When Jerome Dixon and his wife divorced, their daughter, Reanna, went with her father. "My dad was a good father, he tried his hardest to make me happy and make sure I had what I needed for school and home," Reanna, now 18, wrote in an email to The Palm Beach Post.

Even battling drug addiction, Jerome took time to cook. "I remember him bringing food to my classes in elementary school so that everyone can eat a home-cooked meal in my class instead of cafeteria food," she wrote. He also learned to fly a plane and, wrote his daughter, "even flew John Kerry once!"

He lived in the Jupiter-Tequesta area and worked for the cable company and his own home-security business. But "what I think is most important," Reanna wrote, "was that he was the biggest goofball ever. He could make anyone laugh with his jokes and the silly things he said or did."

Despite several rehab stints, he could not shake a drug habit that began with painkillers, she said. Jerome died in a Lake Clarke Shores sober home a week after he checked in, police reported.

Reanna's email concluded: "He wasn't the best father in the world but I can say that I knew he loved me with all his heart and it probably tore him apart that he couldn't be there for me like he wanted to. Drug abuse is a huge problem and these people who go to rehab, jail, and halfway houses are real people just like us and it doesn't make them bad people."

Jerome was 47.