Today is Mazes birthday. I believe he should be 26 now. I the past I would have been writing to him something like "Happy birthday! I'll be home for christmas vacation!" through an email. The host of his old email account shut down. His old phone number has been transferred to a new customer. There is nothing left.
Maze at 26. I wish I could have met the man he grew into. I can't even imagine it.
Today is TdoR, and I am remembering Maze.
I got home from work an hour ago. I am holding his old seal doll named Snowball. I am thumbing through old photos in a photo album. I am looking at his old cell phone, wishing I could still call it, and regretting that I didn't call more.
As of the third of November, 2025. It will have been 9 years without Maze.
It really doesn't seem real. It doesn't seem like that long ago that I was sitting in the hospital with his dead body. Waiting for the hour when doctors would take his body away to have his organs harvested for other people to use. None of the people who got his organs ever contacted our family. I have not received any photos from any friends of his. None of the ones I was waiting on have replied to my messages. So I don't have any new photos of Maze or anything. There's nothing new to report.
Maze would be 25 now, and later this December we should be celebrating his 26th birthday on the 9th. I can't imagine him being 25 or 26. What kind of jobs would Maze have worked by now? Would he have found an apartment somewhere in Winslow or Waterville? Would he have his own car? Would we be going out to have fun after work together? Would we both be able to help our mom with stuff at her house? What games would we play together? Would he even like any of the same games as me? Could I take him hiking on mountains? Could we go canoeing on Mill Stream?
It just doesn't seem real that he even could be that old. He's just always 16 in my head. But he should be that old. He should have gotten the chance to be 25.
Right now, I should be worrying about how it's November now, which means I have to think of getting him two gifts. One for his upcoming birthday and one more for Chirstmas. Instead I've just been wishing that on La Toussant I had the gas money to drive up and take care of his grave.
I was wrong in my last post, today, December 9th of 2024 is when Maze Knowles should have been 25 years old.
It's pretty embarrassing that I wrote his wrong age in the last post. But I will chalk it up to me being upset, plus Maze was the one in the family who was good at math. And Maze was really good at math. Like, way better than he should have been. When I was in High School and needed to ask for help with my math homework, I'd ask Maze.
La Toussaint on November 1st came and went. The Trans Day of Remembrance was on November 20th passed by. I wanted to visit his grave but I was never able to get a ride up to central. I haven't had much to say. The people responsible for his death are still free. Nobody seems to remember him but me and our mom.
I can't even imagine Maze at 25 years old. I'd hope he'd play Halo with me. I'd hope he'd go out hiking with me like I always asked him to no matter how much he declined. I'd hope we could meet up and hang out after work like normal adults, like any other set of brothers.
Sometimes I try to remember what that would have looked like. I try to imagine how it would have looked for him to go out hiking with me. I try to imagine going out to the local arcade with him after we both to get out of work. I try to imagine how long he would have kept the white hair before eventually dyeing it some other color. But I can't even possibly imagine him any different from how he looked when he was 16.
That's about the correct age, right? As of the 9th he should have been a quarter of a century old. This is horseshit. He should be out on his own and in an apartment somewhere, working a normal job and playing video games, but naw. Some son of a bitch government therapist has to listen to Maze, a mentally ill teenager, say that he figured out when the guards do checks, which means Maze had figured out how long he had to kill himself between checks, and upon hearing that, the government therapist decides he should definitely give Maze back his bed sheets.
"Oh so you're suicidal and you've figured out when you can do the deed? Thanks for sharing, have some bed sheets."
Either I should be playing Halo with Maze after we both get home from a long day at our jobs or that bitch should be in prison, instead I've got neither. This is horseshit.
[EDIT] I was wrong lol, not 25.
Or, La Toussaint, It is normally where Catholics or formerly catholic families would flock to catholic cemeteries to visit their dearly departed loved ones graves with pots of mums and clean the graves.
Today I had to be at work here in southern Maine. I could not be there on the proper day. But I did go a few days ago on the weekend when I was able to get a ride. I cleaned up Maze and our grandparents graves and left some mums for them.
It is now about 1AM on the the 30th of October, but just an hour ago it was the 29th, the day Maze decided to take his own life. Some time after that doctors decided he was brain dead and days later on the 3rd of November would be when Maze would officially declared dead. Today, or yesterday as of a hour ago, marks seven years without him.
