The Still Here series has documented what happened after January 21, 2024. This installment documents what came before — and why the pattern was never new.
By Michael Phillips | Father & Co.
Every series has a starting point. For the purposes of documentation, this one has used January 21, 2024 — the last day I had court-ordered parenting time with my son. That date appears in every installment because it is the most precise anchor available for what the record shows.
But January 21, 2024, was not the beginning of anything. It was a continuation — the latest expression of a pattern that began years earlier, inside a marriage that ended the way it did for reasons that have never been honestly accounted for in any court proceeding.
This installment is the origin story. It covers what happened before the docket entries, before the Our Family Wizard messages, before the motions and the hearings that were canceled, and the doctors who didn’t notify me, and the therapy I wasn’t told about. It covers the marriage, what it was, how it ended, and how the tools Christina Avgerinos used to end it became the tools she used to erase me from my son’s life.
Dylan
Dylan was born in March 2019. He is the reason any of this matters and the reason all of it is worth documenting.
He was not born into a stable household. By the time he arrived, the marriage he was born into was already damaged in ways that I did not yet fully understand and was not equipped to name. I was his father from the first moment. That has never changed. Everything else has.
He turned 7 just over a month ago. I have not been present for a single one of his birthdays. Not one. Not by choice. Not the first one, when he was too young to know the difference. I had some supervised time, but his mother canceled my plans because of the pandemic that was barely a pandemic yet. Not the ones in the years since, when he was old enough to notice. Seven birthdays. His father was not there for any of them. Never invited to his parties. Instructed not to hold my own. That is not an accident. It is a choice Christina Avgerinos has made, every year, for seven years.
2017: What We Went Through Together
To understand what happened in this marriage, you have to start before Dylan was born.
In July 2017, Christina and I faced one of the most devastating experiences a couple can go through. A pregnancy was diagnosed with Trisomy 18 — a chromosomal condition incompatible with survival. After consultation with genetic counselors and physicians at Maternal-Fetal Medicine Associates of Maryland, the pregnancy was terminated. The medical records and correspondence from that period are part of the court file.
During that period, Christina wanted to end the marriage. The grief, the trauma, the strain on everything between us — she wanted out.
I stayed. I worked to hold the marriage together. I believed that what we had been through together was something we could survive together. I believed “In sickness and in health.”
That decision — to stay, to try, to not walk away when she wanted to — is part of the record too. Not because it obligates anything. But because it is context for everything that followed. I was not a man who abandoned his partner in crisis. I was a man who stayed when leaving would have been easier. Even when she took out her pain on my own family. Even when she frequently took it out on me.
What I believe now, with the benefit of years of documentation and reflection, is that the Trisomy 18 experience left Christina with unresolved trauma — grief, and depression that compounded over the following years and that significantly contributed to what I later observed as postpartum symptoms following Dylan’s birth. Rather than seeking help, we moved forward. She told me counseling was too expensive. We could solve our problems on our own.
In 2018, we pursued IVF. Christina’s employer did not cover it. Mine did. I was the one whose health plan made Dylan’s conception possible. It gave Christina hope. An extra pep in her step that was previously lost. I navigated that process alongside her — the hormonal weight, the emotional volatility, the sustained strain of fertility treatment inside a marriage that was already fracturing. I administered all of her needles. I apologized on her behalf to every nurse and doctor she yelled at. I was present for all of it.
Dylan was born in March 2019. He was immediately sent to the NICU because of miconium. He was wanted. He was fought for. I paid for it, in every sense of that phrase. I watched her scream at every nurse and doctor. And at me. After a few hours, he was cleared, but not before she yelled at more nurses. She sent them cookies. For me, she would later fabricate that I was drunk at the hospital to project the blame onto me.
What I was not prepared for was what came next. As soon as Dylan was here, I was no longer needed. Not gradually, not subtly — the process of removing me began almost immediately. Even before Dylan was born. My employment difficulties, which Christina had been aware of and at times supportive of, became a source of sustained criticism. The care and patience I had extended through two years of medical trauma and fertility treatment were not returned. The person who had stayed, who had paid, who had shown up for every difficult moment of building a family — was discarded the moment the family existed. At every moment she could, she called someone to accuse me of some wrongdoing, and they arrived to further drive a wedge between not just our marriage, but also between my son and me.
Dylan was ten months old when I was removed from the home. The sequence is documented. The timing is not a coincidence.
