WILMINGTON — A year and a half ago, Cyndee Charlet’s son died from a heroin overdose. Now, as she talks about him, she slips in and out of the present tense. Things that happened many years ago seem immediate to her. And, though it might sound irrational, she’s still living with the fear that hounded her for almost a decade.
“The other day I was driving and I saw a man sitting in his car, he looked slumped over. I know what I was thinking, I know it. I know it’s crazy but I thought, ‘oh (expletive), it’s Joshua,’ and I slammed the car into park. I didn’t have a (naloxone) kit, but I ran over anyway, expecting the worst, and I get to the car window and the guy is fine, he’s just leaning over and reaching into the console,” Charlet said.
Joshua Daughtry, Charlet’s son, died in the early morning of Monday, Feb. 22, 2016. But for Charlet, he is still with her. In part, that’s because she has kept his memory alive – telling stories about him, saving pictures, even his music playlist. But in part, it’s because Daughtry’s death is part of larger epidemic that continues to kill people.
“It’s happening to mothers every day. Every (expletive) minute. It’s happening right now. It’s killing so many people and nothing’s being done,” Charlet said.
That’s why she’s telling her story now.
“I want Josh’s face to be seen, I want his voice to be heard, I want people to know him, I don’t want him to be another statistic, I don’t want him to be just another worthless junkie that needed to die,” Charlet said.
In the midst of an epidemic of opioid abuse, it can be all too easy to lose the individual among the dead. Activists, reporters and politicians are often forced to use numbers – statistics – to shock people into accepting the magnitude of the crisis. The approach can work, it may even be unavoidable, but this is not that kind of story – this is the story of Cyndee Charlet and her son Joshua: what happened, what could have been prevented, and what we can learn.
The downward spiral
The story of Joshua Daughtry’s descent into addiction is a familiar one and yet – in spite of its familiarity – parents like Cyndee Charlet can miss the warning signs.
When Daughtry was in elementary school he had been diagnosed with ADD, but medication allowed him to focus. At Laney High School, he earned good grades, played drums in the marching band and seemed happy. He never touched drugs, according to Charlet.
“I’ve always been very open with my son. Drug and alcohol abuse runs in our family, so I talked with him. I asked him not to smoke marijuana until he was out of high school,” Charlet said. “He actually used to get annoyed at all the kids who would get high at Laney.”
Toward the end of high school, Daughtry stopped taking his ADD medication, claiming he didn’t like the way he felt. After graduating, he began smoking marijuana. He also started using pain pills.
“Joshua had a hernia and it caused him a lot of pain, but it was also embarrassing to him. We couldn’t afford insurance, so I guess he was self-medicating,” Charlet said.
“Heroin was cheaper, and it was everywhere, and I guess now I know it doesn’t matter, the pain pills are the same (expletive), and it already had its hooks in him.”
Daughtry snuck opioid painkillers from family members and occasionally bought them from friends, until something changed.
“I had known about the pills. I was stupid, I guess – I thought, he’s not using needles, and it’s pharmaceutical, it’s clean,” Charlet said. “Then one day I remember he came home and he had a backpack with him. He set it down on the table and his needles fell out.”
According to Charlet, her son confessed he had injected heroin intermittently, trying to stave off addiction by going back to pain pills when he could find them.
“Heroin was cheaper, and it was everywhere, and I guess now I know it doesn’t matter, the pain pills are the same (expletive), and it already had its hooks in him,” she said.
On May 10, 2009, Daughtry overdosed for the first time. It was Mother’s Day. Charlet recalls it vividly:
“I found him, I was shaking and slapping him, and then he just came to, shouting ‘what the (expletive) mom,’ because apparently I hit like a man. But that was the beginning of the end, although it would take years before he died. It was the beginning of his downward spiral and mine. Mine because I couldn’t let him go, not out of my sight, I had to know where he was at all times. If he was in the bathroom for too long, I’d have to go check on him. I’d watch him as he slept to make sure he was breathing,” Charlet said.
Daughtry was 23 when his mother had to resuscitate him for the first time. Over the next seven years, Charlet’s son would overdose seven times. And, seven times, Charlet was there to resuscitate him. She asked her son what the drug was like, hoping to understand its hold on him.
“’Mom,’ he said, ‘it’s better than sex, it feels like you’re wrapped in a warm soft blanket of fuzzy love, that’s all it is, just total fuzzy love. I thought, (expletive), if I’d have tried I would have stayed right there in that warm blanket. It sounded amazing. But it destroyed him. I used to watch him cry and cry and cry. He’d apologize – be on the floor sobbing like a child, apologizing for being a disappointment, and for hurting me. He tried so hard, he tried so many times. I nursed him through it, the vomiting, the dope sickness. It’s not a pretty sight, when it’s your child and you can’t do anything to take away the pain,” Charlet said.
