Growing up in Morehead City, North Carolina, Don Keenan, had daily reminders of the discrimination that his Irish great-grandparents faced.
Downstairs in the little basement room he used as a play area his grandfather J. Don had stacked a number of anti-Irish signs such as, "No Irish Need Apply" which had hung on businesses in the Morehead City area. His grandfather had put them there to remind his grandson that the good life he enjoyed came at a cost.
Keenan, now the most successful children's advocate lawyer in America and a regular guest on Oprah Winfrey, Good Morning America, and 60 Minutes still chokes up at the memory. "It made me a fighter all my life." He says, "I was never going to forget what people, black, Irish, Asian, whoever, went through to make it in America."
His fighting skills have served underprivileged and injured kids well. Oprah gave him her "People Who Have Courage" award a few years ago. In his Atlanta law office there are no pictures of Keenan hobnobbing with famous people. Rather there are the faces of the kids whose lives he has touched, either through his charitable foundation Keenan's Kids or his burgeoning law practice, one of the busiest in the South.
On his desk is a schedule of his travel itinerary, Australia, London, his beloved Dublin, and points east and west. He is one of the most sought after speakers on children's issues in the world.
Up there on his wall is the smiling little face of Kathy Jo Taylor, just two years old, beaten to death by her foster parents. Taylor was placed in foster care despite the fact that members of her family wanted to take her in.
Keenan represented the family pro bono and went all the way to the Supreme Court where he won a famous victory. It came too late for Kathy but it has helped save countless young lives since. The court ruled that the law that mandated immediate foster care when both parents were found unfit had to be changed and that family members had to have the opportunity to take the child in. Incredibly, that was not the case at the time. "In the 1980s children under the age of 18 had no constitutional rights," said Keenan, shaking his head. "Kathy Jo would be alive today if they did."
There is one sweet moment every year for Keenan. On Kathy Jo's anniversary her family sends him flowers to thank him for all he did to bring justice to bear after her death.
Besides the photo of Kathy Jo, there is one of Terrell Peterson. He was just five years old and in foster care when he was admitted to the emergency room in 1998. His little body, weighing only 29 pounds, was covered in cuts, bruises and cigarette burns. Try as they might, doctors could not restart his heart.
The State of Georgia called a press conference and stated that they had followed every provision of the law as it related to caring for foster children. Don Keenan did not believe them. He took the state to court and won a landmark victory that forced Georgia to pass a series of strict measures to protect foster children.
Shawn Huff, Executive Director of the Atlanta Falcons Youth Foundation and a former foster care child himself, says simply "Don Keenan is a person who has rewritten the definition of what a hero is. His voice has shone brightly for the voiceless children who don't get heard."
The fight for the underdog comes naturally to Keenan, the kind of sweet talking Southern lawyer who belongs in a John Grisham script. Behind the bonhomie, however, lurks the instinct of a street brawler. He has not lost a case in 15 years.
Keenan's great-grandparents, Charles and Sarah from Dublin and Galway, were on their way by emigrant ship to Florida in 1888 when life intervened. The ship was forced to put ashore for repairs in North Carolina and because Keenan's great-grandfather was a carpenter, he helped carry them out. When the ship left, it went without him and his new wife. They had fallen in love with the tranquil South and decided to make their home there.
Though the scenery and the vistas were beautiful, some of the local attitudes to post-famine Irish Catholic emigrants were not. His great-grandfather had fruit and vegetables and rocks thrown at him, and there were streets no Irish Catholic could walk down. Oftentimes, Irish workers were the last to be paid, sometimes not at all. Keenan remembers his grandfather, whom he worshiped, telling him that the family survived by growing their own vegetables.
When Keenan was two years old, his father, Joseph, died when a boiler he was working on exploded. Keenan's mother was never in good health afterwards. He was raised by his grandfather who became a local political leader as the Irish began to climb the steep ladder out of the ghetto through the only means open to them - politics.
Born in 1955, an only child, Keenan grew up in a time of turmoil in the South. It was the civil rights era and his grandfather taught him his history well. "Our family had suffered tremendous discrimination and we weren't about to approve of seeing that happen to other people. My grandfather often suffered politically for his views, but he was adamant that civil rights was the greatest thing to happen to the South since the end of slavery."