What I believe, and could not get anyone to listen to, is that the cumulative weight of the Trisomy 18 loss, the IVF process, and Dylan’s birth — without any of the underlying trauma ever being adequately addressed — contributed directly to what I was observing in Christina’s behavior in the months that followed. I raised those concerns. All while Christina refused any marriage or individual counseling. Nobody acted on them. Instead, the concerns I raised about her mental state were folded back into the narrative about mine — as further evidence that I was unstable, delusional, dangerous.
I was trying to protect my son from a situation I could see clearly and could not get anyone else to acknowledge. That effort became the foundation of the case against me.
The Marriage
I am not going to detail the full history of our marriage in this installment. That deserves its own piece and the precision it requires. But the origin story of this series cannot be told accurately without naming, at minimum, what the tools were.
The allegations that removed me from my home on February 7, 2020, did not appear out of nowhere. They were constructed over time, from materials that were either fabricated entirely or taken from reality and inverted.
With the exception of my college years, I have not had a substance abuse problem of any kind. I am not claiming I am some perfect being. When Dylan was born, and because of everything Christina went through, I chose to be her designated driver so she could relax and have fun. I was more than happy to be a doting father holding his son whenever we socialized. That did not prevent Christina Avgerinos from making alcohol and substance abuse a recurring allegation — one deployed in proceedings, repeated in communications, and used to construct a portrait of a man whose presence in his son’s life was a danger rather than a necessity. She accused me of staying up and getting drunk on Christmas Eve. I was up late trying to fix a leaking humidifier attached to our furnace, so nothing flooded or electrically shorted before her family came over in the morning. I took pictures. Her father stopped speaking to me because of that accusation. He has not spoken a word to me since that day in 2019. I had done Dry January in 2020. Not because I needed to detox, but because I was tired of being yelled at or wrongly accused of being drunk by Christina when I had not drunk anything. I was scared to drink. I told friends and family I hadn’t drunk in a month. I was very open about it. That did not prevent the allegations.
I have ADHD. That diagnosis was real. What Christina Avgerinos did with it was not. She used my ADHD to claim that I was prone to violence — that a neurodevelopmental condition that affects attention and impulse regulation was evidence of physical dangerousness. That is not what ADHD is. That is not what my ADHD has ever looked like. But the allegation did not need to be medically accurate to be legally useful. Especially in front of an untrained judge at an ex parte hearing who couldn’t care less about the truth.
Christina Avgerinos accused me of running surveillance on her. The cameras she was referring to were security cameras I had installed at her request, following break-ins in the neighborhood. She had asked me to add them. When the narrative needed a controlling, surveilling husband, those cameras became evidence of exactly that. It became a source of her paranoia. Her mother’s too, as if it were true. They fed off of each other. At her request, I took them all down. But she kept making the accusations.
This is the tactic at the center of everything that followed: take something real, invert it, and present the inversion as the truth. I installed cameras she requested — I became the surveillance threat. I reacted to an abusive environment — my reactions became the abuse. I tried to raise concerns — my concerns became the problem.
I want to be precise about something the court record states plainly and that every proceeding has managed to obscure: Christina Avgerinos was the one who yelled. During our marriage and after it. When I arrived to pick up Dylan and knocked on the door, she would characterize it as banging. When I asked questions, she characterized them as aggression. When I tried to coordinate a move-out, and her screaming at the moving crew was witnessed by multiple people present, that somehow became my fault, too. I responded to her messages on Our Family Wizard, trying to be calm, and she labeled my communications abusive. She provided no video evidence from her surveillance cameras to support those claims — because the claims were false. Yes, she used the very cameras I installed for her against me any time I was at the house. She would later paper over windows.
The inversion was consistent and deliberate. She yelled. I became the one with the anger problem. She screamed. I became the one who needed to be removed. That pattern did not begin after the marriage ended. It defined the marriage itself. And it has been submitted to the court, in detail, and ignored. Hundreds of thousands of pages of accounts, details, and evidence.
People around me began telling me I needed help. For anger. For drinking. For instability. For the very things Christina Avgerinos was doing to me. I was scared in my own home. Not of what I might do — of what was happening around me and what it was being turned into.
I sought therapy. Individually, after Christina Avgerinos refused both marriage counseling and her own individual therapy. I was trying to understand what was happening in my marriage and what I could do about it. That is not the behavior of a man who does not recognize his own problems. It is the behavior of a man trying to address them.