After the eighth time he overdosed, Daughtry died. But in the years between he fought to get and stay clean, although he rarely made it past the 90-day mark.
Enabling: “I would rather he die in my house.”
Charlet is proud of the open relationship she had with her son. But eventually, she realized it was enabling his addiction.
“I’ve been told that we have a very weird and almost unhealthy relationship. And I said, ‘why, because I’m open with my son and we can talk about anything?’ It took time to see that part of our relationship was me enabling him. And people have blamed me – blamed me for his death, because I let him live with me, or gave him money. That’s hard,” Charlet said.
According to Charlet, she wanted to keep her son under her roof. Without the tools to help him fight his addiction – or the money to afford treatment – she thought keeping her son close was her best option.
For years, Charlet said she felt like she was doing the right thing; as she put it, “I knew he would either get clean or die, and I thought, I would rather he die in my house.”
Then, another overdose brought things into perspective for Charlet.
“He went to McDonald’s and, he’d been clean for a while, so I wasn’t stressed out. He went up to the bathroom. I heard a thump and it didn’t connect. Some time passed and my mom said, ‘did you hear that noise,’ and as soon as she said it, I jumped up and I ran to the bathroom,” Charlet recalled.
“The door’s locked and I run to the kitchen to get a toothpick because my mom’s got an old house with the locks you can pick. I’m screaming at my mom, ‘call 911’ and she’s saying, ‘what are you doing, how do you know how to pick the lock?’ And I shout back, ‘I grew up here, I know how to unlock the doors.’”
As Charlet told the this part of story, she laughed. Then she got quiet for a moment.
“Josh was on the floor and he was seized up and the needle was still in his arm. And I yanked it out and it was crooked and I was so mad I just threw it out the bathroom door. My mom’s crying in the hallway and I’m trying to move his arms so I can do CPR. I’m trying to get my mom to go, ‘mom, you don’t need to see this.’ Because he was dead. Joshua was dead that night. He was blue,” Charlet said.
He had apparently ingested several bags of heroin, possibly out of fear of being arrested. A New Hanover County Sheriff’s deputy arrived on the scene after 911 was called.
“A sheriff came in first. Stepped over my son to look in the toilet full of (expletive) and heroin bags and then asked me where the needle was because he was going to arrest my son. Well, I cussed this man out. Fortunately the EMTs arrived a moment later. I would have been arrested if they hadn’t shown up right then,” she said.
The EMTs resuscitated Daughtry and left. Charlet was angry at the Sheriff’s deputy, but later she reassessed the situation.
“Afterwards, when everything had calmed down, I realized, ‘I had given him the money. I had given him the keys,’” Charlet said.
Afterwards, Charlet cracked down the best she could. She refused to give her son money, but she still bought him food. Daughtry stole from family members – including running up thousands of dollars on Charlet’s mother’s credit card – and Charlet encouraged them to press charges. Still, she did not kick him out.
“I couldn’t. We were stuck. Because I love him. It just ground on,” Charlet said.
Treatment: do no harm?
After six years of getting clean and relapsing, both Charlet and Daughtry were exhausted. In September 2015, Daughtry went cold turkey. Charlet nursed him through the withdrawal. Charlet still couldn’t afford her own insurance, but she’d managed to get a policy for Daughtry. Then they set about looking for a treatment plan.
The process took time, Charlet made arrangements for her son at the Walter B. Jones facility, several hours away in Greenville. He would go through intake at New Hanover Regional Medical Center.
But there was a bizarre caveat: Daughtry would have to have heroin in his system to be admitted.
(Officials at Walter B. Jones declined to discuss individual patients, but Cobey Cutton, a spokesperson for the state’s Department of Health and Human Services said limited bed-space at the Walter B. Jones facility means prioritizing the “most in need patients.”)
Charlet said she was shocked at the idea, but wanted her son in rehab.
“Josh stayed inside, in my house, and barely went anywhere, from September to December 18th. But the only way he could get into rehab was to have dope in his system, even though he’d been clean since September. He told me, ‘this is really wrong that I gotta use to get help.’ But what could we do? So, I gave him 20 dollars. I said, ‘okay, you go and you get a bag, and you bring it back here, and you snort it. And then we’ll go to the hospital.
“He said, ‘this is really weird mom,’ and I told him, ‘it’s weirder for me, believe me.’”
Daughtry spent two days at NHRMC and then transferred to Walter B. Jones. But he didn’t stay long. According to Charlet, officials at the facility decided Daughtry’s hernia was an insurance risk and asked him to leave.
In an email about the event, DHHS spokesperson Cutton wrote: “While Walter B. Jones Alcohol and Drug Abuse Treatment Center can manage patients with high acuity medical and psychiatric conditions, there are certain acute medical conditions that may warrant a higher level of care. Insurance is not a factor when a patient is admitted or discharged.”
