A Mother and Daughter Who Made a Difference

Every month, the blurred black-and-white photos and sad biographies of more than 150 children in foster care land on Sherill Chand’s desk at Adoption Horizons. Most of these children, Chand knows from trying, have no chance of being adopted.

But one baby, an African American boy dressed in a sweater with tiny hearts across the chest,caught her eye one day in 1989.

“I took that picture and put it in my drawer and I said, ‘This one I’m going to find a home for,’ ” Chand recalls. She knew just whom to call: Carole Sund.

After their second adoption of a mixed-race baby two years earlier, Carole and Jens Sund had told Chand that their family was complete. Still, Chand didn’t hesitate.

“I called her and said, ‘Are you sitting down?’ ” Chand said, laughing. “It didn’t take much.”

Soon, Jimmy was joining the family.

It was that sort of big-heartedness that made Carole Sund a local hero here long before she herself became a blurred picture on posters and the front pages of newspapers, beneath the word “missing,” and later, “found dead.”

Nevertheless, Carole, friends say, would have been dumbfounded by the outpouring of emotions that her disappearance two months ago has triggered here in her hometown and among complete strangers. The 42-year-old woman vanished Feb. 15 on an outing to Yosemite National Park with her daughter, Juliana, and a family friend, Argentine visitor Silvina Pelosso. Juliana was also slain, and remains found with Sund’s are presumed to be Silvina’s.

A woman who spent her life fighting to protect victims, Carole would have been profoundly uncomfortable being remembered as one, her friends say.

“We see the images of Carole in the press, and they just don’t square with the Carole we knew,” says longtime friend Cindy Savage.

Carole’s friends intend to pay tribute to the woman they knew and the daughter she loved at a Sunday afternoon memorial service that as many as 3,000 mourners are expected to attend.

“We want it to be an upbeat celebration of their lives,” says Linda Beirelles, a friend of the family who is helping script the 70-minute service. “We want it to focus on the happy things as opposed to the sadness.”

Silvina’s family is still waiting for the release of her remains and will bury her in Argentina.

Juliana’s high school chums and the women who worked with Carole in a variety of volunteer organizations are planning the Sunday service and the potluck reception to follow. The Eureka High School orchestra in which Juliana played violin will perform.

Savage, another staffer at Adoption Horizons who helped the Sunds adopt their first son, Jonah, in 1984, remembers Carole as a 5-foot-2 dynamo with a ready wit. Carole and Jens’ biological daughter, Juliana, was a toddler then. Nine months after Jonah’s adoption, the Sunds adopted his infant half-sister, Gina.

By then, the couple’s decision to adopt--a natural move for Carole, who had grown up with two adopted siblings--had turned into a passionate commitment to saving abused children, one by one. In the last 15 years, she had put in thousands of volunteer hours to help start services for abused and foster children in Humboldt County.

She was taking a brief break from her jam-packed schedule of work and kids when she, 15-year-old Juliana and 16-year-old Silvina disappeared. The three were last seen at a lodge outside Yosemite, where they had been sightseeing.

They never showed up for a planned Feb. 16 rendezvous with Jens, Jonah, Gina and Jimmy at the San Francisco airport. Jens was going to take the children to Arizona to tour the Grand Canyon.

Within days, the FBI was leading a massive, statewide manhunt for the threesome and the bright red Pontiac Grand Prix they had rented for the trip. As the search intensified, the story of the woman and two teenagers who vanished into thin air drew national, then international, attention.

The charred remains of Carole and another body that authorities have tentatively identified as Silvina were found in the trunk of their torched car in a Tuolomne County woods last month. Juliana’s body was found days later and miles away, near a reservoir.

The deaths have so traumatized students at Eureka High, where Juliana was a cheerleader with a wide circle of friends, that teams of counselors continue to meet with them and their parents.

Even as they struggle to help their children cope, parents say they are having a hard time dealing with their own grief. Time and again, people who knew Carole break down and weep when a stranger calls to ask what she was like.

Her death, they say, has left a gaping hole in this logging and fishing community of 28,000 people.

Pictures of Carole and her adopted children are still plastered on Chand’s office walls, where for years they have served as smiling testimony that foster children with special needs can be successfully adopted.

“Even for people who didn’t know her, this is a loss, the loss of one more doer who now isn’t there to do,” Chand says. “Carole would tell parents: Don’t be afraid. It works. Every foster kid I place, I will remember Carole.”

Carole worried so much about the kids still in the system that in 1990 she and friend Valerie Bish founded the Humboldt/Del Norte County Branch of CASA, a national volunteer network of child advocates who represent abused children in the legal system.

Carole also was active with Butler Valley Inc., a nonprofit agency that runs two group homes for developmentally disabled adults. She shuttled all four of her children to weekend soccer games, swim meets and basketball camps, was recently appointed to the school site council and taught a parenting class. She also served on a safety committee for schoolchildren.

When most of Carole’s neighbors opposed the opening of a methadone clinic in town, she supported it, saying, “Those people need help too.”

How, her friends ask, do you get over the loss of such a woman?

“I have trouble with that word ‘closure,’ ” says Deborah Oehler, who grew close to Carole when her daughter, Emily, became best friends with Juliana in the fourth grade. “On Sunday at 4 o’clock, we’re supposed to close the door of the church and walk away? Many of us who love this family will not close the doors and be healed on Sunday. This will take a long time.”

‘She Was So Happy . . . Always Smiling’

And then there is Juliana.

Emily says she was so tight with Juliana that when they had sleepovers as kids, they sometimes shared the same dreams. When they were in sixth grade, Juliana told her she was sure they would die together, “side by side in our beds,” when they were very, very old.

After Carole and the two girls disappeared, Emily had nightmares, waking up screaming her friend’s name in the night.

But this week she has kept her composure as she and a friend practiced the song they will sing at the memorial. They picked “The Rose”--the haunting ballad about love from the Bette Midler movie of the same name--because the three girls sang it at one of Juliana’s piano recitals. It captures the essence of Juliana, her friend says.

“You could see Juli coming down the hall at you from a mile away. She was so happy all the time, always smiling,” Emily says. Last year, she says, Juliana “wrote an individual note to every single one of her friends and put it in their lockers, telling them how wonderful they were and how much she loved them.”

In her eulogy, Emily says, she’ll talk about how Juliana taught her to laugh at herself.

Laughter is what many friends say they will most remember about mother and daughter. The two shared an infectious mirth that just seemed to bubble out of them and roll over the people around them.

Bish remembers laughing easily and often with Carole on their morning walks. Plump but determined to stay healthy, Carole hauled out of bed at 6 a.m. three times a week, towing her two tiny white dogs, a toy poodle and a bichon frise, on neighborhood treks with Bish.

She and Jens were comfortable, Bish says, working for the family real estate business after years spent establishing their independence by building up their own successful painting firm.

How, Oehler muses, will Jens and the children cope?

In an article he wrote after her disappearance, Jens seemed unsure himself.

“She is the unequivocal manager and leader of our family,” he wrote. “I am heading into uncharted territory.”