“It happened this week years ago — but Eric is still Santa Clara’s long lost, forgotten son.”
Twenty one years ago this week, my nephew Eric A. Kleemeyer was killed in Santa Clara. He was twenty two years old. He was a son, a brother, a nephew, and a young man whose life ended violently and whose story faded far too quickly from the city where he took his last breath.
For his mother — my sister in law — the loss was shattering. But what followed was its own kind of heartbreak. She did what grieving families are told to do: she filed a civil rights case, trusted the attorney, and believed the truth would eventually be heard. The court granted extensions, reviewed personnel files, and moved the case forward. And then, without warning, everything stopped. The filings ended. The attorney disappeared. And one day she was simply told, “It’s over.” Not because a jury weighed the evidence. Not because the facts were resolved. But because the process collapsed around her.
Eric’s case never had its day in court. The contradictions we saw — the unanswered questions, the details that didn’t align — were never examined in a public forum. I won’t relitigate them here. That time has passed. But the weight of them never left us.
What I want Santa Clara to remember is simple: Eric was a human being. He was not a case number, not a headline, not a moment to be filed away. He was a young man with flaws and hopes and a future that ended too soon. And for twenty one years, his mother has carried the grief of losing her son and the pain of never receiving a full accounting of what happened.
This op ed is not about blame. It is about remembrance. It is about acknowledging that behind every closed case file is a family that never stops feeling the loss.
Eric may have been forgotten by the city where he died.
But he has never been forgotten by those who loved him.
And he deserves to be remembered.