Cutton declined to answer questions about Daughtry specifically or what happens to patients that “warrant a higher level of care.”
Charlet said her son returned home angry but determined.
“He was pissed, he said, ‘I can’t even (expletive) get help,’ but he said he wanted to stay clean,” Charlet said.
Less than two months later, Daughtry was dead.
Speaker for the dead
Charlet said that once her son was kicked out of Walter B. Jones she feared he’d relapse again. But things were looking up: Daughtry’s insurance provider agreed to schedule a surgery to correct his hernia. Daughtry had been clean for months. He was nervous about the pain medication he’d need for recovery from surgery, but was excited to fix the hernia that had caused him pain for a decade.
But something went wrong, and on Sunday, Feb. 21, Charlet spoke to her son for the last time.
“My last words to him were ‘I love you, goodnight, I’ll see you tomorrow. He woke me up, it was a Sunday night, the 21st of February, Sunday was our ‘Walking Dead’ date, we always watched ‘Walking Dead’ together. We hung out. Everything was fine. He had about 90 days under his belt. His hernia surgery was scheduled for two weeks.
“And I went to bed and he stayed up. Sometime in the morning, between midnight and seven, apparently that’s when he died, at seven, but at some point before that he came into my room and woke me up and said, ‘I just want to tell you goodnight, sleep sweet.’ That was our thing, ‘sleep sweet.’ So he said, ‘ sleep sweet I’ll see you tomorrow.’”
The next morning, Charlet found her son dead.
“I found Joshua in the bathroom. Everyone says, ‘oh my god.’ But I’d rather. I’m glad. As opposed to him being somewhere and no one find him. I got to stay there with him. It took about two three hours before they removed the body – which pissed me off, I flipped out when they called it the body. I screamed at them ‘it’s not a body it’s my son,’” Charlet recalled.
Charlet stayed with her son throughout the morning.
“It took about three hours before they moved the body out into the hallway,” Charlet said. “I just laid there with him. I took the sheet off of him. I rubbed his unruly beard that I use to bitch about – ‘just clean that up a little bit,’ because he had this big giant man beard – you know. I laid my head on his cold still quiet chest.”
A year and half later, Charlet wants people to learn from her loss.
She said, “It’s a long lonely road being the parent of an addict, nobody wants to hear you, nobody wants to listen to you cry and sob, it makes them uncomfortable, too uncomfortable. So you have to go it alone. And that’s the hardest part. But I have to speak for my son, because my son has no tongue. I have to be his Lorax.
“It’s hard to watch your child die in front of you. It’s hard to watch the light go out in his eyes,” she said. “At least with Joshua he didn’t lose his looks. His face didn’t’ become all pocked and scarred. No, he was beautiful – beautiful. I would have taken his addiction into my body if that would have saved him. But I couldn’t. I would have sold my soul.”
Charlet said she learned later from Daughtry’s friends that he had a voracious appetite for heroin, injecting larger doses than anyone else. Still, she said she would never be completely sure what killed her son: underlying depression, a broken relationship with his biological father, a family history of substance abuse. Nature, nurture, or something in between – Charlet could not say. But she is sure her son did not have to die.
What could have stopped this?
Charlet believes education is the most important thing. Her lack of understanding of the dangers of prescription pills prevented her from intervening early on.
“I wish I’d known more,” she said. “I know a lot of families are getting blind-sided by this. And I think kids get blind-sided by this. We’ve got students getting high in closets at Laney. Kids. If we’re not educating them, and educating them early, that’s just dangerous.”
Charlet also thinks law enforcement should take a more direct role in getting users into treatment. While District Attorney Ben David has been a vocal proponent of decriminalizing heroin possession and deferring prosecution for small amounts, law enforcement officers still have limited options when it comes to heroin arrests (you can read more about that here).
Charlet said the City of Wilmington’s LEAD program, which redirects arrested drug users into treatment, could have saved her son’s life if it had been countywide. New Hanover County Sheriff’s Office did not comment on the incident of Daughtry’s overdose, but when asked if the office had a policy on heroin, spokesman Lieutenant Jerry Brewer said, “We don’t have a policy on heroin. It’s an illegal drug. So, we arrest people for it.”
Lastly, Charlet hopes health care for mental health and substance abuse will improve. Under proposed guidelines for the new American Health Care Act, Charlet would not have been able to afford insurance for her son, let alone herself. She hopes that stories like hers will help change the current trends in managed healthcare.
“It took us so long to get Joshua into a facility,” she said. “There just aren’t enough resources. I get it, people don’t want to pay for stuff. But, so many people are dying, I just don’t understand why nothing is being done.”
For more about the opioid epidemic in the Cape Fear region, including efforts to address it, check out our series here.
Send comments and tips to Benjamin Schachtman at ben@localvoicemedia.com, @pcdben on Twitter, and (910) 538-2001.
