A Port Orchard woman committed suicide after losing her daughter in a vicious custody battle over her 9 month old daughter.

Kodi Hawthorne, of Port Orchard, had been her daughter Ryah's sole caregiver for the child's entire life. Upon being served with a paternity suit by her daughter's father, Tyler, she arrived in court originally requesting that the father be allowed visitation with his daughter as long as he took his required medication for bipolar disorder, as he had a violent and abusive history.

In the months that followed, a series of character attacks began against Kodi to prove her an unfit parent. She was portrayed as a drug user and abusive parent, despite passing drug follicle screenings and providing pediatrician letters that confirmed Ryah had been a happy, healthy, breastfed infant in her mother's care.

During the court process, Tyler's Myspace pages would cryptically declare, "She is MINE." Hawthorne's residence was stalked and bricks smashed through her window while her daughter was in her care. When attempting to get a restraining order against the father, she was denied.

After passing the necessary hurdles in court to maintain her custody, she was served with paperwork accusing her of raping a 14 year old boy she had lived with and for whom she had provided after school care. Before her rape case was proven or closed, Hawthorne's daughter was then removed from her custody, placed with the father and Hawthorne was given 18 hours of supervised visitation a week.

Despite attempting to assert her visitation rights before her custody trial scheduled for November of 2010, she was consistently denied said visitation by the father, who now had custody. Hawthorne reported her lawyer of Port Orchard had also received threats not to let a supervisor be approved for Ms. Hawthorne to see her daughter.

A study done by the Virginia based American Judges Foundation found that in 70% of challenged custody cases, abusive parents are successful in proving the victimized parent unfit.

Having been given only 2 hours of visitation in 3 weeks, Hawthorne entered a deep depression and consistently received threatening and harassing text messages from "anonymous" emails and phone numbers who she had asserted were from Tyler.

She had been threatened to be arrested to for child rape charges and "thrown into jail" in order to never see her daughter again. The threats, depression and loss of her daughter became too much for Hawthorne, who ended her life in a Kent hotel room on April 8, 2010.

Further investigation with detectives revealed no such rape charges were ever going to be filed, as evidence was not enough to charge Ms. Hawthorne in her rape case. The case mirrors the bullying case of teenager Phoebe Prince, although Kent detectives state that in Washington "a crime has not been committed."

Coincidentally, on Mother's Day 2010, almost exactly one month after Kodi Hawthorne's death, a march of hundreds of victimized parents held a silent vigil at the White House to protest the broken American family court system that removes children from protective parents.

View and/or Sign Kodi's Petition Here