Written By Jana Sutoova Bennun
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An Open Letter to Carrie Madej from Jana Sutoova Bennun — written in 2023 and renewed in 2025. In the silence of the night, through tears and grief, I carved these words into my diary.
You ate the soup my father made.
You walked with him through the little garden he tended, admiring the broccoli he had brought inside, breathing in the soft, honest smell of home.
He offered you the chair at his table and the bread he had prayed over.
He trusted you.
I trusted you.
You insisted you could help.
You pressed me with words of promise, with the language of miracles and faith.
I resisted and then, worn down by fear and hope, I gave in.
You never asked for true consent the way a physician ought to: no sober warning, no full explanation, no weighing of risk.
You came as a healer; you left as a stranger who had broken a covenant of care.
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You injected him with what should never be injected into a living man.
You gave hydrogen peroxide in ways no oath bound doctor would authorize.
When he cried out, you did not come back.
When he needed steady hands, you were gone.
You walked from our house and from the life you touched, and we were left to bear the falling pieces.
The courts have seen the papers. The civil judgment is in the record. The law that moves in ink found that your actions contributed to his death and we were awarded punitive damages. The district attorney put words on paper admitting felonies had been committed yet chose not to prosecute. You got lucky in a courtroom where mercy and discretion wear capes that do not always match truth. Lucky in the halls of men; not free in the sight of God.
You tell the world you are above man’s law.
You tell your followers you are sovereign.
You preach light and angels while refusing to take the weight of what you did.
You deny, you redirect, you speak of healing as if our loss is a rumor that will fade with time.
You lie to people who trust you, and that lie is a second wound on top of the first.
I will not be silenced by your denials.
My children’s childhoods were shuttered the day you left.
Their grandfather’s voice is a hole in our house where laughter used to live.
My husband’s shoulders stoop with grief that no apology can lift.
We spent nights in a fog of terror and days in the grind of proving what we already know in our bones.
We have paid lawyer fees with money that should have been for life’s gentle things repairs, small joys, the ordinary spending of love.
PTSD settled like frost and will not thaw. Every time a car brakes too hard, every unexpected knock at the door, the past plays like a film behind our eyes.
You almost took my life too.
You nearly stole my breath in that same room where my father’s stopped.
I survived by grace and by the furious love of family, but the scars are not only on the skin. They are in sleep that never feels deep enough, in the twitch of a startled muscle, in a child’s question that has no soft answer.
You escaped one kind of justice and yet you cannot escape every witness.
There are papers, there are rulings, there are the names and the dates and the testimony.
There is the quiet ledger that my children keep in their hearts.
There is the memory of a man who fed strangers from his own garden and trusted the world to return that kindness.
Hear this and let it sit in the hollow of your night.
Not as a threat from me, but as a plain truth: blood guilt is not light that can be hidden under a rug.
If you believe in a God who sees, then know that every life poured out in error or arrogance will be counted.
Repentance is open to you if you will take it. Accountability is not the end of mercy, it is the beginning of real healing.
You may scoff at lawbooks and civil courts, but there is a court beyond which pretense cannot pass.
I call you to remember his name: Stefan Suto.
Say it aloud and let it rest in your ears. Remember the hands that planted those broccoli seeds, the laugh that warmed our kitchen, the prayers he said before every meal. Remember that he was not an experiment or a headline, he was a father, a grandfather, a light.
You made us beg for help after you left him wounded. You chose not to come to see what you have done.
At first, you offered yourself, insisted, and we opened the door because we trusted you.
You used our faith in you as the opening to hurt us.
You have lied to your followers and colleagues, dressed falsehood in the garments of faith, and walked away while our family paid with shattered peace.
This is not vengeance. This is a vow.
I vow to speak his name and to keep his story until the day the world understands fully and until my children can heal with the truth held in the light.
I vow to continue the fight for accountability, not for the sake of retribution, but so no other family will be led into the same false shelter that masks danger with a smile.
You taught me a terrible lesson: that people who call themselves healers can be instruments of harm when hubris eclipses humility.
You taught me, too, of the strength of love that refuses to be erased.
For every hour you turned from my plea, we worked double hours to gather proof and witness; for every lie you spun, we measure truth in testimony and in court files and in the steady rhythm of remembrance.
Let this be your mirror. Let the name Stefan Suto echo in your waking hours. Let conscience do what courts would not do. If there is a prayer you claim to carry, let it be one that brings you to acknowledge what you have done and to make some small return to those you have harmed.
I speak not to annihilate but to awaken.
There is a day of reckoning that is not of human making; it is the day when nothing can be hidden, and every life is fully seen.
On that day the hollow claims, the shiny posts, the gatherings of admirers will not shield what you did. Only truth will stand.
Until then I will keep living with the wound, with the work, with the fierce, slow justice of memory.
I will teach my children the man he was, not the way he died. I will plant his name like seeds in their mouths: Stefan Suto, grandfather, gardener, story teller, giver of soup.
We will feed our own children with his recipes and with his laughter. We will keep his lamp lit inside our house so that no denial can blow it out.
You cannot take his name from us.
You cannot take his love.
You cannot take the truth that binds us to him.
So remember his name when you lie awake.
Remember the warmth of the soup he made for you. Remember the hands that offered bread and the face that trusted you.
Remember, because memory is justice for those parts of the heart the world neglects.
Jana Sutoova Bennun
Daughter of Stefan Suto
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