My brother Todd died on 2 February with a syringe under his body and an empty baggie on the floor beside him.
A week later, I visited the homeless shelter where he spent a few of his final nights and spoke to the friend who found his body. I came looking for answers. I wanted to understand why he died, and why my efforts to help him failed. I wasn’t prepared for what I found.
Todd and I both grew up in the western suburbs of Philadelphia. We were half brothers and shared the same mother. He was always the wild child of the family. He never took well to authority and got in trouble in school. He wore his hair long and had a tendency to appear in his photos with his shirt off.
Todd was more than a decade older than me, so I only really got to know him as a teenager, when we worked together in long shifts doing snow removal.
Those were long, cold nights of 12-16 hours of shoveling and plowing in corporate lots. We spent a lot of time in his pickup truck listening to classic rock and talking about the Philadelphia Eagles, who were a continual source of frustration and misplaced hope.
Later, I moved away for college and rarely came back. I did life stuff – marriage, kid, divorce, career. I wasn’t the only one. Chris, Todd’s full younger brother, got married too, and bought a house. Todd, however, seemed stuck – caught in a cycle of seasonal unemployment from landscaping, stalled plans and constant struggles with addiction.
Last June, I got a call from a nurse at a treatment center where Todd had apparently checked himself in. She said he was there for heroin.
I had always known Todd to be an alcoholic; in my 20s, I had tried to confront him about it somewhat clumsily and it created a rift between us that lasted for years. I told the nurse I thought he had been sober since he got out of rehab for an addiction to opiate painkillers, which he was introduced to via a doctor’s prescription after he sliced off part of his finger during a work accident.
I saw the nurse’s call as a chance to make up for lost time and I quickly became Todd’s long-distance support hotline – his coach, cheerleader and professional nagger.
Todd and I talked every few days while he was in rehab. When he left, he went to a halfway house called Recovery Town, where he stayed from the end of June through January, with one relapse sending him briefly back to rehab in August.
He had only stayed at the homeless shelter for a few days the week before he died, so I thought if I was going to understand why Todd didn’t make it, retracing what happened at Recovery Town would be key.
“When he came in, he was shaking. His hands were shaking. His jaw was trembling,” George Beatty, Recovery Town’s owner told me. “Todd was clearly ridden with anxiety and was not in a very good place. It seemed like he had been in this cocoon of drinking and using drugs for awhile.”
I met Beatty at a dinner next to the courthouse in Media, Paennsylvania, the seat of Delaware County which that has has been hit hard by the heroin epidemic. Beatty grew up middle class, with a public defender mother and a father who worked in IT for a bank. But like most halfway house operators, he speaks from experience when he talks about addiction.
Beatty was reluctant to speak to me when I first reached out. He had kicked Todd out of Recovery Town when Todd broke the rule about staying out three nights in a row, and he thought I might blame him for his death. The fact that I was a reporter also made him a little weary.
“One action by me not being a little bit more loving can kill somebody,” he said later. “I feel a little responsible ... I was letting people break rules and didn’t want to kick them out because I know how easy it is to die.”
I didn’t blame Beatty.
Todd had liked rehab; he felt safe there. He even started to pick up things like yoga and meditation, which was entirely out of character but wonderful to hear. At first, he bridled at all the rules of Recovery Town but eventually adapted, attending group meetings and landing odd landscaping jobs.
He complained less when we talked, and started to think more about his future. He also started to adopt to my tendency to use texting acronyms. At 51 years old, Todd learned to type “LOL,” on his phone for the first time and got a kick out of it.
But this is where things start to fall apart.
•••
The guy who had been giving Todd steady landscaping jobs told him that business was slowing down and he didn’t need him anymore. Todd was devastated. He texted me saying he was having anxiety attacks all night and couldn’t sleep. He tried to apply for other jobs, but he grew frustrated and impatient with the online application process. The computers at the library kept freezing up, he would say.
