Father Grieves the Daughter He Lost in Tragic Accident

John Neznik goes to bed crying, wakes up crying and says he forgets about the sleeping part.

Burying a child will do that to a father.

From what he’s been able to piece together, John believes his 41-year-old daughter Kari fell to her death from the fourth-floor balcony of her apartment in Spring Park. A man walking his dog discovered Kari’s body in the early morning hours of Sept. 10.

Police have told the Neznik family that their initial investigation indicates Kari was outside cleaning when she became locked out of her unit. Investigators found a ladder and cleaning supplies on the balcony, supporting a neighbor’s report that he heard Kari cleaning around midnight on the night she died.

Preliminary findings of the police investigation presented to the Neznik family indicate the doorknob and lock mechanism came apart and fell inside the apartment while Kari was outside on her patio.

“Now she’s out on the deck locked out after midnight and is four stories up,” John said. “There aren’t a whole lot of people out there at that time of night.”

Based on palm prints found while dusting for fingerprints, police believe Kari was attempting to climb down the balcony. They put the time of her fall sometime between midnight and 1 a.m.

“She had stood on the railing and climbed over the edge,” John said. “She tried to climb down to the deck below. She didn’t make it. She fell.”

John stood on the balcony of his daughter’s apartment the morning after her tragic fall. He said he could understand his daughter’s thought process and conceded he would have probably done the same thing.

“It was not an impossible feat,” John said. “Me and the detective looked down and said, ‘I could do that.’ It’s just one of those decisions that you make every day—should I run this stoplight or should I stop? Climb down or sit there until morning? Life gives you a bunch of choices. This one turned out to be fatal.”

Police found John on his way to work early the next morning. They took him to a nearby picnic table to deliver the news every parent dreads.

“They were very good about it,” John said. “They didn’t want to leave me alone. We sat there and talked for 15 or 20 minutes, and I told them I had to go tell my wife and children. I told them that I wanted to tell them in person.”

Although the Hennepin County Medical Examiner’s Office has not yet determined an official cause of death, Orono police are not classifying Kari’s death as suspicious, and the Neznik family is convinced it was an accident.

John Neznik last saw his daughter the day she died. Kari worked at her family’s collision repair business in Crystal from the time she was 15, and her father says that Friday was no different than the countless other workdays they spent together.

“You know how in elementary school they have Take Your Child to Work Day? Well, I took my kid to work with me for 25 years,” he said. “I lost a daughter, a partner and a friend. I spent 50 hours a week with her. Some people have kids, they grow up, move away and get their own life. We were closer than normal, and it makes this doubly devastating.”

Police found small amounts of both cocaine and marijuana inside Kari’s apartment during their process of collecting evidence. John says he was “surprised” to hear that but stressed he didn’t believe drugs played a factor in Kari’s death.

“I wasn’t aware of it,” John said. “Standing there with the detective on Saturday morning, I don’t believe that had impaired her judgment or anything like that. Both of us looked over and said, ‘yeah, it (climbing down) would be a viable option.’”

John says he never noticed any signs of chemical dependence in his daughter, saying she successfully managed a shop of dozens of employees and was among the sharpest and most engaged managers he's ever known.

“It doesn’t matter, and I don’t care,” he said. “It’s like a car accident where one of the drivers had alcohol in their blood—that accident might have happened anyway. Not always is that a contributing factor, and I don’t think it was a big contributing factor here. It wasn’t like they found tons of it. If you raid 10 houses you’d find something that wouldn’t look good. People’s privacy in their home is in their home.”

More than 400 people turned out for Kari Neznik’s visitation and funeral service—so many that mourners waited in line for more than an hour to talk to her parents, and the family ran out of pages in the guestbook.

“She had a personal network that blew me away,” John said. “She touched a lot of people.”

While the outpouring of well wishes and expressions of support and sympathy have been overwhelming in the two weeks since Kari’s accident, John says the family has struggled mightily coming to terms with Kari’s death. John went on to say he understands there was nothing he could have done to prevent Kari’s death. Still, a feeling of helplessness haunts him.

“It takes a strong marriage to get through this,” he said. “People come up to me and say ‘I can’t even imagine,’ and they can’t. There’s a certain amount of parental instinct to protect your young that I’m dealing with. People have it, grizzly bears have it, geese have it. You see the mama goose and the babies behind it—she protects them. That’s instinctive in everybody. So when something crosses that, it’s very hard to process it because we’re not built for it. We’re built to process our parents dying—most people get over it. But when you bury a child, you live with that grief for the rest of your life and take it to your grave.”

Click here to read Kari Neznik's obituary.