Did My Dad Have Amnesia Or Is He A Liar? (Family Secrets Documentary) | Real Stories

hello and welcome to the doc exchange a real stories podcast in partnership with the grierson trust every week i'll ask a new filmmaker or filmmaking team about three documentaries connected by a single theme that have made a meaningful impression on their work and life [Music] ugh uh [Music] one week after my college graduation my dad got in a car accident and lost his memory [Music] for the past 16 years dad's amnesia has haunted my family but we've never been able to talk about it until now [Music] all this time i've been living abroad and rarely saw him then a few years ago i asked dad why his memory still hadn't returned he replied i'm the new richard now not dad that you keep calling me [Music] not much later he moved away and left behind a trail of unanswered questions [Music] at the time of the accident mom and dad had already been divorced for over a decade and dad was living with a second family in the small college town of davis not far from sacramento we'd never been close and i was anxious about seeing my second family again after so many years of silence this man was coming behind us and um he was doing probably the police say probably about 50 55 miles an hour and we were almost stopped and he slammed into the back end of us it was a stationary head rest and it hit him at the base of his um skull right there in that area and so um i don't know what happened but they think he might have been out for like a couple of seconds just kind of you know stunned your dad and i didn't feel hurt at all either one of us you know we were just seemed to be fine he did have a headache but every day we went to work just like normal until the amnesia started [Music] everybody said hi to him and the boy said hi dad and he just kind of um looked like he wasn't feeling well to me he just kind of stared at me and and didn't say much of anything and then um eventually he said you know i don't know who you are and i don't know who i am so i just kind of went yeah right and um just kept on doing what i was doing with the boys and then he said no isis i i don't know who i am and i said what do you mean you don't know who you are [Music] and he just kept saying i don't know who i am i don't know am i supposed to be here and so i started telling him who he was and who the boys were and you know all about ourselves and about you and ann and jan and and everything and he didn't wasn't getting any of it i said good morning and mom said this is my daughter laura and her daughter sam and he shook my hand and i went on about my business and just kind of left it at that i didn't really it didn't really occur to me that this was [Music] real i don't remember him like being a toddler acting like a kid he just didn't know how to do anything you know like taking a shower or shave or brushing his teeth he was very bashful and so i left the room and put his clothes out for him when he came downstairs he was all dressed his shirt was buttoned properly so you know um i mean he looked at his driver's license and read the name richard on it so he knew how to read that was the very first day i didn't have a clue what had happened to dad the news didn't reach me until two months later after i'd already moved to europe and i saw dad for the first time he gave me a hug and said you must be my son rick loretta showed me a picture of you so how old are you now i'm 46 46 years old how about you exactly half half oh wow 23 say i'm just for now a few weeks doing uh learning uh division arithmetic i did that yeah it's 23. it's very good well i don't know why i started filming dad back then somehow it was easier to hide behind my camera and see him as a film figure and not my father who'd suddenly become a stranger i kept searching for clues to where my old dad had gone and how i could get him back but instead he just kept telling me all about the physical problems that had developed since the accident like how he got blind in his left eye and how he's having troubles keeping his balance you know what it is like it's empty it's feeling uh like my head is empty maybe now everybody's head is empty i'm thinking would feel that way i didn't want to believe the man who raised me no longer existed how could all of his memories of our life together vanish just like that you tell somebody um yeah he was in an accident and he woke up a week later with amnesia and that was about 16 years ago and he's never remembered anything nothing not a smell not a sound not a nothing or has he don't know i think it's been a question in a lot of people's minds even mine at times you know things that he's sitting there talking to him and so many people have said this before and it's all of a sudden i'm talking to richard again the old richard and carrying on a normal intelligent conversation and you know talking about these things um and i can't even tell you one specific thing but just talking about things and thinking that well i'm talking to my husband you know oh my gosh i'm talking to my husband again and then all of a sudden it's like some somebody said to me like the shade came down and then he got um this far away look in his eye and went back to being the new richard you know and got very quiet it made me feel very suspicious about what was going on did did i say something to trigger something or did i give him the look like oh it's you you know or what what did i you know so what did i do um and all of a sudden he was gone again don't be afraid that's when he said he said i i can't find anything wrong with you did you see all these medical records um no but i was always there when he talked to the doctors i was there when they did the mri i was there when he was tested by both neuropsychologists i was there when he was tested by the neurology department of stance or if there had been any organic damage right what you would have known right and being part of the court case i mean the attorney kept me abreast of everything that was going on all the findings but all the findings that i know of that were going on during the court case nothing physical was found [Music] what was loretta talking about dad always told me the metal bar on