Christina Avgerinos attended some of my individual sessions at my invitation. I allowed this because I was desperate to save the marriage and believed that her participation might help. What happened instead was sabotage. She would disrupt sessions, redirect them, and introduce narratives that reframed the purpose of the therapy from my growth to her version of my pathology. On other occasions, Christina Avgerinos would make threats immediately before I left for a session — timing designed to ensure I arrived destabilized, distracted, and unable to engage with the work I was there to do. Sometimes she stormed out of sessions when she couldn’t get her way.
The therapy I sought to save my marriage became another tool used against me. The sessions I invited Christina Avgerinos into became opportunities for interference. And the fact that I was in therapy at all was later deployed as evidence that something was wrong with me — rather than as evidence that I was the one trying to fix what was wrong with us. When she couldn’t get her narrative across, she forced me to quit.
Christina Avgerinos refused help. I sought it. That distinction has never been adequately reflected in any court record.
Every detail in this section was submitted to the court. In motions, in filings, in documentation that I compiled over years of proceedings. None of it was addressed. Not refuted — ignored. The court record does not show a judge weighing my account against Christina Avgerinos’s and finding hers more credible. It shows a judge receiving my account and moving on. Multiple judges. That distinction matters. I was not disbelieved. I was not heard.
That is how the marriage ended. And it is why everything that followed has the shape that it does.
When I Asked for Help
Before February 7, 2020 — before the protective order, before the removal, before the divorce filing, but after police involvement — I reached out to domestic violence organizations. But I didn’t know what I was asking for. I was never physically attacked, so I wasn’t sure if what I experienced was even abuse.
I was turned away. Without physical violence, I was told there was nothing anyone could do.
This is not unusual for male victims of domestic abuse, though it is rarely discussed. The infrastructure built to support survivors of intimate partner violence is oriented, structurally and historically, toward women. Male victims who call hotlines, walk into shelters, or seek advocacy are frequently redirected, disbelieved, or simply told that the organization cannot help them. That is what happened to me.
After the protective order was obtained on February 7, 2020, I attempted to call the Family Justice Center in Rockville, Maryland. I was told I was not eligible for resources because of the protective order — the very order obtained against me on false allegations. I tried several other places. Same result. The instrument of false accusation had become the barrier to receiving help. I documented my attempts to reach domestic violence resources in text messages to my brother at the time, frustrated and exhausted, noting that there were no resources available to help with the abuse I was experiencing because the protective order meant I was classified as the abuser.
I was experiencing what I now understand to be coercive control — a pattern of behavior that included emotional abuse, false accusations, sabotage of my therapy, sabotage of my employment, sabotage of my support network, threats, and a systematic campaign to reframe my responses to abuse as the abuse itself. I reached out for help. The organizations designed to provide that help turned me away.
What followed, in part, was a direct consequence of that failure. With no support infrastructure, no advocate, no organization willing to document what I was experiencing, I had no institutional record of what was happening to me before February 7, 2020. Christina Avgerinos had one within hours on that date. The asymmetry in documentation became the asymmetry in the legal record — and the legal record became the basis for everything the court did and did not do in the years that followed.
I am not the only man this has happened to. The systemic failure to recognize male victims of coercive control is a documented problem with documented consequences. Mine are in the court record. Or rather — they are not in the court record, because no one would help me put them there.
The Night of January 31, 2020
The protective order Christina Avgerinos obtained on February 7, 2020, referenced events from the night of January 31 through the early morning hours of February 1. The record I compiled documents that night in precise detail. I had witness statements, text messages, photos, and phone logs, all with timestamps.
I had gone out that evening — a rare social event, four neighborhood fathers having dinner at Brew Belly in Olney, MD. I had done Dry January and told the people I was with that I hadn’t drunk in a month. I let my guard down and had a few drinks over several hours, ensuring I didn’t overdo it. We took an Uber to be safe from one father’s home two blocks away. A short walk. The baby monitor showed Dylan sleeping. By midnight, we were winding down. We returned to the neighborhood. I walked home, the short two blocks from the neighbors.
I arrived at 1 AM. The dogs barked when I came through the garage — they always did no matter how careful I was. When I played in bands, Christina never woke up when I returned home late. She would greet me at the door. I hung out with my dogs to wind down. She went to bed. After a few minutes, I went to turn in. Christina was in the guest room, awake, on her laptop. We were sleeping separately. Before walking to my room, I stopped at the doorway and tried to be kind — asked how her evening was, said she looked pretty, tried to lighten things between us. What followed was immediate and disproportionate. She snapped at me, accused me of being aggressive and threatening, told me to stop yelling when I was not yelling. I apologized. I disengaged. I went downstairs to breathe and sit with my dogs.
