Kayla Hillmann

Our Journey

This is not an easy story to share, but one I so confidently feel as though needs to be written out in words to help others who may be struggling through the same situation. My husband and I just had our anniversary, we are going into our fifth year. We have three beautiful children: Summer,3, Blaze, 2, and Charlie, 1. My husband did not have the best upbringing. Being raised my a drugaddict who barely had her children, we have been very wary about allowing our children to spend lengthy amounts of time with her. She claims to have been clean for 13 years, but right now she is literally a legal addict. Heres our story: On February 18th, 2022, we allowed Summer to go to her step cousins birthday party. At the time, my husband and I were revamping our house, painting, cleaning, laying down new rugs and decorating. My husband told me we should let Summer go. We were attempting to allow our daughter to have a normal life. Because of watching my mother-in-law go behind my sisters-in-law's back and snatch custody away of her children (we also turned our backs on her without hearing the whole side of the story, but that's an entirely different story I will share later), we very rarely allowed her to go anywhere alone with this woman. She acts like she has a humongous heart but in reality, she is vindictive, manipulative, and a plain nasty human being. That evening she brought our daughter home stating, "We would have stayed a little longer but your daughter was being a little bitch." Mind you, my daughter was 2.5 at that time. My husband went to change her diaper and she started screaming, "No, it hurts! Please don't touch me, please." My husband and I locked eyes and our worst fear hit us. He called his mother and asked if anything had happened to her, how long she had been left alone. She told my husband if Summer had been left alone at all, it was only for ten to fifteen minutes. We had no proof, no words from Summer, so, unfortunately it got let go. However, over the course of the next few months we noticed an EPIC behavioral change in Summer. She was aggressive, angry, just mean. My mother made comments, my sister commented on how Summer looked more stretched out then she should. Then, moving forward to August, it happened out of the blue. Summer was in the bathtub, she stated out of the blue, "Mommy, he touched me down here, it hurt, I was scared, I was told not to say." My heart dropped, I couldn't think. I asked my brother to stand by the hallway while she was in the tub so I could call my husband at work. He asked me to put him on speaker phone and ask her if it was a man like daddy or a boy like Blaze. She immediately told us it was a man like Daddy. I studied enough Criminal Justice to know never to ask leading questions. My husband headed home from work, and I got her dressed. When he came home we asked her where this happened. She told us, "It happened at Gromma's we went somewhere else." Well, the only two times she had been left alone with grandma was the party and when she went to the museum with all of her cousins and my sister-in-law. We began looking at photos on facebook to find out what the date of the party was, and as we were scrolling through photos on this young woman's facebook page; my daughter pointed to her signigicant other and said that is who touched me. It hurt. That was the end of it. We reported it to the police. My husbands mother, Laurie, did not call once to find out how Summer was, never checked in. The entire investigation she has done nothing but blame her. She even got so brave as to to tell a family member that she wouldn't take Summer because of the accusations, she wouldn't take Blaze because she thinks he might be slow and all he does is cry, but she would gladly take Charlie from us and raise him as her own. Well, lets flash forward to the advocacy center. Summer came right out and told the medical examiner and the advocate what happened. One thing that has remained the same throughout this whole investigation is that he touched her in a truck with an orange tool. We spent some time looking through the photos of the birthday party; Summer is not in any of them but all the other little children are. Conviently, neither is he. We finally received video footage of Summer stating she told her grandmother that night and grandma yelled at her. Which doesn't surprise me; because when my sister-in-law was a child, she was sexually assaulted, and her mother told her to keep her mouth shut so that they didn't lose the home they were living in. So, now we are being told to get a no contact order on this woman. We did so, we went to court on November 17th. She hired a lawyer. The lawyer stated she couldn't read my writing because it was in blue ink, but yet she was able to pull out that there were other agencies involved and she wanted to Subpoena them. She also wanted it continued so that CPS had a chance to finish their investigation. First of all, she would of had NO access to know that CPS was investigating us unless she herself made the phone call. We believe her lawyer overheard us talking because my mother expressed that it wasn't true. We have never been investigated by CPS, especially when it was determined that we had nothing to do with the assault. My sister-in-law flew in from New York to support us and our sister. Two days after she flew home, Laurie's mother called my sister, Nichole and tried to make her feel bad for coming her, telling her that Laurie was worried Nichole was going to try to take away her visitation rights with her children. Nichole pointed out that if Laurie had nothing to hide; then she shouldn't have hidden this whole case from her. Mind you, Laurie never said anything to Nichole from the beginning when this whole case came about. It also then came out that Summer was in fact left alone at this party, and for an unknown period of time. Her grandmother actually slipped that out on accident. A day later, my husband's Aunt Mary called my sister-in-law, to remind her that Zak and I were not there for her when everything was happening with her children and to mention to her that they did not call CPS, it was the family member that shared with us what Laurie said about trying to take custody of our children. We now have to go back to court on January 5th for this and I am praying hard that we receive the no contact order. This woman has been non-compliant throughout the whole situation. If she would have told us that night when it happened, we would have had DNA evidence, that person would be in prison now.