At age 17, Don Keenan's world was turned upside down when his grandfather suffered a heart attack and died. Alone in the world except for his ailing mother and grandmother, Keenan, a top student, went to school at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. His life was to take the first of several unpredictable turns there.
He fell in with a group of student entrepreneurs each of whom tried to outdo the other in starting a successful business. Keenan won the contest hands down. By the age of 21 he was a millionaire, having opened delicatessens, catering operations and nightclubs.
His cherished memory is of requiring vast amounts of cheese for a new upscale food venture he was planning and flying to Switzerland because he read that was where the best cheese was. He recalls getting off the plane in Zurich and asking a puzzled immigration officer "Where's the cheese at?"
A year or so later with $1.8 million in the bank he was at USC in southern California studying law. He bought himself a Jaguar and a cell phone, one of the first ever made. "It took up most of the trunk of the car," he remembers. "There were about three people in the world I could call."
As quickly as he made the money, however, Keenan lost it again. Bad investments landed him back in the genteel poverty he had grown up in. He resolved to start all over again.
This time it was tougher. He attended Atlanta Law School at night. During the day he worked and when possible went to every trial in every courtroom he could find to study how it could be done. He learned a lot.
Even before his law license was finally delivered he found himself defending a car thief. He figured the guy would get off even if guilty, because technically he was not qualified to defend him. That never arose, as he won his first case.
Soon the young silver-tongued lawyer from North Carolina began making a reputation for himself. People began sending cases to him. He was closely paralleling the career of Senator John Edwards, another North Carolinian who later became a very close friend.
Keenan had thought that practicing criminal law would be the apex of his professional life. Instead it was a disillusioning experience. "They were all guilty," he says now. "I thought I would be saving innocents, but the facts turned out different. I can't remember an innocent person I represented."
Keenan also took several death penalty cases, saving his clients from the ultimate fate but ending up more disillusioned than ever about the process. "I was very successful but I was absolutely miserable," he says.
It was a period when he admits frankly he was drinking way too much. Friends eventually came to his rescue, corralling him in a cabin in a very remote area and taking his car keys away. By the time he got back to civilization he had changed his ways.
His path to sobriety coincided with the breakthrough case that would change his life forever.
Atlanta in the late 1970s was in the grip of fear. A monstrous child killer was on the loose and by 1981, 29 young black kids had been murdered. Police were baffled and it seemed the killer might never be caught.
The mothers of the dead children came to see Keenan. They had formed an organization called The Committee to Stop Children's Murders and claimed that the entire investigation was being badly mishandled by police.
Whispers had circulated, fanned by law enforcement sources, that some of the mothers had killed their own children and that funds they had raised were missing. The parents were distraught.
Keenan took charge. Through civil disobedience, press conferences and speaking engagements, they held the police authorities' feet to the flames and kept a relentless focus on the murders. Eventually, Wayne Williams, a young black man, was caught and convicted.
Keenan says the murders still haunt him; especially those of two boys aged five and six whose killings have never been solved. "Authorities tried to close the book but there are voices inside that book that are still crying out," he said.
Keenan's involvement in the case led to his new career as a child advocate. It began when he appeared on the Phil Donahue Show and heard Donahue describe his next guest as an expert on children's issues. Keenan looked around to see who Donahue was talking about and realized it was him. He instantly liked the title and set about earning it.
"I know what effect other people's negligence can have on a child," he says, "and it ultimately dictated what I did with the rest of my life."
There are almost 50 photographs on the wall of Keenan's law firm, all of kids he has successfully represented since he became a child advocate lawyer. They are proof of a wide range of horrific violence that has been visited on kids.
Among his cases are abused and murdered foster care kids, babies who were accidentally castrated during circumcision (two in one week in the same hospital), kids who suffered horrific birth defects as a result of negligence, and kids shot, burned, beaten, and abandoned. One case still stands out for him. Elizabeth Leake was a ten-year-old girl who was attacked by a paranoid schizophrenic wielding a hammer in front of her terrified classmates. It turned out that school security was incredibly lax. After he won the case Keenan succeeded in forcing authorities to tighten access to schools all over the state and eventually all over the country.
