated what her brother described as her grandmother’s old-world habits.

“Our grandmother thought the belt was the best way to punish,” he said.

After the court transferred guardianship, Sarah, Barry and Brittany moved in with their aunt and uncle on their five-acre farm just south of Lindsborg. Once again, Sarah tried to stay optimistic.

BARRY WAS standing in the doorway to the kitchen when his aunt and uncle walked in holding Sarah. She was obviously drunk. She slurred her words and fell to the floor.

Sarah knew she wasn’t supposed to drink alcohol while on Lamictal, but she didn’t care. After all, she wouldn’t have been on medication at all if her aunt and uncle hadn’t committed her to Prairie View at the beginning of the school year. They thought she had become suicidal. Now they worried Sarah had alcohol poisoning. Barry stayed home to watch Brittany while their uncle drove Sarah to the emergency room. Sarah returned home later that night after spending several hours in the emergency room.

In the following weeks, when Sarah’s aunt and uncle took away her cellphone and wouldn’t let her go out with friends, she started sneaking out. Barry kept his distance from Sarah for weeks after the incident. He worried about her growing drug habit. That same year she started smoking marijuana on a weekly basis and experimenting with harder drugs, including cocaine.

“That was my escape,” she said. “It’s really how I tried to forget.”

It was Sarah’s junior year of high school. She had been living with her aunt and uncle for more than four years. She was convinced they lied to her about her mom, that she wasn’t as bad as they said she was, and she hated them for it. Sarah said she knew her mom was trying. Anita had recently bought a house in Lindsborg and continued seeing a therapist. She worked a series of jobs, but unpaid legal fees forced her into bankruptcy last year after she spent thousands fighting the guardianship in court.

“Whether or not I thought she could be a good parent, I knew she was a good person,” Sarah said. “She deserved a chance.”

ON THE NIGHT before Thanksgiving, when Sarah was 17, she stayed up late with two friends. Sarah wanted to talk to them away from her aunt and uncle. But because she wasn’t allowed to leave their property, they sat outside in her friend’s dark-blue Oldsmobile, parked in Sarah’s driveway. They were still there when her uncle woke up around 6 a.m. He was furious and soon began yelling at Sarah.

It wasn’t the first fight Sarah had with her uncle. She had grown accustomed to such spats during the five years she lived with him. She usually shrugged them off, but this one proved to be too much.

“I didn’t want to leave,” Sarah said. “I wanted to try to stick it out, but two more years felt like a lifetime.”

And so she left. She ran away to her mom’s house. Legally she wasn’t allowed to live with her mom. The court had granted Anita two two-hour visits with Sarah every week. Her aunt and uncle could have forced her to come back, but they apparently never did.

THE NEXT seven months proved difficult for Sarah. She worked 12-hour shifts at the Bethany Home, a local retirement community, to help support herself and her mom. She didn’t regret her decision to move in with her.

“It was easy in the sense that I knew my mom actually cared about me,” she said.

But that summer Anita became increasingly manic. She screamed for hours during the day and at night. Sarah tried to calm her, but nothing seemed to work.

The breaking point came when her mom reported her to police for being out past curfew. The next day Sarah moved in with her boyfriend’s mother and stayed with her for the remainder of the school year. It was her third home in less than a year, but by then she was used to it.

“I had to be,” she said. “I was always hoping that the next situation would be better.”

When Sarah’s guidance counselor told her about the Hixson scholarship, she knew it was an opportunity she couldn’t afford to pass up. She immediately started work on her application and spent three months writing her two-page essay. It proved difficult for her to write, especially when it came to writing about her mom. Sarah said she didn’t want to convey her as “this horrible person.”

But writing her essay also became a form of catharsis for Sarah. It caused her to re-examine everything she had experienced and in the process ask herself, “Why me?” She wrote candidly about being raped, about her mom’s mental illness and about her own frustrations and self-inflicted guilt.

“My entire life I have lived to try to attain a better understanding of why,” Sarah wrote. “Why my life has not been society’s standard of normal.”

The letter from KU Financial Aid and Scholarships arrived in early April, a month before Sarah’s high school graduation. Sarah had won the Hixson. Four months later, she moved into Ellsworth Hall.

SARAH TALKS openly about her past. She may rub her nose with the palm of her hand when she appears uncomfortable, a nervous habit, but most of the time she remains calm. She’s more likely to be upset because of a bad grade or a difficult assignment than because of anything that happened to her before college.

“I deal with life crises better than with what a college student should be doing,” she said. “It’s really hard getting used to having a normal life.”

Sarah’s life has remained far from easy since she arrived in Lawrence two years ago. Last spring her younger sister committed suicide. She was 11 years old and still living with Sarah’s aunt and uncle when she hung herself in her bedroom. Her mom still experiences manic episodes and talks about killing herself while Sarah continues to struggle with depression. Sometimes she sees a therapist, but she refuses to take medication.

Last fall Sarah married her long-time boyfriend, Danny Bregman, whom she once described as the only constant in her life. They now live in a cluttered one-bedroom apartment west of campus. She quit using drugs and rarely drinks. School has become her primary focus. It’s her newest escape from her troubled past. It’s what gives her a chance at her once elusive dream of a normal life, if only she now wanted one.

“Normal is such a weird way to put things,” Sarah said. “Normal doesn’t exist.”

— Edited by Ashley Montgomery