the headrest punctured his brainstem when a county officer rear-ended his car in front of the shopping center that's what caused his amnesia the case dragged on for two years until sacramento county finally settled out of court for 325 thousand dollars surely there must be some evidence to back dad's claims i've never seen anything effective all the evidence that i've seen leads to the contrary that there was no physical damage but he's told me that there's that stuff showed up on mris where the mri pictures i don't know show them to me yeah i haven't found him oh didn't your mom see him no my mother had no clue and she'll tell you that she had no idea what was going on what to do um who to call why didn't she ask for help she did she never asked any of us for help no she didn't she didn't tell us for two months i think she thought it would go away [Music] i think the hardest part in what happened to their dad was that they didn't have their dad but every time this man walked in the room well of course i have my dad there's my dad but it wasn't really their dad [Music] i just finally talked to justin and i just tell him daddy's not feeling well he just cried and cried because he knew something was wrong with him and he said is he ever going to come back mom is he ever gonna come back is my daddy gonna come back [Music] and i said yeah if we work really hard just and spend time with him and talk to him i think you know maybe he'll start remembering things that's what we have to do [Music] it just the the whole situation just i [ __ ] was forced to grow up way too fast i was forced to deal with raising matt and you know like my mom never been there because she had to work all the time so she could support us and and dad being in the spot that he was in and it was like you know i i just got pushed through all these things way too fast and now it's like i'm trying to keep my life together and then i'm still trying to deal with stuff that never got closed as far as you know the way things happened with dad and and it's it's really hard on me it's really hard on my head my little brother jester was only eight when the accident happened and he suddenly had to become the man of the house we hadn't seen each other in years until i went to visit him and his girlfriend crystal in san francisco where justin was going to culinary school he spoiled me with fabulous meals and shocked me as tales of his drug addiction which began when he was only 13. in art and words i do confide in the unanswered questions that dwell inside why and who what i am why we why be heard on the path to die what does that say will i know or this or is this the same as the ones before that i won't that i want to blame but this is my curse my blessing too and until there's an answer i'll hide in you that's so dope just some thoughts at times they're pretty killer i mean have you read any of them they're pretty deep some of them aren't i'm pretty cool oh yeah perfect oh it's hot the fact that he was fine for two weeks after the accident happened and then randomly he's like not okay you know and then every so often he'd say things like random things that there's no way that you that somebody just happened to tell you like little tiny details you know itty-bitty little things that you had to have remembered you know and and at this at the same time i mean right before his accident there was a lot of bad [ __ ] that he was doing you know he was cheating on my mom he was hitting me and my little brother like he was never home you know god knows what he was doing for work and when he was gone that time you know who he's screwing maybe it came up that yeah he did lose a lot of his memory but you know the the doctors never fully said that they they always said every doctor always said that there was you know if he really wanted to he could get his memory back so i think maybe you know he just didn't want to you know maybe he heard about all this bad [ __ ] that he was doing before he lost his memory and just didn't want to deal with it [Music] was justin talking about the same father i grew up with after dad married loretta when i was 12 and took on her kids laura and steve he tried everything possible to turn us into the brady bunch but my twin sisters ann and jan and i weren't interested and stayed with mom we still got together on holidays and weekends but with each passing year we grew more and more apart [Music] that's why i was really surprised at how often dad wrote me after his amnesia began he said it sad in his heart what everyone was telling him about old richard his life sounds so out of balance so different from the person he was now dad felt like he was surrounded by strangers who kept accusing him of things he couldn't possibly have done [Music] [Music] i think the biggest thing is my family would call and say um i called you and left a message why didn't you call me back and i wasn't getting any of my messages and um and i left to go to the grocery store so your dad was home by himself so i looked downstairs i couldn't find him and i thought oh he must be upstairs and as i was going up the stairs i could hear talking i could hear it like people were talking and i was like what is he doing later on when i when i um when i said something to your dad one day we we got into an argument about something and i said i asked him i just plain asked him why are you recording our phone calls he says what do you mean recording our phone call the phone calls and i said well you've got this little setup up in the bedroom and he was just totally shocked that i knew about it and i wanted to know what he was doing with it he said that he was recording everything and he was keeping it and that he had a safety deposit box at the bank and they were all locked up and that that that we never better never do anything to hurt him and i better never send him away because he'd get the tapes out and i was like what's on the tape [Music] dad once told me he was keeping an audio diary of what was going on after his amnesia began [Music] someone had told him it might be valuable if the case ever went to trial could these be the same tapes loretta was talking about [Music] a few years after his amnesia began dad took me to his