at the end of the pier...

The 23-year-old woman who stripped her three small children naked and then threw them off a San Francisco fishing pier into the bay sparked the creation of this film. 

I had reached a point in my life when it was time to finally say something; time to stop sitting back and merely feel appalled by the latest baby thrown in a dumpster or abandoned in a public restroom. For me, it was time to finally come forward with a message—ironically enough, one that we all know too well—about child abuse in all its ugly forms. 

That night, after hearing about those three children being thrown to their deaths in the cold bay, I couldn’t sleep. All I could do was picture the horrified looks on their faces and hear the echoing screams as their mother threw them off one by one. Imagine the last child and the horror that he must have felt, knowing his time was only seconds away. As I sat at my computer typing away for three hours, the result was the initial script for Chasing Mountaintops.

As a high school teacher, I come in to contact with children who are abused all the time, and it sickens me to think of the lives that some children are forced to live each day. But we can do something right now. We can take action. We can make a difference. 

I have been accused of being an idealist far too many times over the course of my short-lived life, but I make it a point to never offer excuses for those behaviors aimed at making this world a better place.