Multiple newspapers declared her dead. She wants to resurrect herself
Alicia Rowe learned she was dead from a news story.
Rowe, a 39-year-old therapist in Austin, had been searching the internet around Thanksgiving for updates about her parents, an occasional curiosity she indulged after becoming estranged from them six years ago.
She found something new — an article in Britain’s Daily Mail about her parents’ ongoing battle with their homeowners’ association in a Houston suburb. Rowe learned that the HOA was suing her mother and father, Kathleen and George Rowe. The association wanted a judge to order the couple to stop feeding ducks outside their home in Cypress, Tex., and let the association foreclose on the property if they kept doing so.
News outlets from around the world, including The Washington Post, reported the story. Most, if not all, reported the same thing: The Rowes had moved to the Lakeland Village development about a decade earlier, and Kathleen fed the ducks soon after as a way to cope with the death of their only child.
Alicia was that only child — and was very much alive.
“At first I was stunned,” she said.
Rowe read article after article reporting her death — in The Post, the Houston Chronicle, HuffPost, USA Today and Business Insider, to name a few. Unsure of what to do, she published a post on Facebook asking for advice, the start of a months-long effort to correct the record by reaching the thousands — if not millions — of people who’d read about her parents’ battle with their HOA.
About five months before Alicia stumbled across the article in the Daily Mail, the Lakeland Village Community
Association had taken legal action. For years, it had ordered Rowe’s parents to stop feeding ducks and threatened to file suit if they didn’t. The association sued the couple in June in Harris County Civil Court, asking a judge for a “permanent mandatory injunction requiring Defendants to cease from feeding any wildlife” in the neighborhood.
Feeding the ducks “runs afoul of the general plan and scheme of Subdivision” and has caused “imminent harm and irreparable injury to the Plaintiff,” the lawsuit states.
The Rowes fired back in court, denying they had done anything wrong and asking a judge to scuttle the HOA’s suit. Their lawyer, Richard Weaver, called it “the silliest lawsuit I’ve ever seen.” Around the same time, the Rowes and their lawyer were communicating with news organizations. Kathleen told the Chronicle that, after losing her daughter, she started feeding the ducks, some of which she suspected had been incubated and purchased at pet stores and then abandoned by their owners to fend for themselves in the manicured quasi-wilderness of suburban America.
“They’ve never had a mother,” she told the newspaper. “I feel like I’m just stepping in.”
The slew of national and international news stories came out in the days and weeks after the suit was filed. Then things calmed down, and for months, the battle was largely fought through court filings and out of the public eye.
Meanwhile, Alicia Rowe was living roughly 120 miles away in Austin, unaware of her parents’ fight with their HOA or that she had been declared dead the world over as a result.
Then, in mid- to late November, she Googled her parents’ names to see whether she could find any new information about them. One of the first sentences in the Daily Mail article caught her eye: “The Rowes started feeding the animals after the death of their only child, saying they found it therapeutic.”
A Facebook friend helped Alicia connect with a reporter at the Houston Chronicle, she said. After an email exchange, the two spoke on the phone.
“Both of us were very confused,” Alicia said.
To clear things up, the reporter, R.A. Schuetz, once again contacted the Rowes’ attorney, according to her story in the Chronicle, which published Jan. 30. The lawyer then contacted
Kathleen. She said that, when she told him she had “lost” her daughter, she meant they had become estranged, not that she had died.
Schuetz reviewed her interview with Kathleen and noticed she’d always phrased her grief in terms of “losing” or having “lost” her daughter without explicitly saying she had died or even “passed,” the reporter said on an episode of the Chronicle’s podcast “Looped In,” on which she discusses reporting the Rowes’ story.
“Mrs. Rowe asked me to communicate her apologies for the confusion,” Weaver, the Rowes’ attorney, said in an email.
In a subsequent email, Kathleen Rowe wrote that she never said that her daughter was dead.
The Chronicle quickly posted an update to its July 8 article: “This story has been corrected to reflect that Kathleen and George Rowe are estranged from their daughter, who is still alive.”
But Schuetz suggested to Alicia that they work together to produce a new story. Although Alicia said her initial instinct was to let the whole thing go and move on, she ultimately agreed. She thought talking about the pain of being estranged from her parents might resonate with others.
Alicia said that at first she felt guilty about going public with her story but has gotten positive feedback since the Chronicle’s article published. People have reached out to say that her story sounded a lot like theirs.
“So it’s kind of helped me want to continue to move forward and let people know about my situation and about my experiences,” she said.
Then there was the more straightforward news that she wanted to get out into the world:
“The message is just that, like, I am alive.”
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