bank and showed me the tapes one day we can listen to them together he said [Music] i'm still waiting dad said the doctors called his condition the rarest of the rare [Music] they all had their theories and kept poking and prodding him in search of some kind of proof to satisfy their enormous egos dad was frightened and didn't know where to turn for help there's only one person he seemed to trust grandma where it said that i was there and he said oh and he raised up in bed and grabbed me and hugged me and hugged me and hugged me he just was so happy to see someone he recognized the reason he recognized me he had a little picture on his bed table and loretta had told him that's who it was and she said when she told him he said but no she said but your father died a few years ago from cancer and of course that made him cry because he felt he had nobody if he didn't have his father i don't know every little detail what happened there but i i went up in the motor home and i stayed there for i think i was there for a couple weeks at that time and we went to a couple different doctors and they said that if he'd just get back to his work with a computer business so he would be all right he just had to face the fact that he could be okay if he would um just make himself go back to it when we came out of the i guess it was a psychiatrist out of his office richard said i don't like that man i don't ever want to come back again because he was accusing me of things that aren't true [Music] what was he asking the doctor oh he would ask him uh why are you why are you doing this richard said why am i doing what he said you're not facing the facts and rich said well i guess i don't know what the facts are and because i'm answering you the best i know how i don't have any any memory i don't seem to have a memory [Music] when we came out that time i said you don't need to go back and face that doctor again and loretta was rather upset about that because she she felt too that richard was just putting this on and i don't know how anybody could be that good an actor even the best in the movies and the tv shows because it was so real okay stay there i'm gonna take your picture too are you taking a picture okay you can start now oh um i'm i am uh richard minnick and i'm 47 years old and i am rick's dad um uh and i'm saying a few things tonight uh it's thanksgiving we're together and all i know is uh since it was an accident i had and um now pretty many times it's like um living in a dead person person's body for 18 months i was going to say some things tonight i like um i like learning about people who are in my family and playing with justin and matthew i like getting better physically so i can play more things um building myself from learning things and learning about things in the bible and i'm out of time i think okay the next time i filmed dad i was disappointed this memory still hadn't returned he was getting better physically he could see out of his left eye again [Music] but mentally he was like a little kid dad was going to first grade with my little brother matt he was reading everything he could get his hands on he said he felt older than matt but younger than justin dad called him his play buddies and like nothing better than going to the playground with them but i was 24 and didn't know how to play with dad anymore [Music] i think we were all hopeful that um when his brain healed he'd get his memory back we kept looking for for signs of that he would remember something but it just wasn't happening [Applause] i was showing pictures and telling family stories and he said i don't want to hurt your feelings or anything and this is all these are all really nice stories and these are nice pictures but they really don't mean anything more to me than if i were reading a history book so now now that he doesn't remember anything i just let that go i don't even think about it anymore because i figured that that richard isn't around anymore anyway the the richard that's around now as a totally new and different person and so i'm learning to relate to the new richard and just let the old richard go all right you guys when he has been willing to share some of the things that happened with him sometimes i'm just kind of in awe like he told me once that he could he could see the electricity going through the power lines really he could yeah he could see the aura of the electricity running along the power lines and um and the aura around people and he just thought that was normal that was pretty weird but not as weird as his out-of-body experiences he told me about that he could leave his body and go out into the universe and travel all around and then come back in his body and i'm going all right this is sci-fi material here and then it got to be he he liked it so much it got to be harder and harder to come back into his body so he quit doing it where do you think that came from and why would he say stuff like that i can only trust that it was real and pam's stories made me wonder did dad's accident open up some part of his brain no machine could measure give him access to a realm somewhere out of our reach maybe even the metaphysical world would a dad's spirit die and give way to another you know my brother's body was there but my brother wasn't there anymore and you know it's almost worse than having him die because when you die the body's gone but he died and his body was still there and i was always really close to richard we had a good relationship as we were growing up and he was kind of like my best friend so anyway my best friend was gone and yet he was there did he ever get a sense that he was part of him was still there like locked up inside or something that he was ever giving you any signs that he was still there the old rich was still there no not really not as far as memories go none of his memories have ever come back so we've been developing new memories no [Music] i've never wanted to admit what ann pam said but i've often felt like life would be easier if dad had died in the accident everything would be so final instead of this uncertainty about when his memories would finally return three years after the accident dad's life wasn't exactly unfolding the way any of us had