He started isolating himself again, spending hours in his room at Recovery Town. It was around this time that Todd texted me saying, “I feel the world has turned its back on me.”
His roommate, Frankie Hamilton, knew something was wrong. “Emotionally, he was in a lot of pain, he was hiding from something,” Hamilton told me.
Things turned worse. Todd left food on his bed and dirty plates overturned on the floor. He stopped showering regularly, and his clothes weren’t always clean.
Todd and I argued a lot during this period. He talked to me about finding a therapist, but insisted it had to be his old therapist, and I couldn’t find her contact information anywhere. My father was paying his rent at Recovery Town, and I had just paid his phone bill. Sometimes Todd was grateful; other times he lashed out. He wanted me to give him the phone numbers of other relatives so he could ask for money, but I refused. Between having my own less-than-secure journalism job and a six-year-old daughter in kindergarten, I already had a lot on my plate. I knew I was in over my head.
I thought the one thing I could do was remind him that he had a family, so I made a video of my daughter Cecilia saying “Hi, Todd.” Todd had never met my daughter – and I wanted to correct that. I thought the video would be a good start.
He texted back, saying “Thanks. Needed that, tell her I said hello.”
I always knew Todd as an addict, but there were moments when he wasn’t in that cocoon of drinking and drugs, when it seemed like he was on the verge of starting his own business, like he’d always dreamed. But something would always go wrong. A job would fall through, or somebody, somewhere screwed him over. These little disappointments hit Todd harder than the average person because they just reconfirmed his own sense of self-loathing, and his tendency to think he was destined to fail. That is when he would go back to the drugs.
That first night out of Recovery Town, Todd didn’t it make it to the shelter – Safe Harbor in downtown West Chester – by their 6pm check-in time, so he spent the night at a friend’s house and then slept in his pickup truck in a church parking lot.
He texted me that morning.
That night, the shelter staff took what I believe to be the last photo of him, on 27 January. I winced when I saw it. I hadn’t seen him for about a year, since our mother’s funeral. His trademark smirk was gone, replaced by a vacant, thousand-yard stare. Chris, my other brother, saw Todd around that same time, and told me he didn’t know how to help him either. He gave Todd a WaWa gift card and some cash.
A few days after that photo was taken, Todd would no-show at the shelter, opting instead to spend the night at a friend’s house. A few days after that, he was dead.
I set out to meet Mike Henry, the person who found his body. At 54, he had known Todd since he was about 12. They went to high school together, worked together and sometimes did drugs together. I figured if anybody understood Todd, he did, and he could help me fill in the blank of his final three days.
We talked in the parking lot, reminiscing about Todd and going over what had happened in the final weeks. I rolled down the window of my rental car so Henry could smoke while he talked.
Henry said he knew Todd had been using pills for years, but that the heroin problem had developed more recently. He even had a nickname for the dealer Todd got his Percocet/oxycodone pills from.
“I called her Queen Bee. She called him on the phone and she’d always be ragging him because he was always running late, or didn’t show up the first time.”
Once Todd got through rehab, Henry said he tried to help him look for jobs. One day, he sat him down, gave him a haircut, and made him shave.
“He seemed pretty motivated, then this last past few weeks he was just out of it, and I was like, dude, what the fuck is going on? Look at you,” he said.
Todd stayed at his place a few days. He spent most of his time sleeping downstairs. Henry was starting to get worried. A few days later, he found Todd passed out in a chair when he got home from work. Todd’s fingertips were blue and he wasn’t breathing.
When paramedics arrived, they pronounced him dead at the scene.
Henry said he didn’t notice the syringe, or the baggie, but that the cops told him about it when they interviewed him. He also realized that his brother, who lives in the same house, was missing 18 Valium pills. He thought maybe Todd had taken them. “That sneaky bastard,” he said.
Like Beatty, and myself, he wished he could have done more.
“He was generally a good person. In the party game, in the drug game, most of the people are slimy motherfuckers. Todd wasn’t that way. To me he was a true friend.”