I've spent most of today both keeping busy while also thinking of him. It's weird to know he's not here, but at the same time I can't imagine what he would be like at the age of 24. If he were alive, I'd be thinking what I'd have to be getting him for his upcoming 25th birthday on the 9th of December, and then also for Christmas soon after. In my head he's forever stuck at the age he died at. Trying to age that image of him up to 24 years old just doesn't work. What would he It still seems so wrong that he is not here. Incorrect information. It still feels like there should not be any reason that I can't just simply email him and ask "Hey dude, what do you want for your birthday? And what about Christmas?"
What would a 24 year old Maze want for his 25th birthday? It feels so weird that I can't imagine it at all.
I wonder if anyone else is thinking of him today as well. He changed schools a couple times, and would have to reintroduce himself under different names because he had such a hard time settling on a name after he came out as trans. Charles, then Charlie, then maybe just "Chuck" for a bit, before giving up on anything starting with a 'C' and just wanting to be called by the childhood nickname of "Maze" which people already knew him by. No matter what anyone knew him as, I hope somebody other than just me and our mother are thinking of him. I tried without success for a long time to talk to any of his friends about their memories of Maze because I'd really like to collect and compile some stories or memories of him, note down the year each memory takes place, and through that compile a summary of each year of his life. Which shouldn't be too hard since he only had 16 of them. But no one seems to want to take part. It's something I've thought about a lot. I'm thinking of it again today.
Seven years without him. It doesn't seem real. It still feels like just yesterday our grandmother reached out to tell me Maze was dead. It feels equally as unreal now as it did that day.
I found something very old in my Gmail account. Now, because when uploading a photo to Gmail you would sometimes loose EXIF data, I'm not 100% sure when this photo was taken, but I did find an old photo of Maze from 2009.
Maze in in the center of the photo in a blue shirt carrying a bucket. Our brother David is on the left. I took this photo of them on an old phone. Almost all of the photos from that time period were lost because they were backed up onto hard drives that broke down. I found this photo in an email I sent to myself on the 9th of August in 2009. If you've ever been to Sandy Point beach you probably recognize that abandoned pier in the background. If I remember correctly we went to that beach a couple times that summer.
I feel lucky that Gmail kept this photo that long. If I look backward to emails I sent back in 2007-2011 many of the attachments are null or corrupted. I don't know why I sent his one photo to myself back in 2009, the email is otherwise blank, but the current me of 2023 is very happy the me of 2009 did so. It's not a good photo or a hi-res one, but it's more than nothing.
Here are two that I did not loose which were taken on the same day:
I found this article, it's from a socialist publication called Pines and Roses. It mentions Maze briefly.
https://pineandroses.org/news/maine-youth-justice-no-prisons-for-children/
Someone passed away recently who knew Maze a bit, not related to us, but he say Maze every morning, 5 days a week. Bus driver Ben. He saw all of us grow up, seeing us all of us every morning as he picked us up to take us to VCS. He saw me, David and Maze all grow up.
>Benjamin Bird Twitchell III, 77, passed away surrounded by loved ones on Friday, Feb. 24, 2023 after a long and valiant battle with prostate cancer.
https://www.centralmaine.com/2023/03/03/obituarybenjamin-bird-twitchell-iii-2/?fbclid=IwAR0Qkkv2G8IKwSZujO7WqY2ECTsT4dw3vpluPT4wMIwmU8lZ-qAPL6ZrNsI
https://archive.is/BIwxO
https://web.archive.org/web/20230417072836/https://www.centralmaine.com/2023/03/03/obituarybenjamin-bird-twitchell-iii-2/
Here are links to the obituaries, and archives of the obituaries, of our grandparents. I'm using the www.archive.is service to archive the obituaries because I do not know how long they will be kept online. (Please note that some of these obituaries state that I am married. I am not and have never been married, it was the mistake of whoever wrote the obituary and other newspapers kept reprinting it. I don't know why they thought that I was ever married. Also they spelled my last name wrong but everyone always does so whatever.)
Our Nana, Shirley McQuillan, the woman who raised my mother and always hid her french from us.
https://www.dignitymemorial.com/obituaries/waterville-me/shirley-mcquillan-10841354
https://townline.org/obituaries-for-thursday-july-28-2022/
https://www.tributearchive.com/obituaries/11247478/Shirley-McQuillan
https://archive.is/R4gDB < This archive is broken for some reason? Maybe the page loads slower than the archival tool reads.
https://darik.news/maine/obituary-shirley-a-mcquillan-centralmaine-com/621412.html
Our Grandpa, John McQuillan, the most gentle and patient man I have ever met, who always smiled and laughed at everything.
https://www.dignitymemorial.com/obituaries/waterville-me/john-mcquillan-7696947
https://www.centralmaine.com/2022/07/24/obituaryshirley-a-mcquillan/
On one of Mazes facebook accounts there is this blank post. It exists, it's there. And at some point two people liked it. But there's nothing there. Normally if the content was deleted there would be a box with words which says so. But here there is just nothing, it looks broken. What was it he posted about?