expected his memory still hadn't returned he and loretta were separating i was thousands of miles away at least my sister jan and her husband payment were there to help out [Music] she pushed him or something and while he was sitting or something she pushed and he fell down on me would you did you ever feel sorry for him of course we feel sorry i mean of course we did it was a sad situation it was very emotional and very difficult and um there was a lot of sadness around it that you know we lost the person that had raised us the person that we knew the person who coached our track team the uh person who taught me how to run her i didn't know him before yeah richard so i didn't know as as he called it old richard i just knew knew richard yeah and um and payment was so much more patient with him because i just the whole thing was just difficult for me the way he could drag out one small topic for hours it was very it was difficult right when we were there dealing with old settlement actually six months after the settlement when he had gone on his own you remember that when he was living we actually also said uh when it went up there and settled his uh apartment for him that time we found him an apartment because at that point you could see that loretta and him were gonna break up and we helped him find an apartment where it was close enough that he could see the board maybe that was a few months later we went anyways we went multiple jobs yeah it was kind of an interesting thing when we went there it was he was like a local almost hero in the sense that here was this guy that was building his life up despite the fact that he has this huge handicap and everyone would wave to him as he rode his bike by and by this time he had his you know bicycle and he would ride everywhere and he had a newspaper route and he had a newspaper out just like a typical child [Music] next time i saw dad i was really surprised he'd become a paper boy his doctors thought it would teach him responsibility plus a spare change couldn't hurt dad and i had both delivered newspapers as kids it was kind of fun doing it together again as an adult all these years later i was really proud of how dad was putting his life back together and was sure his memory would return in no time but then something else changed in his life that none of us was prepared for tracy she was one of his customers it struck up a conversation one day while he was admiring the flowers on her balcony she's hitting on the paper boy i mean that's exactly what it was and it was a boy it was a little he was a paper boy [Music] it is changed come on you can't she was getting on pain i mean she was you're laughing but it's true [Music] dad couldn't wait to introduce me to tracy he called her a spirit angel and joked about her being an older woman even though she was young enough to be his daughter dad was like a teenager in love for the first time and i wasn't sure if i should be happy for him or embarrassed about at not all after they met dad and tracy moved into a big house in davis over the next years i visited them often once i even brought my son jonathan to meet his grandpa dad and tracy were spending a lot of time with matt and justin and we're taking care of grandma too with tracy's help dad's life seemed to be getting back to normal at times it even felt like we were becoming father and son again until i asked dad why his memory still wasn't returning that's when he said we're not in alignment you're one of those thinking people who's stuck in the fog i'm glad i escaped i'm new richard now when are you finally going to stop calling me dad [Music] dad and tracy started avoiding me the last time they let me film them a few years back they were writing children's songs and performing them for kids and seniors i was touched by the smiles they brought to everyone's faces [Music] but kept wondering is this who dad really wants to be or what tracy's turned him into [Music] then something happened that put even more distance between dad and his old family after 10 years together in davis he and tracy suddenly packed up their bags and moved to a remote corner of oregon hundreds of miles away from all the friends and family dad had ever known ever since dad and tracy moved away it's been harder and harder to get through to him he stopped answering my calls and rarely wrote they start calling us richard's five biological children why was dad trying so hard to distance himself from his past from our past [Music] [Music] so [Music] and there is no way that either one of them is emotionally equipped to live in this society the way it is i think that's why they had to get away i'm not so sure they were trying to hide anything maybe maybe everything was getting too close maybe they were maybe memories were coming back because of where they were living i don't know but or maybe it's just they could afford to buy a house there i i don't know what the i have no idea why they did it but um but they seemed really always though he was yeah you know we moved all the time he kept thinking in pursuit of a better life he just kept thinking every time we moved it was going to be better somehow just changing venues was going to make the whole world a better place and that our whole life was just going to be totally different and wonderful and that's one more thing that hasn't changed exactly yeah the wonderlust it's like the desire to just you know somehow you can escape and just start all over reinvent yourself which he has and start all over and be fresh and somebody that nobody's ever constantly we never want to move yeah i don't want to move no i'm not moving next [Music] i never understood why we moved around so much when i was a kid it just seemed like we always started packing up again before we'd ever really unpacked we must have moved back and forth across the west at least a dozen times before i'd finished grade school back then it sort of felt like a neverending road trip with dad as our fearless guide i never thought of him as a restless soul who could never stay put for long it doesn't mean that i'm not curious and i don't care because i do [Music] but regardless of the outcome it's not within our power to change it we can't make him be