Reading · rebecca’s Substack

Danielle would be thirty-three today.

I know exactly what this morning would have looked like. She would have started reminding me in January. By June the plan would have been settled and re-settled six times, the food, the music, who was coming, what she was wearing.

And it was never just one party. Danielle had two, sometimes three. One at school. One with her camp friends, the camp administrators would plan a whole trip around her day, because they knew what it meant to her. And one at home: the backyard petting zoo, the DJ, the bowling alley, the catered table, the house so full of noise you couldn’t hear yourself think.

Danielle’s last Birthday August 5th 2021

She loved every second of it. She loved the attention, not in a selfish way. She just lit up when a room turned toward her. She loved being the special one. She loved knowing she was loved.

At the restaurant on August 5th 2021

That is what I hold onto hardest. From the day she was born until the day she walked into that hospital, my daughter never spent a single moment of her life doubting she was loved. Not one. That was all she ever knew.

Then COVID came. In 2020 there was no party, just us, small and quiet. 2021 was small too. That was the last one: August 5, 2021, three weeks before she went into the hospital.

Dinner with her workers for a Birthday dinner 2021

There have been five birthdays since. Five Augusts with no January reminders. Five summers with nothing to plan. Five birthdays where the house stays exactly as loud as it was the day before, which is to say not loud at all.

People say time helps. What time has actually done is make the silence more specific. In the beginning it was one large absence. Now it is a thousand small ones — the hallway where she sang, the hugs I could set my watch by, the sound of my own name in her voice.

There is a second silence in this story, and I want to name it plainly today.

Danielle went into a hospital on August 27, 2021. She was there forty-one days. She never came home.

In the nearly five years since, not one person who cared for her has sat down with me and answered for what happened in that room. Not a call. Not a letter. Not an explanation. When a family asks and asks and is met with nothing, that nothing is a choice somebody made.

So I stopped asking and started filing.

I want to be honest with you about where this stands, because so many of you have walked this road with me and you deserve more than a highlight reel.

The case is pending in Nassau County Supreme Court, Index No. 605957/2024.

I filed it myself. No lawyer. No legal training. I sat down and decided I was going to file a medical malpractice case with no idea what I was doing — reading, guessing, learning the forms as I went — and I got it in just before midnight, before the statute of limitations closed that door forever.

I did not know then what I was doing. I know now.

2020 in Southampton, NY

Depositions began in June. Mine was the first — two days of questions about my own daughter’s death. Two days of reliving the worst forty-one days of my life in front of people whose job is to find the seam in my story. I did it. I would do it again tomorrow.

Since then we have deposed three doctors.

On August 21, I will be in New York for the second half of Dr. Iqbal’s deposition. I will be in the room. I will be looking straight at him.

In his first deposition, he never once looked at me.

Not once. Hours in a room together, and he could not lift his eyes to mine. I have thought about that more than almost anything else in this case. A man who stood over a hospital bed making decisions about a young woman’s life, who cannot look across a conference table at her mother.

I will be there on the 21st. I will not be looking away.

The hospital corporation was dismissed on June 30 of this year. That ruling is on appeal, and I want to be clear about what it was and was not: it was decided on a procedural question about capacity to sue — not on whether what happened to my daughter was wrong. The door is not closed.

Expert medical review is underway, and this is the part I lose sleep over. Cases like this live or die on whether a qualified physician will stand up and say, on the record, that the standard of care was breached. That work is happening right now, it is expensive, and it is the difference between a mother’s grief and a legal finding.

I get asked this. Sometimes kindly, sometimes not.

Danielle spent eight years serving breakfast and lunch to the elderly at Sunrise Living. She made up a song for a resident named Joan Bano and sang it down the halls. She volunteered feeding children. Firefighters called her name from the parade route.

She trusted everyone, and she loved everyone. Color, size, background, personality — none of it registered with her. She did not know racism. She did not know suspicion. She never learned to sort people, because I never taught her to. That was not something missing in her. That is how I raised her, and I would raise her that way again.

She had a disability, and she out-loved every able-bodied person I have ever met.

What I could not protect her from was a system that did not love her back.

So when people ask why I don’t let it rest, I am not doing this to win an argument. I am doing it because my daughter’s life was treated as though it did not count, and I am the only one left who can insist, in a room where it legally matters, that it did.

Five birthdays of silence from them. They should understand by now that I have no intention of matching it.

I know some of you want more. You want the records, the names, the specifics, the whole timeline. So do I. There are things I could tell you today that would take your breath away.

But this is in the courts now, and there is a right place and a right time for every one of those things — under oath, on the record, where it counts for something instead of just making noise. Saying it here first could cost Danielle the very thing I have spent five years building.

So bear with me. The day I can say all of it, I will say all of it. I am not holding back because there is nothing there. I am holding back because there is too much, and I intend for it to land where it cannot be ignored.

If you have been following this from the beginning, thank you. You have kept me standing more times than you know.

If today is the day you want to do something:

Share this post. Silence is their strategy. Attention is the counter-strategy.
Support the case. Expert witnesses, transcripts, filings, travel to New York, and the appeal all cost real money, and I am one person funding this. Every dollar goes into the record, not into me.
Say her name. Danielle Cathleen Alvarez. Thirty-three today.
Ask questions where your own people are being treated. Write things down. Keep your own copies. I did not know to do that. I know now, and I would rather you learn it from my post than from your own worst day.

Tonight I will do what I have done for five Augusts. I will look at the picture from that last small party, the one where she is grinning like the whole world showed up for her, because in her mind it had, and I will let my heart break again, on purpose, because breaking is what love does when it has nowhere left to go.

Happy birthday, my sweet girl. Mommy is still fighting. Mommy is not going to stop.

In faith and fierce love,

Rebecca Danielle’s mom. Forever.

[DONATE] 💵 $5 funds pages of expert record review. 💵 $500 funds a deposition transcript. 💵 $5,000 funds an entire expert report. This fight is won by many hands, not deep pockets.

👉 Donate (tax-deductible) freenowfoundation.app.neoncrm.com/forms/28

Write Danielle’ s name in the memo box.

👉 Donate on GiveSendGo: givesendgo.com/JusticeforDanielle

👉 Danielle’s story: justiceforsweetdanielle.com

Checks: Free Now Foundation, 50 Woodside Plaza, Suite #417, Redwood City, CA 94061 — Memo: Danielle

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