The night before I left Philly, Beatty offered to take me around West Kensington, which is a neighborhood in Philadelphia where a lot of white suburbanites like Todd go to buy heroin. I wanted to see the place with my own eyes.
West Kensington is a Puerto Rican and African American neighborhood with a history of police and gang violence. A section of it is in a notoriously violent area called the Badlands. The heroin trade has shaped this community for decades. It’s not lost on Beatty that while the heroin epidemic is getting more attention now, it wasn’t so high on the priority list when areas such as Kensington were bearing the brunt of it.
“Honestly, the heroin epidemic is only a problem because there are fucking white people dying. I know that sounds awful but that’s really the truth. There are a bunch of lower middle-class white people in Delaware County that are dying and that’s why it’s a problem. People in the ghettos, or in Chester or in North Philly, this has been happening for years, and it was like, meh. Not that big of a deal. That’s the fucking truth and that’s a major issue.”
Now gentrification is beginning to creep its way into the southern end of the Kensington area. We headed over to Somerset Street, which the Daily Beast called a “Cop-Free Heroin Zone” in 2011. Beatty pointed out who he thought the dealers were at one corner. “Notice the heavy lean, and how he tries to make eye contact,” he said. A young man on a lowrider bicycle pedaled in front of us, and then slowed, positioning himself near the window for a moment before Beatty touched the pedal and we speed by.
Our destination was The Last Stop, a free recovery house on Kensington Avenue that was holding a Narcotics Anonymous meeting. He wanted me to see what it was like. One of my biggest regrets was having never made it to a Nar-Anon, which is like AA/NA but for family members of addicts.
I got coffee in a styrofoam cup and sat down on a wooden bench in the back while someone shared their story from the microphone at the front of the room. The word “anonymous” isn’t a joke, so I didn’t record any of it, but I can say that if you are looking for a shining example of racial integration in the Philadelphia area, an NA meeting at The Last Stop in Kensington would be a good place to start.
Death was a common theme in many of the stories. It reminded me that Frankie Hamilton, Todd’s roommate at Recovery Town, said that he knew 12 people who had died in the past year, many of them “kids”, or young adults in their teens and 20s.
That is increasingly true: heroin use among Americans 18-25 increased 109% between 2002 and 2013 – just over a decade – according to a study by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Hamilton attributed the recent rash of deaths to the new trend of cutting heroin with fentanyl, a more powerful and lethal concoction. “Look around this room,” one young man said. “In a year from now, one of us is going to be dead.”
As we drove home, I was struggling to figure out what I had learned from all this and thought back to the night when I found out Todd died. I was wracked with guilt and regret. After meeting a friend in a bar, I spent an hour wandering around a park right after a snowstorm.
I wished I hadn’t argued with him so much. That my words had been gentler. I couldn’t remember the last time I had told him I loved him. I had pushed him too hard. I wasn’t patient enough.
But while I still believed all that to be true, the survivor’s guilt had faded now. I tried. Beatty tried. Henry tried. Chris tried. Even Frankie Hamilton tried.
Todd tried, too.
When he died, he left behind a few changes of clothes, some blankets, and his pickup truck. It was full of trash when I went through it – discarded Gatorade bottles, an empty bag of Doritos, a Kit Kat bar. But, behind the front seat, there were photocopies of a book about addiction. The first page I grabbed was titled “controlling cravings”. It was part of a chapter called “phase one, saving your life”.
When Chris cleaned out the truck a few days later, he found another telling artifact: empty syringe wrappers.
I asked Beatty what he thought the larger meaning of this story would be.
“There is no magic bullet. Nothing really is going to stop it,” he said. “More than likely, this will fall on deaf ears and there is no meaning.”
Then he asked me a question.
“Was Todd related to any politicians or uber wealthy people that like actually make a difference for things?”
“No,” I said.
“Is Todd just another guy that died of a heroin overdose in Philadelphia?”
I didn’t need to answer.
“So, that’s the meaning,” he said. “Another check on the board.”