The Leake case fell under what Keenan calls his one-third solution. The first one-third is to prosecute the case and see that justice is done. The second is to promote safety awareness around the issue. The third part of the solution is to remedy those wrongs by bringing about legislative change. In the case of Hannah Helms, a young two-year-old girl killed by a branch falling from a rotting tree, Keenan's foundation did exhaustive research and found that playground accidents are one of the biggest causes of death for children in America. Keenan succeeded in having regular playground safety inspections carried out in many states.
He has also helped distribute thousands of gunlocks to households where guns and children are both present. It is practical steps such as these that he believes can make the difference.
Unsafe toys are also a constant cause for Keenan. Each year his foundation, Keenan's Kids, lists the ten most dangerous and defective toys on the market. He was horrified to find that some toy manufacturers, once they appear on his list, immediately pull the toys in the U.S. and ship them overseas. He has pursued companies to countries as far away as China and South America to stop the practice.
Keenan founded Keenan's Kids in 1992, when he decided that his charitable donations were being poorly used by existing charities. He began by focusing on children's safety issues but also provided a very practical program of supplying clothes for kids in deprived communities. As of this year, through determined outreach, Keenan's Kids has supplied over 400,000 items of clothing for kids in need. Another aspect is the making of bologna sandwiches to bring to neighborhood shelters and food banks. Even if you are a casual visitor to Keenan's law firm you may have to do your duty preparing sandwiches for that day's run. He estimates over 250,000 sandwiches have been distributed in the dozen years of the program.
Before every major case Keenan takes everything personally. He lives with the family of the plaintiff for a few days "walking in their shoes" as he puts it. He makes extensive use of focus groups to determine whether or not this argument or that one could work before he comes to face the judge.
Keenan says much of his passion comes from his Irish heritage and the values his grandfather taught him. He visits Ireland once or twice a year and keeps in touch through a number of Irish organizations. He says his will to win and fierce determination are the Irish traits he values most. "I've never had an opponent who has outworked me in terms of the will to get the win for my little kids," he says. "I think that's my most important ability." His opponents would certainly say "amen" to that.
Downstairs in the little basement room he used as a play area his grandfather J. Don had stacked a number of anti-Irish signs such as, "No Irish Need Apply" which had hung on businesses in the Morehead City area. His grandfather had put them there to remind his grandson that the good life he enjoyed came at a cost.
Keenan, now the most successful children's advocate lawyer in America and a regular guest on Oprah Winfrey, Good Morning America, and 60 Minutes still chokes up at the memory. "It made me a fighter all my life." He says, "I was never going to forget what people, black, Irish, Asian, whoever, went through to make it in America."
His fighting skills have served underprivileged and injured kids well. Oprah gave him her "People Who Have Courage" award a few years ago. In his Atlanta law office there are no pictures of Keenan hobnobbing with famous people. Rather there are the faces of the kids whose lives he has touched, either through his charitable foundation Keenan's Kids or his burgeoning law practice, one of the busiest in the South.
On his desk is a schedule of his travel itinerary, Australia, London, his beloved Dublin, and points east and west. He is one of the most sought after speakers on children's issues in the world.
Up there on his wall is the smiling little face of Kathy Jo Taylor, just two years old, beaten to death by her foster parents. Taylor was placed in foster care despite the fact that members of her family wanted to take her in.
Keenan represented the family pro bono and went all the way to the Supreme Court where he won a famous victory. It came too late for Kathy but it has helped save countless young lives since. The court ruled that the law that mandated immediate foster care when both parents were found unfit had to be changed and that family members had to have the opportunity to take the child in. Incredibly, that was not the case at the time. "In the 1980s children under the age of 18 had no constitutional rights," said Keenan, shaking his head. "Kathy Jo would be alive today if they did."
There is one sweet moment every year for Keenan. On Kathy Jo's anniversary her family sends him flowers to thank him for all he did to bring justice to bear after her death.
Besides the photo of Kathy Jo, there is one of Terrell Peterson. He was just five years old and in foster care when he was admitted to the emergency room in 1998. His little body, weighing only 29 pounds, was covered in cuts, bruises and cigarette burns. Try as they might, doctors could not restart his heart.
