WINDSOR — For the summer and fall of 2000 — a year and a half after moving to the Upper Valley from Florda — Kerrie Ramsey and her three sons, ages 5, 11 and 17, lived at a Hartford campground.

Before moving to Maple Leaf Camp Grounds and leaving most of the family’s belongings at a self-storage facility, Ramsey had rented a condo in Quechee for $850 a month.

But even by working an overnight shift, which paid $3 more an hour, at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center, Ramsey couldn’t make ends meet. Not with the condo’s electric heating bill soaring to $800 a month during the previous winter.

So a small tent and a pop-up camper that the 35-year-old Ramsey had borrowed from her boss became home.

After I met her at the campground that summer, Ramsey agreed to participate in a 10-month Valley News project, “The Other Side of the Valley.” The eight-part series, published in June 2001, chronicled the lives of four families struggling to find affordable housing and pay monthly bills even while the head of the household held down a full-time job.

Since then, I’ve also written about the adolescent struggles of Ramsey’s youngest son, Sam. Throughout the hardships, Ramsey was determined to do everything in her power to see that her son had a chance to lead a satisfying life.

Ramsey was among the first people in Vermont to sound the alarms about what was happening behind locked doors at the Woodside Juvenile Rehabilitation Center in Essex.

Her son had experienced it.

In 2020, Gov. Phil Scott’s administration was forced to close Woodside amid allegations of widespread abuse of troubled teens.

This spring, Ramsey called me to say she had received bad news. She’d been diagnosed with lung cancer.

On Oct. 2, Ramsey died “peacefully in the presence of her family at her home in Windsor,” her obituary read. She was 59.

Growing up in Massachusetts and South Carolina, Ramsey finished near the top of her high school class. After becoming a mom at 18, she earned a college degree and embarked on a 25-year career as a respiratory therapist.

It wasn’t until months after we talked for the first time at the campground that she told me how she came to settle in the Upper Valley. In 1999, she packed up a U-Haul truck and with her boys in tow, headed for Vermont, where she had relatives, leaving an abusive husband and their 13-year marriage behind.

Ramsey found a job in her field at DHMC, which turned out to be much easier than finding an affordable place to live in the Upper Valley.

Unable to afford renting the Quechee condo, Ramsey’s fallback became campsite No. 24 at Maple Leaf Camp Grounds, off Route 5, for $144 a month. She joked that not having permanent housing had its advantages — her boys could roast marshmallows over a campfire every night.

Even when living at the campground, which is no longer around, Ramsey found the time and energy to volunteer at the Upper Valley Haven, where she answered phones, wrote thank-you notes to donors and helped out at the food shelf.

With cold weather approaching and the campground about to close for the season, Ramsey still hadn’t secured a place to live.

Her luck changed when she came across a classified ad for a two-bedroom ranch in Quechee. She slept on the living room couch. Her kids’ comfort and space came first.

Within a year or so, Ramsey started seeing Jim Bennett, who had returned to his hometown of Windsor after a 20-year career in the Navy’s intelligence service. “We met online when it was still a newfangled thing,” Bennett said.

Bennett had started a second career as a mail carrier in Windsor and served on the town’s school board.

In 2003, Ramsey made the move to Bennett’s large house, where he was raising his two daughters. “We’d both been single parents for a while,” he said. “I helped her when she needed help, and she helped me when I needed help. It was a mutual aid society. We grew together.”

Adjusting to a new elementary school and trying to make friends proved tough on Ramsey’s youngest son. At school, Sam was prone to outbursts that went beyond youthful temper tantrums.

“Kerrie understood that Sam had his issues,” Bennett said.

She found mental health counseling for him, but Sam’s destructive behavior continued.

After 11 years at DHMC, Ramsey had to stop working due to her own chronic physical ailments, which meant she lost her family’s health insurance coverage.

She didn’t have the money to pay for Sam’s in-patient mental health care. The Vermont Department for Children and Families, or DCF, offered to step in, but there was a condition: Ramsey must relinquish custody of her son to the state.

“It went against every fiber of her maternal being,” Bennett said. “It was heart-wrenching, but she understood it was what she needed to do to try to get Sam the help that he needed.”

He spent most of his early teens in residential treatment centers for youths with psychiatric illnesses.

At 16, the state sent him to Woodside, where the staff almost immediately took him off his medications. Kerrie Ramsey argued with Woodside and DCF that doing so was a mistake. No one listened.

In August 2011, Sam slammed a staff member, a former Vermont prison guard, against a wall after she berated him for having a messy room. Other staff members pulled him away.

