Home from Purgatory

About the Book

“Shortly after Mom passed, I opened her tiny file on Eddie’s wrongful death case,” she recalls. “No one can imagine the pain I felt for Mom and for Eddie, and then it hit me that she must have lived in hell from that time forward.” It would be early in 1995 that June would take on the journey her mother had begun on that day she walked into the room in 1973. First there were the calls to the nursing home that still was caring for the boy many now believed was Eddie B. but who was being called Eddie Schabbing. Their response was for her to take her story and her concerns elsewhere, take them to APSI, the state’s protective service agency.

About the Author

Judith Daniel Leasure is statewide coordinator for Ohio’s Lest We Forget initiative to record and preserve the first-person histories of people who lived in state institutions, their families, professionals, and advocates. She is the writer and coproducer of the audio documentary, Lest We Forget: Spoken Histories along with Jeff Moyer (Music from the Heart) and writer and executive producer of the award-winning film documentary, Lest We Forget: Silent Voices, directed by Mark Lyons. She is a long-time disability rights activist and advocate, including Ohio statewide art exhibits Accessible Expressions Ohio and Art and Soul; the founding of the Developmental Disabilities Hall of Fame, Miami Valley Very Special Arts Festival, and founding trustee of The Brighter Tomorrow Foundation. She is author of Out of the Silence: Stories from a Quaker Life and associate producer of the film documentary, Quakers: That of God in Everyone. Nancy Reder, RN, is a long-time professional and advocate and coauthor of The Gifts of Autism and Alzheimer’s: Stories of Unconditional Love and Self-Determination.