who he was before [Music] i don't know there's not much you can do i mean i don't know what you can do i mean you could for try to force the point that he that it's there and then let it go what good is it gonna do and i just think for your own peace of mind you you probably should just accept the fact that he's got amnesia and go forward and just have whatever relationship you have with him now and remember what it was when you were young and you've got wonderful movies don't you have all the movies a lot of them oh not all of them though oh well that's kind of interesting because i was hoping we could get all those on videotape so i'd have them they're so cute little tiny album there's the girls that's how i looked in 1991 when all this happened with your dad isn't that funny mom and dad were high school sweethearts and got married right after graduation but things were pretty rocky from the start and he eventually called it quits when i was 12. still after the accident mom tried her best to jog dad's memory well he was really strange he said to me well you know you seem like a nice person why would i have divorced you what was it like the first time you saw him after the accident well it was horrifying and it was creepy um and i and i still didn't really believe it why not i don't know i just i just didn't believe it i just and i spent time with them you know and and um i listened to him but i just kept thinking all the time i was talking to him i felt silly because i thought i'm playing this game with you that's exactly what i thought i thought i'm playing this game with you you know but i did it [Music] do based on the description of the accident and everything i i thought i just didn't i it didn't occur to me that it was a long-term thing i thought oh he's just he's just pretending to get attention or something that was initially kind of that was seems to me like that's what i thought at the time he's well could you imagine i'm doing that [Music] yeah i could i could absolutely absolutely i could imagine him doing that i could because um i i don't i think oh i don't think he lived in the real world sometimes [Music] dear karen i think sometimes for how hard maybe it was for you or tom to me visiting and so thank you very much for your caring and your help it was so great to me great to meet rick i felt so sad when he left his little time with me was a beautiful sunny day in the middle of terrible dark storms [Music] it feels like i am going to blow into many little pieces and fly away in the wind you felt like a friend i do not feel any friends in this house but justin and matthew i feel so alone like i am sinking in a dark cold swamp and i cry sometimes inside sometimes i have a strange feeling for just wanting to visit with you but you do not hardly know me but it seems like you do [Music] my brain is so messed up and i am trying to hold on with everything i have got now i am so tired so i am in sending this to you i am walking from my printing lesson past the post office [Music] so i am sitting here to say goodbye and mail this i feel like i miss you richard 3 15 91. i printed the whole alphabet today it is my first time to do that after five weeks of lessons two days each week so what i can't figure out is how did he write this letter i was just as puzzled as mom and realized i'd never questioned how dad i could write me all those letters back then if he supposedly could barely read maybe i was too caught up in what he was trying to say to think about how he was doing it it's just a gut feel just a gut feel i mean remember i've known him since we were kids it's just with me it's just a gut feel it's just a gut feel and and i actually almost feel guilty but i still think this is a roost that he's carried out for 15 years why would he do that to because he can retreat into a world where he's 100 comfortable where he can he doesn't have to be at a grown-up adult and deal with things as they really are in life that he can repair bicycles and do all those things that he's really good at and not and be a totally accepted part of society because everybody thinks he's not totally there you know and he's smart i mean he's not stupid maybe he maybe that's it maybe he's smarter than any of us realize i don't know i don't know i don't know if there was some kind of stuff in the newspapers about that savings and loan he was working for was in some kind of trouble [Music] do you think he was part of it well he could have he could have been he could have been innocent and he could have not been innocent i think he's too smart to not to not have known i mean maybe he didn't do anything wrong maybe he but maybe he stumbled onto something there's a lot of stuff that's gone on in savings and loans in the 80s and the 90s so god only knows what he i mean he could have wreck gotten into anything mama reminded me of how little i knew about what dad did for a living never talked about his work and i never asked too many questions i just knew it had something to do with computer systems for banks [Music] but then i thought back to my graduation dad arrived penniless and slept in the floor of my dorm room he said he was out of work he was spending a lot of time giving depositions against his former colleagues at farmers savings bank the job he moved his whole family from l.a up to davis for in the mid-1980s he was hired to overhaul the computer system of the rapidly expanding savings alone but apparently things didn't go quite as [Music] planned [Music] so i found out the federal government investigated farmer savings bank during the years leading up to dad's accident at the national archives in san francisco i discovered 20 boxes of depositions including volume after volume of dad's testimony the investigators grilled dad for months on end about some kind of data scrub i couldn't make out exactly what roy played in the whole affair but then i stumbled upon a name i'd heard before harlan butters he was always in control of what the situation was even if the world so to speak was crumbling even in high pressure situations even in high school yeah he was always on he just had this sense about him that the system could be down you could have three states without computers because