The State of Georgia called a press conference and stated that they had followed every provision of the law as it related to caring for foster children. Don Keenan did not believe them. He took the state to court and won a landmark victory that forced Georgia to pass a series of strict measures to protect foster children.
Shawn Huff, Executive Director of the Atlanta Falcons Youth Foundation and a former foster care child himself, says simply "Don Keenan is a person who has rewritten the definition of what a hero is. His voice has shone brightly for the voiceless children who don't get heard."
The fight for the underdog comes naturally to Keenan, the kind of sweet talking Southern lawyer who belongs in a John Grisham script. Behind the bonhomie, however, lurks the instinct of a street brawler. He has not lost a case in 15 years.
Keenan's great-grandparents, Charles and Sarah from Dublin and Galway, were on their way by emigrant ship to Florida in 1888 when life intervened. The ship was forced to put ashore for repairs in North Carolina and because Keenan's great-grandfather was a carpenter, he helped carry them out. When the ship left, it went without him and his new wife. They had fallen in love with the tranquil South and decided to make their home there.
Though the scenery and the vistas were beautiful, some of the local attitudes to post-famine Irish Catholic emigrants were not. His great-grandfather had fruit and vegetables and rocks thrown at him, and there were streets no Irish Catholic could walk down. Oftentimes, Irish workers were the last to be paid, sometimes not at all. Keenan remembers his grandfather, whom he worshiped, telling him that the family survived by growing their own vegetables.
When Keenan was two years old, his father, Joseph, died when a boiler he was working on exploded. Keenan's mother was never in good health afterwards. He was raised by his grandfather who became a local political leader as the Irish began to climb the steep ladder out of the ghetto through the only means open to them - politics.
Born in 1955, an only child, Keenan grew up in a time of turmoil in the South. It was the civil rights era and his grandfather taught him his history well. "Our family had suffered tremendous discrimination and we weren't about to approve of seeing that happen to other people. My grandfather often suffered politically for his views, but he was adamant that civil rights was the greatest thing to happen to the South since the end of slavery."
At age 17, Don Keenan's world was turned upside down when his grandfather suffered a heart attack and died. Alone in the world except for his ailing mother and grandmother, Keenan, a top student, went to school at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. His life was to take the first of several unpredictable turns there.
He fell in with a group of student entrepreneurs each of whom tried to outdo the other in starting a successful business. Keenan won the contest hands down. By the age of 21 he was a millionaire, having opened delicatessens, catering operations and nightclubs.
His cherished memory is of requiring vast amounts of cheese for a new upscale food venture he was planning and flying to Switzerland because he read that was where the best cheese was. He recalls getting off the plane in Zurich and asking a puzzled immigration officer "Where's the cheese at?"
A year or so later with $1.8 million in the bank he was at USC in southern California studying law. He bought himself a Jaguar and a cell phone, one of the first ever made. "It took up most of the trunk of the car," he remembers. "There were about three people in the world I could call."
As quickly as he made the money, however, Keenan lost it again. Bad investments landed him back in the genteel poverty he had grown up in. He resolved to start all over again.
This time it was tougher. He attended Atlanta Law School at night. During the day he worked and when possible went to every trial in every courtroom he could find to study how it could be done. He learned a lot.
Even before his law license was finally delivered he found himself defending a car thief. He figured the guy would get off even if guilty, because technically he was not qualified to defend him. That never arose, as he won his first case.
Soon the young silver-tongued lawyer from North Carolina began making a reputation for himself. People began sending cases to him. He was closely paralleling the career of Senator John Edwards, another North Carolinian who later became a very close friend.
Keenan had thought that practicing criminal law would be the apex of his professional life. Instead it was a disillusioning experience. "They were all guilty," he says now. "I thought I would be saving innocents, but the facts turned out different. I can't remember an innocent person I represented."
Keenan also took several death penalty cases, saving his clients from the ultimate fate but ending up more disillusioned than ever about the process. "I was very successful but I was absolutely miserable," he says.
It was a period when he admits frankly he was drinking way too much. Friends eventually came to his rescue, corralling him in a cabin in a very remote area and taking his car keys away. By the time he got back to civilization he had changed his ways.