As punishment, he was locked in a room with a bed, toilet and sink. He was let out for one hour to shower and call his mom. She was allowed to visit once a week.

After seven months, DCF shipped him to a private residential center for emotionally disturbed teens in Georgia.

When he turned 18, the state brought him back — to prison. He served 3½ years for misdemeanors stemming from his altercation at Woodside when he was 16.

At Northern State Correctional Facility in Newport, Vt., Sam was allowed visitors only on Sunday mornings. His mom left home before 7 a.m. for the 120-mile drive. She wanted to be in line to the prison’s visiting room when the heavy metal doors opened.

“It didn’t matter what the weather was like,” Bennett said. “There would be a blizzard, and I’d beg her not to go. She’d still go.”

Few incarcerated people have family or friends who visit them regularly. “At the time, I didn’t really know how important it was,” Sam told me. “It helped break up the week.”

Kerrie became an advocate for her son and other young men in prison whom society is too quick to write off.

After saying goodbye to Sam, she’d often hang around for the prison’s Sunday afternoon visiting session to spend time with another young man from Windsor who seldom had visitors.

“She developed a good understanding of how the (corrections) system worked and that people weren’t always going to be treated fairly,” Bennett said. “You pick your battles and do what you can do. You tolerate what you can’t change.

“She was bright and well-read,” he added. “She had a really good sense of right and wrong.”

During their Sunday morning visits, the conversation invariably turned to what it was going to take for Sam to graduate from high school. (In Sam’s case, another failure on Woodside’s part.) Kerrie encouraged — a polite way of saying badgered — her son to keep up with his studies at the Community High School of Vermont, which is open to people in the corrections department’s custody.

“My mom knew that I’d have enough hurdles to overcome when I got out that I didn’t need another, like not having my degree,” he said.

On graduation day at the Newport prison, I joined Kerrie for the ceremony and brief celebration during which the strict “no contact” rules that applied to regular visits were lifted. For the first time in years, Ramsey was allowed to hug her son.

On the early spring day in 2017 when her son was released, Kerrie waited outside the prison to bring him home.

She wasted no time in signing him up for government health benefits and helping him register for classes at Community College of Vermont, or CCV.

After Sam got his first job at a fast-food restaurant, she’d pick him up at the end of his shift. He’d changed out of his uniform before they drove to the CCV campus in Wilder. Kerrie often waited in her Subaru for her son’s night classes to finish.

Along with supporting her son, Ramsey was quick to help others in need. When she found out that an acquaintance didn’t own a car, she began driving him to the grocery store and to medical appointments.

“If he called her at night and needed to go somewhere, she’d take him,” Bennett said.

In her trips to Windsor’s only supermarket, Ramsey met an older woman who worked there. The woman was having difficulty signing up online for Social Security and Medicare benefits. Ramsey, who took online computer classes after leaving DHMC, offered to help.

“She was really good at navigating the complexity of (government) systems,” Bennett said.

In early 2015, when Sam was still incarcerated, I interviewed him and his mother during their Sunday visits for a two-part series about Woodside, where he was kept in solitary confinement for months.

While her son was in state custody, Kerrie felt powerless to do anything about his mistreatment at Woodside. But after Sam was released from prison, she began looking for an attorney to file a lawsuit against the state.

Without the money to pay legal fees, she struck out.

In December 2021, however, a federal lawsuit was brought on behalf of seven other youths who had suffered “serious physical and psychological injuries, both temporary and permanent,” at Woodside, the plaintiffs’ lawyers wrote.

Last year, the state finalized a $4.5 million out-of-court settlement in the case.

It gave the Ramseys new hope. Dan Sedon, a Chelsea attorney, had heard about Sam’s experiences at Woodside. Sedon and associate Will Stocker told me recently that they’re “exploring avenues” that could lead to a lawsuit against the state for Sam’s “treatment at Woodside.”

From the time her son left prison, Kerry has wanted her son to earn a college degree. (Balancing a 50-hour work week and classes at CCV became too much, leading him to drop out.)

Sam, who turns 30 next month, has bounced from job to job, mostly in the restaurant business, where he’s held managerial positions.

If Sedon and Stocker, who took the case on a contingency basis, are successful in securing a settlement, Sam could afford to return to college. Kerrie’s dream for her son could come true.

Last week, I met Sam at a Windsor restaurant. “I’m fully aware of how lucky I was,” he said, “to have her as my mom.”

Jim Kenyon can be reached at jkenyon@vnews.com.