that's what data line was and it was fine we know the problem let's not get emotional about it let's just fix it [Music] when i was there there was a request by fannie mae to audit the loans that farmers had sold to fannie mae well we got this magnetic tape i wrote a program to spin through the farmer's files and get a sense of you know what's going to flush out well you expect some discrepancies just through human error but there were quite a few balances appeared to be different addresses were different account numbers were different what's going on here quite frankly there was no real big surprises for for richard and i we had consistently suspected there was a lot of misinformation in the systems and i brought that to the attention of one of the officers at the company it wasn't richard because she was in charge of that particular area and i said you know we're running into some discrepancies you know what's going on here she then made a request of me to take the information that was on this fannie mae audit tape and change our system the farmer system to reflect the fannie mae data on our system i was asked to manipulate the data and i just flat refused and then what happened um well it wasn't too long after that that as i recall that that richard was let go and why he just arbitrarily i don't i can't speak to why he was let go i can only suspect that management was unhappy with the message that he was sending back to them that look you people need to put procedures together and execute those procedures consistently otherwise you're going to lose it and so in my opinion farmers shot the messenger it was just that simple and they did it rather abruptly just all of a sudden one day richard was asked to leave and his replacement was already there they told him he wasn't a team player and so they were going to have to let him go how did he react to that um he was very angry about it because all he was trying to do was was be honest and um and he got fired and he basically got blackballed because he couldn't get a job anyplace else in another savings alone at least not in southern california [Music] so i mean we didn't have anything we were devastated by it basically financially [Music] apparently dad was a key witness for the prosecution until he got his amnesia the case never went to trial and the federal government ended up bailing out farmers savings bank for 150 million dollars no one went to jail i also found out that dad's former boss was murdered at his desk a year later and the murderer was never found [Music] after farmers dad couldn't find another job and tried to go out on his own he started one computer consulting company after another but things only got worse shortly before the accident he turned his back on the computer business and was trying to open a hardware store with the help of my stepbrother steve but it wasn't meant to be [Music] well i don't ever think he had amnesia i think the whole thing was nothing but an act i always have why what makes you think that the whole thing never added up people that tried to sit there and talk about it too much and think about it too much would try and figure out a way that it worked people like me that are simple and use common sense that back when said no it's a bunch of bs i've always believed that why do you think he'd do something like this it was his way of getting out of working and all the financial responsibilities he had which most of those he created for himself anyway he was the one that couldn't hold down a job and kept putting himself in financial problems why can't he hold down the job i mean he's like that when i was a little kid because he was always too busy trying to tell everybody else how it's done i learned a long time ago from one of my granddads if your boss comes up and tells you that white wall is red you tell them it's a nice shed of red because that's the way it is because he's the employer he's the one signing your paycheck your dad could never do that he always wanted to tell everybody how to do it and how it was done he had to control everything employers didn't like that they can't him it was his own fault do you think he snapped or what i don't think he snapped i think he chickened out i think he figured out he was headed for bankruptcy he had no way out and he finally just took the sucker's way out he just got out of it the best way he could figure out what do you think he has anything to do with the accident no they weren't hit that hard i saw the damage to the vehicle they weren't hit that hard what'd it look like yeah the back end was smashed in a little bit that was about it bumper was smashed up tailgate wouldn't shut right it wasn't hard enough to create all the mess that he's come up with he figured out a way he sat back and figured out a way to wind up with a an income for life that was not taxable that couldn't be levied by any garnishment and it could turn out to walk away from all of his bills scot-free yeah he walked away from his family too well that didn't never bothered him before why would it now what do you mean he walked away from you and your sisters yeah and start it all over again people do that yeah maybe some do some don't your dad and i never saw eye-to-eye on anything never have never will and i didn't have much respect for the guy so like i always said i'm the wrong person to talk to but i thought you guys got along no we did for my mother's sake we didn't see eye to eye on anything out right after his accident he still was prone to these rages and these fits and he'd start throwing a fit over stupid little things well junior was throwing he was like 18 months and he was coming unglued i was standing there doing my laundry and uh he was throwing a fit about something your dad grabbed me by one arm swung him around and sent him face first right into the staircase and uh so i come running over there because he had been told not not to do that with the kids he'd been rough with him before so i jumped over the couch and he was trying to get away from me because he saw me coming he goes don't you touch me i grabbed him by the front of his shirt like this picked him up opened the front door and went boom down the front driveway and then i locked the