About RJD Blessings: Survivor Advocacy & Healing
RJD Blessings exists to honor murdered children, support families harmed by violent crime, and share hard-earned pathways toward healing.
Who We Are
RJD Blessings is a survivor-centered home for remembrance, advocacy, and recovery after violent loss.
The work begins with the lives of children who should still be here. Their names, relationships, personalities, and unfinished futures matter. When a child is murdered, a family does not only lose a loved one; they are pushed into court dates, paperwork, media questions, anniversaries, and a grief that changes shape over time.
We write and speak from that ground. The site brings together the memoir The Book, tributes in Remembering Our Children, and practical reflection on Victim Advocacy. Each part serves the same purpose: to keep love visible while helping survivors find language, resources, and community.
Field note
Families often arrive with one urgent need, then discover three more before the week ends. A memorial question may sit beside a restitution question. A panic attack may show up on the same morning as a hearing notice. Good advocacy makes room for that overlap.
Our Mission
Our mission is to stand with survivors of homicide and violent crime through remembrance, public education, victim advocacy, and honest conversation about trauma recovery.
That mission has a public side and a private side. Publicly, RJD Blessings helps communities understand what families face after violence enters their lives. Privately, the work affirms what many grieving parents, siblings, grandparents, and caregivers already know: healing is not forgetting, and strength does not mean silence.
Remember
We preserve stories with dignity, especially the stories of children whose lives were taken and whose legacies still shape their families.
Advocate
We point survivors toward crime-victim services, reparations information, and grounded guidance for navigating systems that can feel cold or confusing.
Heal
We speak plainly about grief, PTSD, faith, resilience, and the slow work of rebuilding life after traumatic loss.
How RJD Blessings Began
RJD Blessings grew from lived experience, not from a distant theory about grief.
After the murder of a child, families often learn the criminal legal system by necessity. They learn where to sit in a courtroom, which office handles victim compensation, how to answer reporters, and how to keep breathing through dates that the rest of the world treats as ordinary. Those lessons come at a terrible cost.
The beginning of this work came from the decision to turn some of that cost into service. Not every story belongs in public, and not every wound should be made into a lesson. Still, some experiences can help another parent feel less alone at the moment when isolation feels absolute.
That is the thread running through this site. RJD Blessings does not pretend grief follows a neat calendar. It offers witness, language, and practical direction for people carrying losses that many communities do not know how to hold.
Advocacy and Victim Services in Practice
Victim advocacy sounds formal until a family needs it early on a Tuesday morning.
A parent may need help understanding a restitution form before a deadline. A sibling may need someone to explain why a hearing was continued. A grandmother may need language for a school counselor who does not understand why an anniversary date has changed a child's behavior. These are not abstract service categories. They are moments when clear information can reduce harm.
RJD Blessings approaches advocacy through practical education and survivor-informed perspective. The emphasis is not on replacing local victim service agencies, legal counsel, or clinical care. The emphasis is on helping families ask better questions, recognize available supports, and enter those conversations with more confidence.
Ground-level needs
Court communication, compensation paperwork, safety concerns, memorial planning, and trauma responses often arrive together. Families need information that respects that reality.
Community responsibility
Neighbors, churches, schools, and civic groups can support survivors better when they understand the long aftermath of violent crime, not just the first week of crisis.
The Story Behind 'Stabbed in the Heart'
The Book centers the story of three murdered children and two resilient mothers. It carries grief, memory, and the difficult record of what surviving mothers had to endure.
A book like this asks something of the reader. It asks the reader to slow down long enough to see the children as children, not as case details. It also asks the reader to notice how mothers continue mothering after death through testimony, remembrance, advocacy, and the protection of legacy.
The title, 'Stabbed in the Heart: Three Murdered Children, Two Resilient Mothers,' names both injury and endurance. The injury is not softened. The endurance is not romanticized. Between those two truths, the book creates space for survivors who may have felt that their grief was too heavy, too complicated, or too long-lasting for public conversation.
Readers looking for excerpts, background, and ordering information can begin with The Book. Those seeking the continuing work of remembrance can visit Remembering Our Children.
The People Behind the Work
The people behind RJD Blessings are shaped by survivor experience, authorship, advocacy, and a commitment to public remembrance.
This work carries the perspective of mothers who know the long aftermath of homicide from the inside. That matters. A survivor can hear the difference between sympathy performed from a distance and care spoken by someone who understands why a simple courthouse hallway can feel unbearable.
The work also reaches beyond personal testimony. Through writing, outreach, and community education, the authors help audiences understand the practical and emotional realities that follow violent loss. Speaking invitations and public conversations are part of that effort, including community education settings such as university programs and local events.
For more about the authors themselves, visit Meet the Authors. For speaking-related information, visit Speaking & Outreach.
Our Scope and What We Offer
RJD Blessings offers survivor-informed education, remembrance, and advocacy resources. It does not replace emergency services, legal representation, or clinical treatment, and that boundary helps keep the work honest.
Writing and testimony
Memoir, reflection, and public storytelling help preserve the lives of murdered children and give survivors language for experiences that are often misunderstood.
Victim advocacy education
Resources and commentary help families and communities understand victim services, reparations, trauma responses, and the demands placed on survivors after violent crime.
Healing and resilience
Articles in Healing & Resilience address grief, PTSD, faith, coping, and the uneven work of living after the murder of a loved one.
The scope is intentionally focused. RJD Blessings speaks most directly to homicide survivors, bereaved families, advocates, educators, faith communities, and readers who want to respond to violent loss with more care and less assumption.
Continue Exploring and Reach Out
If you are new to RJD Blessings, start where your need is strongest.
Read The Book if you want the central story behind the work. Visit Victim Advocacy if you are looking for survivor-informed guidance around services and systems. Spend time with Healing & Resilience if grief, trauma, or rebuilding has brought you here.
You can also follow public updates through In the News or learn about presentations through Speaking & Outreach. If you need to ask a question, invite a speaker, or share why this work matters to you, please use Contact Us.
RJD Blessings stands for memory with dignity, advocacy with clarity, and healing that makes room for love that never ended.