At approximately 1:15 AM, Dylan cried from his nursery. I waited downstairs, assuming Christina would get him. She had the audio monitor. She did not move. I checked the video monitor on my phone — Dylan was standing up in his crib, crying. I started toward the stairs.
Standing in her doorway upstairs, Christina threatened to call 911 if I went to get him.
I pleaded with her for several minutes to get Dylan herself. She refused. She made the threat again and again, refusing to get Dylan. Nothing else was said by her. Each time, I took a few more steps upstairs. Eventually, I slowly walked past her down the hall to the nursery. She didn’t move. I picked up Dylan. His head slumped onto my shoulder, and he quickly fell back to sleep. She called 911. I quickly closed the nursery door to separate myself from her. Out of fear, I called 911. I wanted the police to know where I was in the house, hoping to avoid any melee.
I was not arrested. The officers who responded found no basis for arrest. My son remained sleeping on my shoulder the entire time. What Christina did after she called 911 was to text my mother at 1:20 AM with an account of the evening that bore little resemblance to what had actually occurred — an account documented in the court record that contradicts specific details she later included in the protective order filing. She stated in that text that I had not woken Dylan — the same detail she contradicted in the protective order itself, and in future testimony. But this was a frequent tactic of hers. To involve my parents in situations where she was in the wrong, to project blame onto me. It caused a lot of friction in my family. But that was her goal, to deflect attention and blame away from her.
Seven days later, on February 7, she obtained the temporary protective order. My attorney, Erin Gibson, was not notified of the possibility until a late email on the evening of February 6 that she could not respond to until the morning of February 7. Phone calls to Christina’s attorney were not returned. The order was obtained before she could act. The protective order stated I had threatened Christina. It stated I had been aggressive. It stated facts that were false.
I was removed from my home the same day. Dylan was ten months old. There was nothing I could do.
What the Protective Order Cost
The consequences of the February 7, 2020, protective order extended far beyond the home.
I had spent almost fifteen years as a federal government contractor. I had a security clearance. I had letters of accommodation and commendation for my performance. In the months leading up to February 7, I had been fighting to resolve a flag on my clearance record — a flag placed by a prior employer, Acuity, in circumstances I disputed — that was preventing me from obtaining new government contract work. Circumstances created by the growing stress of my failing marriage. I had been in active communication with attorneys, with government records offices, with the security clearance system itself, trying to salvage a career I had been building for well over a decade.
The domestic violence 9-1-1 call on February 1, combined with the protective order obtained February 7, ended that effort permanently. Any prospect of reinstating my government security clearance was eliminated. I had to cancel job interviews scheduled for that week because I had been abruptly removed from my home without advance notice and had no access to my clothes, my files, or my professional materials. The protective order would appear in any background check. The career I had spent almost fifteen years building was gone.
I had also been a new father for less than a year. I had no income. I had no clearance. I had no home. I had a son I was not allowed to see except on terms Christina Avgerinos controlled.
All of it is in the record. All of it was submitted to the court. All of it was ignored.
February 7, 2020
On February 7, 2020, I was removed from our home. Dylan was ten months old.
Thirty-seven days later, on March 16, 2020, the divorce case was filed. The protective order preceded the filing. The removal preceded the filing. By the time the case was formally opened, Christina Avgerinos had already removed me from my son’s daily life for over a month. The legal process formalized what had already been accomplished through the protective order.
The protective order became a permanent fixture of my legal record — something I would spend years attempting to vacate through the courts, something that would be cited repeatedly in subsequent proceedings as evidence of a pattern that did not exist. I filed motions to have it removed. Those motions, like nearly everything else I filed, were denied. Christina would continue to mention its existence at any hearing, as if to prove I was an abuser and justify her violating any agreement or order we had.
Dylan was ten months old when his father was taken out of the house. He has no memory of a home that contained both of his parents. That is not a natural outcome of a difficult divorce. It is the result of a specific decision Christina Avgerinos made on a specific date — a decision preceded by a 9-1-1 call made while I was trying to comfort my crying son, and followed seven days later by a protective order obtained without even my attorney’s knowledge until it was too late to respond.
COVID
March 2020 was also the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. For most families, the lockdowns and restrictions created logistical challenges. For a father who had just been removed from his home 37 days before the first lockdowns and had a ten-month-old son he was trying to remain connected to, COVID became something else entirely.