His path to sobriety coincided with the breakthrough case that would change his life forever.
Atlanta in the late 1970s was in the grip of fear. A monstrous child killer was on the loose and by 1981, 29 young black kids had been murdered. Police were baffled and it seemed the killer might never be caught.
The mothers of the dead children came to see Keenan. They had formed an organization called The Committee to Stop Children's Murders and claimed that the entire investigation was being badly mishandled by police.
Whispers had circulated, fanned by law enforcement sources, that some of the mothers had killed their own children and that funds they had raised were missing. The parents were distraught.
Keenan took charge. Through civil disobedience, press conferences and speaking engagements, they held the police authorities' feet to the flames and kept a relentless focus on the murders. Eventually, Wayne Williams, a young black man, was caught and convicted.
Keenan says the murders still haunt him; especially those of two boys aged five and six whose killings have never been solved. "Authorities tried to close the book but there are voices inside that book that are still crying out," he said.
Keenan's involvement in the case led to his new career as a child advocate. It began when he appeared on the Phil Donahue Show and heard Donahue describe his next guest as an expert on children's issues. Keenan looked around to see who Donahue was talking about and realized it was him. He instantly liked the title and set about earning it.
"I know what effect other people's negligence can have on a child," he says, "and it ultimately dictated what I did with the rest of my life."
There are almost 50 photographs on the wall of Keenan's law firm, all of kids he has successfully represented since he became a child advocate lawyer. They are proof of a wide range of horrific violence that has been visited on kids.
Among his cases are abused and murdered foster care kids, babies who were accidentally castrated during circumcision (two in one week in the same hospital), kids who suffered horrific birth defects as a result of negligence, and kids shot, burned, beaten, and abandoned. One case still stands out for him. Elizabeth Leake was a ten-year-old girl who was attacked by a paranoid schizophrenic wielding a hammer in front of her terrified classmates. It turned out that school security was incredibly lax. After he won the case Keenan succeeded in forcing authorities to tighten access to schools all over the state and eventually all over the country.
The Leake case fell under what Keenan calls his one-third solution. The first one-third is to prosecute the case and see that justice is done. The second is to promote safety awareness around the issue. The third part of the solution is to remedy those wrongs by bringing about legislative change. In the case of Hannah Helms, a young two-year-old girl killed by a branch falling from a rotting tree, Keenan's foundation did exhaustive research and found that playground accidents are one of the biggest causes of death for children in America. Keenan succeeded in having regular playground safety inspections carried out in many states.
He has also helped distribute thousands of gunlocks to households where guns and children are both present. It is practical steps such as these that he believes can make the difference.
Unsafe toys are also a constant cause for Keenan. Each year his foundation, Keenan's Kids, lists the ten most dangerous and defective toys on the market. He was horrified to find that some toy manufacturers, once they appear on his list, immediately pull the toys in the U.S. and ship them overseas. He has pursued companies to countries as far away as China and South America to stop the practice.
Keenan founded Keenan's Kids in 1992, when he decided that his charitable donations were being poorly used by existing charities. He began by focusing on children's safety issues but also provided a very practical program of supplying clothes for kids in deprived communities. As of this year, through determined outreach, Keenan's Kids has supplied over 400,000 items of clothing for kids in need. Another aspect is the making of bologna sandwiches to bring to neighborhood shelters and food banks. Even if you are a casual visitor to Keenan's law firm you may have to do your duty preparing sandwiches for that day's run. He estimates over 250,000 sandwiches have been distributed in the dozen years of the program.
Before every major case Keenan takes everything personally. He lives with the family of the plaintiff for a few days "walking in their shoes" as he puts it. He makes extensive use of focus groups to determine whether or not this argument or that one could work before he comes to face the judge.
Keenan says much of his passion comes from his Irish heritage and the values his grandfather taught him. He visits Ireland once or twice a year and keeps in touch through a number of Irish organizations. He says his will to win and fierce determination are the Irish traits he values most. "I've never had an opponent who has outworked me in terms of the will to get the win for my little kids," he says. "I think that's my most important ability." His opponents would certainly say "amen" to that.