door and mom's want to let him back in she was worried about the neighbors calling the cops i said i don't care i don't call the cops that was the last time i really ever had anything to do with him from that point on i had no respect for him and i just told him to stay away from me did you see him being violent a lot yeah he'd gotten violent with my sister he tried it with me but i'd knocked him down two or three times he left me alone after that so so that didn't change after the accident no and there's another reason why it was a big hoax best thing that anybody could have ever done if they could have years ago would have been able to put some secret cameras and microphones somewhere and catch him when his guard was down and nobody's paying attention because i guarantee you they would have seen something different you think he's uh getting nervous i mean that's why he's refusing to let me film i don't think it's a point of getting nervous i think it's a point of i've i've pulled this off i'm done you see what i'm saying everybody believes it and i'm beyond that point of being questioned anymore so i've got my little life and it's all working out just peachy i'm not going to go back and talk about the past because i might accidentally open pandora's box do you think i should leave him in peace i would i'd let it go everybody else has steve and i could never stand each other and i didn't want to believe anything he was saying but he reminded me of everything about dad that i didn't want to remember he'd always had an explosive side to him brimming beneath the surface [Music] we never knew when he might erupt [Music] again i wasn't sure i wanted to hear any more when laura rang with some surprising news there's something we'd overlooked all these years something so close i couldn't believe we'd missed it [Music] the person that was responsible for the car accident um worked for sacramento county and so there was a civil suit that happened against sacramento county with my mother and richard um and some of the um in there is medical findings [Music] i didn't know how i felt about laura's discovery none of us had ever realized accident documents our public record we could have easily seen them years ago surely they contain the medical diagnosis that would answer all of our questions but after all this time did i really want to know oh this is richard's writing [Music] this is the day of the accident this was written he's talking about what happened in that accident [Music] reading the diary made me feel like i was hearing dad's true voice at last i awoken great pain down my neck like a screwdriver stuck in the base of my skull when i close my eyes there's lightning in my head i'm having a lot of trouble remembering what i'm doing even shaving and showering took a lot of thought as to what was the next thing to do i'm feeling very depressed by what is happening i feel very alone and out of control [Music] two days later dad woke up with total amnesia he is attempting unconsciously to be reborn so that his life may be started anew this level of amnesia is a drastic even what's that word draconian i can't say yeah draconian psychic mechanism [Music] so [Music] the courthouse file also contained two medical evaluations it took me days to digest i'd always wanted dad to be the medical mystery he claimed to be someone so unique that not even the best doctors in the country could figure them out [Music] but according to the reports the diagnosis was clear from the start the doctors ruled out any organic damage to dad's brain and diagnosed him with a dissociative disorder [Music] unconsciously dad was trying to escape a life he'd found increasingly unrewarding and start all over again [Music] but there was one hitch everyone he'd ever known had to be left behind [Music] the doctors concurred the dad's condition was potentially treatable with intense psychotherapy antidepressants and the support of his family within two to three years his memories would return and the old new richards would merge into one so why didn't it happen [Music] that's what i'd like to know yeah i mean if he's so happy where he is and likes where he is even if he did remember things he may not want to come back he may not want to tell anybody i don't know it's sad it's really sad but i don't know i guess he's he's a totally different person than i thought he was then again maybe he's exactly what i always really knew he was i guess we all want our dads to be a hero and sometimes they're just incredibly fragile and incredibly human an incredibly disappointed [Music] i know you can see your breath this is going to be fun it'll be good interesting at least to find everything out see how it's going thanks for having me it's a pleasure and let us know if we can do anything to help with this okay and anne's right don't let it eat you up don't let it destroy you okay what does mean just gonna can't quite get out of my system well i think he needs to be approached well oh you can do this all we can do is confront him you know i mean that's that's the one thing we've never done yeah okay i've tried to be not i've tried to be polite and non-confrontational and maybe it's time to oh maybe it is maybe it's time to just say you know i'm not trying to be me you have nothing to listen i'm not trying to help you it's privacy but you know you're not the only person who was affected by this in fact you may have had the easiest easiest time with all of this out of you know and because you don't have the memories yeah you don't have the memories and how convenient because the rest of us do and you have no idea what that does to you on a daily basis to just have that coming back to you all the time and how hard it is to see you and you know see that you physically the same person only older but emotionally just nowhere near the [Music] same i tried talking anna jan and going up to oregon with me for family intervention but they couldn't get away so i head back up to san francisco to fetch justin for years we've been talking about going up to see dad together now we couldn't wait any longer okay he's an old man you know what i mean he's he's okay with where he's at finally i mean and you want to go and shove him around