It became a reason. A general-purpose justification for anything and everything. Exchanges canceled because of COVID. Visits refused because of COVID. Communication deflected, plans disrupted, commitments abandoned — all attributed by Christina Avgerinos, at one point or another, to the pandemic. I was accused of being dismissive of COVID concerns when she asked questions I didn’t immediately know the answers to — questions she chose to seek answers to by calling and harassing my family members rather than simply accepting my responses. She never answered any of my questions. She also threatened to deny visits if I found a job at any brick-and-mortar business. When I arranged for movers to retrieve my belongings from the house in March 2020, Christina Avgerinos was screaming at everyone before they could even begin, despite my having verified COVID protocols with the moving team in advance. Multiple people witnessed it. It was documented. She wouldn’t even allow me into my own home to pack and move my belongings. I had to rely on everyone else to do it.
COVID was real. The restrictions were real. What I am describing is its specific deployment as a blanket justification in circumstances where it was not the actual reason.
Supervised Visitation: March to May 2020
In the early period following the protective order and the divorce filing, the only parenting time available to me was supervised — supervised by Christina Avgerinos herself, at a location she controlled, on terms she set. This is the same person who just obtained a protective order against me. This is the person who, only days earlier, said I wasn’t allowed into my own home to move my belongings out. Now she feels safe enough to supervise me there?
This arrangement existed from approximately March 2020 to May 2, 2020. It ended not because I chose to end it, but because it became untenable.
Every visit was surveilled. Christina Avgerinos hovered over Dylan and me throughout, intervening in our interactions, monitoring everything. False accusations emerged from every one of these visits — claims about recording, that I was stealing things, that I wasn’t caring for Dylan correctly, about conduct that had not occurred. She had agreed to provide copies of all her recordings from these visits. She never did. She added more cameras without providing additional recordings. The atmosphere was one of constant observation designed to produce incidents that could be documented and used. I had so much anxiety being there. But I wanted to see my son.
Christina Avgerinos involved others. Visits that should have been between a father and his infant son became staged performances in which my behavior was the subject of scrutiny by additional parties. I was not able to be present with my son in any meaningful way because the act of being present was itself being weaponized.
I stopped attending those supervised visits on May 2, 2020. I couldn’t handle being yelled at anymore for simply taking my son for a walk around the neighborhood. That decision has been used against me in subsequent proceedings. What has not been adequately addressed in those proceedings is why I made it — because the arrangement was not supervision, it was orchestration, it was abuse, and continuing to participate in it was not in Dylan’s interest or mine.
The Isolation
What happened to my relationship with Christina Avgerinos’s family and my own social network during this period is something I have touched on in prior installments. Here I want to be more specific about what it felt like.
People I had known for years stopped talking to me. Neighbors who had been friendly went silent. Friends I had maintained relationships with for a long time became unavailable. No one explained why. The information that caused each person to withdraw was passed through a network I had no access to, in conversations I was not part of, and the result was a kind of social erasure that ran parallel to the legal erasure happening in the courts.
Christina Avgerinos was also communicating directly with my own family — my parents, my brother, my sister-in-law — in ways that consistently caused conflict between us. The dates of those communications are documented in the court record across years of incidents. Any time Christina Avgerinos called my parents, spoke with them privately, or had the opportunity to share her version of events, it resulted in unprovoked conflict directed at me. My parents began acting against my interests, accepting her account over mine, and undermining my ability to mount any coherent legal response.
Christina Avgerinos’s brother Nick was the only person in her family who ever said anything to me directly. He told me that their family had been instructed not to talk to me. Not that they had chosen to step back — that they had been told. That instruction came from Christina Avgerinos.
Dylan’s baptism was organized and conducted by Christina Avgerinos without my involvement or notification. I am his father. I was not there.
Every birthday has passed the same way. Seven of them. His father was not present and was not invited. Whatever Dylan has been told about why — I do not know. I have not been in a position to offer him a different account. Same with everyone in his network that once was mine.
The Prior Denial Period — And What Interrupted It
From March 2021 through April 2022 — more than a year — Christina Avgerinos denied or severely restricted visitation entirely. A court had to intervene and order her to resume it. She was not found in contempt despite more than a year of documented noncompliance.
During the limited visits that did occur in that period — facilitated only through a paid co-parenting coordinator from the National Family Resiliency Center, whose recommendations Christina Avgerinos then ignored — I was dealing with something the court record also contains, but that received no meaningful weight.
On February 19, 2021 — one week after my three-day custody merits hearing concluded on February 11 — my brother William Phillips assaulted me at my parents’ house in Finksburg, Maryland. He was angry about how he and his wife were treated during the trial by Christina Avgerinos and her legal team.
