Raised In Silence

There’s a kind of charisma that doesn’t inspire, it consumes. It arrives dressed as attention, tenderness, devotion — but underneath, it’s an agenda. Influence without consent. Affection used like a key to doors that should never be opened without permission.

At first it feels intoxicating. The rush of being seen, praised, adored. Compliments raining down faster than you can hold them. But what happens when those compliments are not gifts, but contracts you never agreed to? When “you’re perfect” becomes the foundation for “so you’ll do what I say, right?”

The dark side of charm bypasses your reasoning, slipping under the guardrails you built to keep yourself safe. It creates dependency by making you believe your worth is reflected only in their eyes. Slowly, invisibly, the balance shifts. Boundaries bend. Then they break.

And from the outside? It looks like love. It looks like a partner who “cherishes” you. Nobody sees the way the praise curdles in private, how every word of adoration doubles as a tether. Nobody sees the loneliness of being worshipped one moment and undermined the next.

Flattery that is only fraud doesn’t just manipulate your choices — it rewrites your reality. It isolates you. It convinces you that freedom is betrayal, that silence is harmony, that questioning is ingratitude. It turns the very thing that should empower you — intimacy — into the very thing that erodes you.

The second most common cause of death in pregnant people? Mental health related demises such as suicide and overdose. Pregnancy wrecks mental health. It absolutely destroys it, especially if you don’t want to be pregnant. Long before postpartum psychosis and postpartum depression, pregnant people harm themselves at a rate that exceeds deaths in pregnancy related to physical complications. You have to discontinue many psychiatric drugs in pregnancy because they are not safe for the fetus. Pregnant people lack mental health support and are often shamed for struggling with their mental health or doing activities that could harm their pregnancy like continuing to use drugs and alcohol.

I’m here because my mother, Dawn Caraveo, never received a real investigation into her death, and the truth was buried the same day she died.

On January 29, 1990, when I was three years old, my siblings and I woke up to a gunshot. My mother was found facedown on top of a shotgun. Within hours, her death was ruled a suicide. No forensic testing was done. No fingerprints. No gunshot residue. No trajectory analysis. No blood spatter work. Nothing that should have been standard…even in 1990.

The officer who made that decision had an intimate relationship with my mother….while he was engaged to be married to someone else. That’s the man who walked into the scene, called it suicide immediately, and closed the door on the truth before the truth could come out.

Last year, I finally obtained the crime scene photos and other documents. And the more I found, the less the official story made sense. There was blood outside the house but none in the room where she supposedly shot herself. The autopsy describes injuries that would have made it impossible for her to walk or move after being shot. Her black eye wasn’t documented. Her reproductive system marked as “unremarkable” when that was the furthest from the truth. She was shot straight through her uterus. Could she have been pregnant? We will never know

And then there are the records.

The coroner’s file is missing, even though coroner records are permanent by law. I only have the documents my oldest sister was able to obtain copies of before the file disappeared.

The police report is also gone, and there is no certificate of destruction, which is required to legally destroy police records. There is no documentation explaining its disappearance. Nothing.

I’m not here pretending any of this can be undone.

I know justice, in the traditional sense, is long gone.

But my mother didn’t deserve her story ending in lies.

And I’m not going to let the version that was convenient for other people be the one that survives.

If you want to understand what really happened, everything I’ve found is here:

🔗 Petition for Accuracy & Accountability

PETITION

🔗 Documentation, Crime Scene Photos, Timeline

Crime Scene Archive: The Death of Dawn Caraveo

I’ll be sharing 30 days of red flags, one each day, breaking down every inconsistency, every missing step, and every part of the official narrative that falls apart when you look at the facts.

If you’re here reading this, thank you.