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TwitThisA Gift for Organizing
Monica hated her new home, and when her father abducted her from school, she did not resist. Her mother kidnapped her back. She bounced between parents until eventually a judge awarded custody to her dad. But by her early teens, she was running away regularly and living largely on the streets. She joined a gang, developed a taste for alcohol and tried any drug she could get her hands on -- acid, meth, prescription downers. "My only question was, How is it gonna make me feel?" She dropped out of high school after her sophomore year and got a job as a waitress. During a visit to her mother, who had remarried and relocated to rural North Carolina, she met Sam Caison, a shy, sober, God-fearing boy who adored her despite her wild ways. At 19, she moved in with him and had her first baby, though that didn't keep her from partying. When some street friends asked her to cash a few payroll checks, she thought nothing of it. Only when she was arrested, she says, did she realize that the checks were stolen.She spent six months in jail awaiting trial, then took the rap and was sentenced to time served. When she emerged, she was ready to turn her life around. She went into counseling, married Sam (who went on to prosper as a fencing subcontractor), and threw herself into motherhood and community work. Over the next five years, she had four more kids and volunteered for everything from the PTA to charity drives. It turned out she had a gift for organizing people, and soon she was chairing events at Wilmington's annual riverfront festival, which draws crowds in the tens of thousands. In her spare time, she played drums in an all-girl rock band.
In the early '90s, Caison weathered a series of health crises: the removal of a cancerous ovarian cyst, followed by thyroid disease and a ruptured gallbladder. But by 1994, she was well enough to turn outward again. She decided to start with a small fund-raiser and went looking for a deserving beneficiary. On a whim, she approached the head of the North Carolina Center for Missing Persons, an ex-cop named John Goad. He put her in touch with a Wilmington woman, Karen Brown, who ran a group that worked to publicize cases of missing children. Caison wound up helping her organize a carnival for the group at a shopping mall. She erected a memorial wall to the missing, centered on a portrait of a friend's daughter, who had been kidnapped and murdered just days earlier. She persuaded the cast of Matlock, filming in the area, to pose for the press in front of the shrine.
From that moment, Caison had a cause. For as long as she could remember, she had known families ripped apart by sudden disappearances: a childhood friend's mother, another friend's sister, yet another friend's daughter -- like Caison in her wayward years -- gone AWOL. The idea of helping to repair the damage filled her with an overwhelming sense of purpose. "I think God has a plan for everyone's life,"she says, "but people don't always heed what he's trying to show them."
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