The injuries documented at the Carroll County Hospital Emergency Room: a fractured right fibula and tibia, a fractured nose, a concussion with lingering symptoms including headaches, dizziness, blurred vision, and difficulty concentrating, and multiple cuts and bruises all over my body. I was taken by ambulance. My parents refused to pick me up from the hospital even after I told my mother my leg was broken. When I returned to the house on crutches, my mother accused me of faking my injuries despite the hospital X-rays.
I had called 911. I was the one who reported the assault. While I was at the hospital, my brother and parents gave a statement to the police. I did not. I was charged with assault.
I had already been diagnosed with PTSD — the result of cumulative trauma from the abusive treatment I had experienced from Christina Avgerinos and from my own family. The February 19 assault immediately worsened every symptom. Flashbacks. Loss of sleep. Constant fear and anxiety. Fear of leaving the room. I was living in the house where the assault had occurred, with the people who had protected the person who committed it, unable to drive to Rockville to see my son because my leg was in a cast.
Christina Avgerinos learned about the Carroll County incident. She immediately subpoenaed the Carroll County criminal and medical records and filed them as exhibits in the Montgomery County custody case. She began to do this before I even knew I was being charged with assault. How did she know before I did?
The assault charges against me were eventually moved to the stet docket for dismissal, and quickly expunged. The evidence was clear enough that the State’s Attorney agreed to dismiss before the case even proceeded. I was the victim. The charges were dismissed. None of that happened quickly enough to prevent the records from being weaponized in the custody and divorce proceedings.
I filed counter assault charges and a protective order against my brother. My mother filed a protective order against me in clear retaliation. The family that had already been turned against me by Christina Avgerinos’s communications with them over the years was now fully deployed against me in the legal record at the most vulnerable moment of my life. My mother’s was granted without presenting any evidence. My filings were dismissed despite injuries still visible.
I stated to my Bible study group at the time: “I’m ready to give up on this world. Nothing makes sense to me. My parents always protect him. Who gives a shit about me? As soon as my wife finds the case, there goes any custody, everything I’ve been fighting for. I don’t know what to do anymore. I’m tired of fighting.”
I did not give up. But I want to be clear about what I was carrying when I continued.
Otis
Otis is a black lab. He was my dog in the way that a dog has a person — the one he listened to, the one whose presence registered as home. Christina Avgerinos shared the protective order with his veterinary office, making it uncomfortable for me to drop him off for appointments.
When Christina Avgerinos had me removed from the house on February 7, 2020, I lost Otis, too. When Christina Avgerinos and Dylan travel — the ski trips, the New York City weekends, the various vacations documented across 7,077 Our Family Wizard messages — I am not asked to watch him. The offer is not made.
I last saw Otis on January 21, 2024. The same day I last had my son.
I had already lost my older dog, Benny. He passed away from cancer in 2021, only a few months after the family issues.
What January 21, 2024, Actually Was
The series uses January 21, 2024, as its anchor because it is the most precise date available. It is the last documented day of court-ordered parenting time. It is the last day I spent any meaningful time with Dylan. It is the last day I saw Otis. It is the starting point of the 28-month record of denials that installments 04 and 05 have documented in full.
But January 21, 2024, was not a beginning. It was an ending — the closing of the last remaining door in a house that had been emptied, room by room, since February 7, 2020.
What changed that day was not the pattern. The pattern had been in place for years. What changed was the pretext. My car broke down after a court hearing on January 23, 2024. I asked to reschedule my next visit. That request — reasonable, temporary, the kind of accommodation co-parents extend to each other without negotiation — became the justification Christina Avgerinos used to cut off access entirely. Not because a car breaking down is a reason to deny a child his father. But because a pretext was needed, and one had presented itself.
The pattern was not new. The pretext was.
Dylan was born in March 2019. I stayed when leaving would have been easier. I have been here for every day of his life, even the ones he doesn’t know about. That is what this series exists to prove.
Still Here is an ongoing series documenting one father’s fight to remain in his son’s life. Read the full series at Father & Co.
This article reflects the author’s firsthand experience and documented record. References to legal proceedings are based on publicly available court records through the Maryland Judiciary Case Search portal. The Carroll County assault charges referenced in this article were moved to the stet docket, dismissed, and expunged. All legal references in this series are informational only and do not constitute legal advice. Father & Co. is not a law firm. If you are navigating a custody matter, consult a licensed attorney in your state.
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