Amika Moda

Welcome back to Snap Judgment.

My name is Anna Sussman.

Today, we're listening to our series Fire Escape, Already in Progress.

She did have the three-bedroom house with a wrapper on porch.

She had this goal to reconnect with her kids.

She was able to go to football practice and do the things her kids had asked for all those years, those years when she was called away in the middle of the night as a midwife.

But there was a lot of hardship to it.

She didn't have midwifing to ground her.

Her marriage was falling apart, and she had moved to a place where she really didn't know anyone.

She relapsed, quietly.

holding down a job and using when no one else was around.

She said that when the marriage got really ugly, the father of her kids took them away and said she'd never see them again.

And then, a little while later, on August 18th, less than two months before the crash, he filed for divorce.

Amika was caught off guard by all of it.

She said she knew things were bad in their marriage, but she didn't know things would escalate so quickly.

In court, both Amika and the father of her kids accused the other of drug use and ordered the other to drug test.

Amika knew her test would come back positive and she could lose custody of her kids.

So she decided to go someplace to get clean and get well.

She checked herself into a rehab center, South Coast Recovery, not far from Laguna Beach.

But a few days later, she checked herself out again in order to eventually make it to a custody hearing back home.