emotionally because you don't feel what because you don't feel comfortable because you don't feel closure because what because you want some answers you've gotten all those you're not gonna get anything different right you want him to feel bad you want him to [ __ ] hurt what is it that you want from him more than he's given so far well he's given all that he can haven't you seen that no he's not all that he's ready to give you know what i mean you put so much in you give him so much [ __ ] life according to his [ __ ] time well you have to no [ __ ] you're giving him so much [ __ ] power justine well he's at it on his [ __ ] time for way too long but it's not up to you to tell him when he's [ __ ] no but i can [ __ ] bug the [ __ ] out of him maybe that would [ __ ] work i don't know if he'll [ __ ] work dude why the [ __ ] are you arguing i'm not arguing with you i'm just saying [Music] you're pushing for something that's out of your hands yeah well i don't really have any other choice dude you do you have keep doing it the way i've been doing it before just not deal with it just be pissed off no sweetheart you have no control over his head and no matter what he does in life it's not up to you it doesn't [ __ ] it shouldn't control you it shouldn't determine where you stand in life [Music] hmm [Music] just remember that whether we agree with richard's new life or not he's still entitled to it he's still entitled to peace and happiness and if this is the way he found it it really sucks because it caused so much pain but causing him pain isn't gonna make any of the rest of our pain go away so [Applause] uh dad wasn't around when we finally rolled into town but his brother larry dropped by our motel with some old photos he told us how he'd moved up to dad's town two years ago to retire near his little brother but he never made it beyond being dad and tracy's handyman who is under strict orders to not talk about them especially not to me [Music] larry offered to show us around town then suddenly dad's car pulled up it was tracy she put on her best smile but was clearly not happy to see us filming with larry are we here only to try to get dad on camera [Music] justin and i stayed up for hours hoping dad would call or have we traveled all these miles in vain [Music] the next morning the phone rang it was dad he agreed to meet us at a nearby coffee shop but no cameras just and i were shocked at the sight of dad's ravaged face it was once startlingly blue eyes it sunk it into deep dark sockets [Music] he'd aged decades since our last encounter three years earlier over breakfast dad told us some confusing story about disconnected synapses and twisted nerves in his brain stem that were wreaking havoc on his entire body justin and i had come to confront dad with the doctor's reports and everything i learned about his amnesia but we are both so dumbstruck at the sight of the trembling old man before us that we forgot what we'd come there for i was sure justin was going to attack dad but he never even opened his mouth [Music] something about seeing him again had brought justin the kind of peace i'd never thought possible one that still felt just out of reach later that day dad took us on a drive to his favorite lake i was hoping he was going to open up at last whenever our eyes met i could see my old dad flashing in front of me only to disappear over and over again finally i mustered up the courage to ask him one single question [Music] did you ever want your memory back dad's face went blank as he replied i never think about it [Music] so [Music] you

Channel: Real Stories

Views: 374,352

Rating: 4.763268 out of 5

Keywords: Real Stories, Real Stories Full Documentary, Real Stories Documentary, Full length Documentaries, Documentary, TV Shows - Topic, Documentary Movies - Topic, full documentary, full episode, forgetting dad documentary 2008, forgetting dad, rick minnich, amnesia, richard minnich, matt sweetwood, documentary, memory loss, rickfilms, film, family trauma, hoferichter & jacobs, films transit, zdf, trailer, teaser trailer, official, 2009, mike santoro, justin minnich, loretta minnich

Id: xO2s48V6tE4

Length: 84min 20sec (5060 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 04 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Equal-Ear2312]

What a monster. He literally crushed his family. He could have just left. But nah... He probably liked causing them pain.

[u/MissGalaxy1986]

Well I think this guy had a very severe mental Illness. I know many will disagree with me on that. It doesn’t make him not responsible though. He just wasn’t interested in getting better. I think his state was a combination of his mental illness plus his own moral failings, lack of character and choices. Because even the docs said he could get better if he wanted to.

This was a really good but slow and thought-provoking doc on the lengths people will go to avoid shame. I don’t think he’s a fundamentally lazy man, he obviously tried really hard to bring some new sources of income to the family but just couldn’t figure out how to make it work. So instead of seeing the repercussions of that and face the shame albeit temporary it would bring on him and his family he escaped by creating his own reality.

The biggest person he fooled was himself. Life is full of abundance and possibility, and as long as one has family they treasure and that supports you anything is possibly. Clearly this man didn’t see it that way and thought he’d reached the end of his path, he committed virtual suicide and the consequences of his choices caught up with him as he stared into the void that was the last part of his life and probably realized how he’d screwed himself, after all this mans greatest fear was shame and in the end he turned that into a monster that defeated him, hence why how fast he aged at the end. His family even said it would’ve been better had he just died completely... he turned into a symbol in a way of that which he feared most, helplessness and shame, a feat someone so severely mentally ill with depersonalization could “accomplish”.

I do believe he had a choice, absolutely, to get better.

So sad for his family... and for him as well. I wish people didn’t lose hope so quickly.