I don't understand it. And it's a little upsetting. It's a little something he did, gone forever.
He would have been 23.
He could have had his hobbies. He could have still had his friends. He could have been working a normal job. He could have had a life. He and I could have hung out after work together and could have been celebrating him turning 23.
I'm always reaching out to people, looking for photos or videos of Maze. I reached out to so so so many people who knew Maze, asking for photos they might have taken with him, or of him. I probably contacted 40 to 50 people, only 4 or 5 got back to me. Only 2 actually had photos of him.
So I'm always looking for photos in our own stuff. Maybe an old book with some photos between pages, a forgotten photo album buried in an old chest. Some files archived in a an old hard drive, Recently in an old storage container in a shed outside I found an old Kodak photo CD, and it was from my own High School graduation in 2010. My grandfather took the photos. Most of the photos are of me, but a smaller 2010 version of Maze is visible in some of them. I haven't had any victories in a long while. Here are the ones that Mazes is visible in:
Looking at the second of Mazes two facebook accounts there's one post that is longer than others, where he talks about how he got fired from a job at a farm he worked on. It's but a small fragment of his thoughts, but one of the few posts he actually wrote that goes beyond a single sentence. I am going to post screenshots here, and copy+paste the text of what he said, so they stay around the web a bit longer.
He posted it on the 28th of June, 2016.
I've updated the page on social media accounts with some better links and archives of twitter posts. See here -
https://mazeknowles.blogspot.com/p/blog-page_28.html
As you may have heard in the news, our mother has recently reached some sort of legal settlement with regards to Mazes death. Below I'll link some news articles about it with a little copied text from each one for posterity purposes. We can't know how long into the future the links will still work. A lot of it is repetitive, but whatever.
So as you may have noticed from the last post, there was a robbery at the home of the mother of Maze Knowles. My mom, Michelle Knowles stayed with a friend for a couple days and upon returning home found that her home had been invaded, trashed and robbed. The thieves moved or tossed over furniture, turned around every mirror in the house, trashed everything, and left behind empty beer cans and used heroin needles. It seems that the robbers may have purposed targeted my mom and may have known Maze, and they went through stacks of family photos and left out photos of Maze where they would be noticed. The robbers wanted my mom to know they had been there by leaving out photos of her deceased child. Some of the things that were stolen from the home belonged to my mom, some of the things that were stolen belonged to me. Most of these things are replaceable. What is very upsetting, however is that the majority of things that were stolen were things that belonged to Maze. After Maze died, we were never allowed to see his suicide note because Long Creek said it was a part of the investigation into itself. All we had left of Maze were his belongings. Things he owned that he left behind. He left his own little personal touch on so many things In this post I will detail some of what was stolen from us. The last post on this blog was a copy-and-paste of a very brief posted I printed out and hung up around Vassalboro. I don't have direct photos of everything that was taken, so some I just sourced from Google Image Search.
I am still offering a CASH REWARD for the return of any items, or any information that leads to the return of the stolen items. How much cash depends entirely upon what we get back and what condition they are in, but we want everything.
The police have been contacted and do know of what was stolen. The police want to track down whoever it was that broke into my moms house. IF we have the stolen items returned to us, we can make the police stop trying to find out who robbed my moms house.
Contact me via email at
drewtardif@gmail.com
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One thing was his school backpack, that was orange, yellow, and black. I remember that he left a few doodles of his own on and inside the backpack. Before he passed away he had actually nearly filled it up with origami frogs, which was something I taught him when he was very small. I learned how to fold little origami frogs when I was a kid, and I taught him how to fold them, too. What I didn't know was that he apparently had very recently folded a few HUNDRED of the the little guys and was keeping them all in that backpack. I noticed that he drew eyes on a couple of them, which I thought was cute. The few hundred little frogs that he folded were dumped on the floor by the robbers, who I assume stole the backpack to carry out all the other things they stole.
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A folding pocket knife. Like a lot of things Maze owned it was purple and black. It had it's pocket clip bent out of shape.
● A whole wooden shelf they stole off the wall, I don't know why they stole this.
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A handcrafted small table my mom crafted from an Ouiji game board and a
birch tree stump. It's more art than it is table, I don't know why they
stole this.
● A mostly black, with gray endcaps, USB external hard drive. It's capacity is 40 gigabytes. I was using it to store a large amount of photos and videos of Maze, to keep them all in one place after he died.
● A black colored USB flash drive. It's capacity is 16 gigabytes. It
was a hole through the middle of it for tying a lanyard through it.
● A ring with a red jewel on it.
The thieves stole a bunch of dolls that belonged to Maze that were creatures from the Pokemon video game series. Some of them were hand-me-down gifts from me, as I had been playing the Pokemon games for a few years before he was even born.
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This little one is called Poliwag. It is rubber and hallow.
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This one is called Pichu, it has a connector on the bottom for hooking it up to a game. About an inch and a half tall.
● This one is called Blastoise, its made of a hard plastic and about an inch tall.
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This is called Charmander. It's almost a foot tall and is a cotton doll. It's a hand me down that I had owned since 1999.
● This one is called Poliwhirl. It is about softball sized and is a cotton doll. I am really upset about this one being stolen because it used to be mind. I had gotten it in 1997 and I had loved it so much, it was a favorite of mine. But I stilled handed it down to Maze. Now it's gone.
● This one is called Bulbasaur, it is a large doll.
● A black and white Ibanez electric guitar. This is mine.
● A Sony PSP. Also called the PlayStation Portable. It is the older, fatter, 1000-series of PSP.
Here is a photo of Maze teaching our mom to play a game on the PSP back in 2009.
● A Sony Playstation 2. The older fatter version. And the controllers for it.
● The item I am most upset about being stolen was his Nintendo Wii, a game console he won in a raffle he entered at Bull Moose Music.
Even though he won that Wii, he didn't have the money to buy a lot of Wii games for it, so for christmas that year I took his Wii and modded it to play a bunch of games that had been put on its SD memory card. That made him happy. He sometimes had taken the SD memory card out of his Wii and used it in his digital camera to take photos.
When he put the SD memory card back into his Wii, the photos he took would sometimes show up on one of the parts of the Wii main menu when you turned the Wii on. It randomized which photos showed up, sometimes it was my own face, a photo he took of me, or his face, a photo he took of himself. On the Wii each player could make cartoon avatars called "Miis" that they could play as in some games. Maze had actually took a really long time in the Mii creator and made rather accurate Miis of every single person in out family. The Mii he made of me was really accurate. He did that way back before he started to transition, so there was a Mii of himself from before he transitioned. After he transitioned he never deleted the old Mii, he just made a new one of himself as a male. If you own a Wii then you will know that whenever you go to the Mii menu, you will see all the Miis that had been created on you Wii. They will walk around the screen and interact with each other. I always left Mazes Wii plugged in. Whenever I went to visit my mom, I would see it's little red light, glowing in my room. I would power it on, the light would turn green. On the main menu I would see the one photo it choose at random, a photo Maze had taken of me or himself. If I opened the Mii menu I could see all the little Mii avatars that Maze had spent so much time creating. They'd waddle around the screen and interact with each other. It was nice to see the little Mii avatar of himself walk around and interact with the others, like me, or our mom, or David. After our grandfather passed away it was also a nice thing to seen the Mii that Maze made of our grandfather walk up and interact with the Mii made of himself. Sometimes I would play games on Mazes Wii and remember all the times we played games on it together. Out of everything that was stolen, more than anything, I want back Mazes Wii and the two Wii controllers and the SD memory card the most.
Oddly, the thieves forgot to steal the Wii Sensor Bar, which the Wii controllers use to communicate with the Wii itself. I don't think it will work very well for them since they didn't steal the Sensor Bar as well.
(This document is not quite done, but near enough done that it can be published and usable in it's current state. More will be added later.)
Again, I am offering a CASH REWARD for the return of the stolen items, or any information that leads to their safe return. To talk to me, please contact me via email at
drewtardif@gmail.com
“They couldn’t attend to his mental health because he was a detainee and not an inmate. And that’s important. He was languishing,” Knowles said. “I demanded that he get clinical assistance. They were just going to begin some. That’s when they called up to congratulate themselves on how great [Maze] was doing for the past 12 hours. I said, ‘yeah, you gotta look out.'”
The next day, Charles had hanged himself.
...
She learned with experience that periods of relative calm and apparent progress with doctors would suddenly give way like a trap door that opened into free fall.
“I told them (at Long Creek), ‘Please be careful, you can’t trust this child,’ ” Knowles said. “As soon as you trust him, the other shoe drops.”
