1 week in Salem, 3 deaths: Drug overdoses plateau locally, but pain of crisis persists. | Roanoke News

After her son’s death in October, Gillis created the memorial garden at her Salem home. On the porch, friends and family paint rocks that will rest at the base of the cross.

Friday would have been Charles “Sonny” Dillon’s 31st birthday.

Sonny was one of at least 82 people who died of a drug overdose in the Roanoke Valley last year, according to the Virginia Department of Health, which released preliminary data Monday. That’s the same number as 2017.

While fatal overdoses statewide fell in 2018 for the first time since 2012, deaths from the opioid crisis have hardly ended. And the heartache has far from subsided.

During one October week in Salem, at least three people died: Sonny Dillon on Oct. 2, Steve Wellington Sample the next day and Sean Gladden on Oct. 9. Each had fentanyl — an opioid 50 times more potent than heroin, with which it can be cut — in his system.

In the city of 25,000 people, two others died of overdoses in 2018, according to the department.

In Roanoke, 56 people died of drug overdoses, and 21 died in Roanoke County. Valleywide, opioids contributed to 87% of those deaths, and fentanyl specifically to about 41% of them.

Statewide, fentanyl remains the deadliest drug, contributing to 813 deaths, an increase of 5.6% from 2017. But some signs suggest that the opioid crisis has morphed, as non-opioid drugs flood the area.

In Virginia, cocaine overdoses increased 11.5% to 445 deaths, and fatal methamphetamine overdoses increased 44.3%, from 88 to 127 deaths. The department is still examining 30 cases statewide from last year.

Locally, officials see “fits and starts” of fatal overdoses, Dr. John Burton, chairman of emergency medicine for Carilion Clinic, told a panel on the opioid crisis in February.

“That’s largely because of supply, what’s in the supply on the streets and available to people who have addictions,” Burton said. “If we see a large surge of fentanyl in the supply, we’ll see a large surge of death.”

On Monday, Burton said he had been hopeful that overdose numbers would plateau and not increase. But he also cautioned that, like the drug supply, year-to-year data can prove fickle.

“When we say ‘plateau,’ one of the key things we’re saying is that’s still unacceptably dangerous levels of where our society should be.”

‘I knew it was coming’

Sonny Dillon got his nickname after a great-uncle, and he lived up to it.

“Just like a ray of sunshine, he was,” Sarah White, his girlfriend, recalled.

They met at a music festival 10 years ago. Sonny loved reggae and ska. He had the sun logo of the band Sublime tattooed on his arm. Gillis got a similar tattoo, with the date of Sonny’s birth.

At his memorial, a friend played a Sublime song on a speaker and Gillis began to sway. Mother and son traveled to see concerts in Baltimore, Atlanta. Slightly Stoopid, The Movement, Stick Figure.

“It didn’t matter that it was his mom,” Cheryl Gravely, Gillis’ sister, said. “That was his thing. They did everything together. … Always grinning, laughing, cutting up.”

Addiction took hold after high school. Heroin became his god.

“I didn’t know how bad it was until I searched his room,” Gillis said. “Of course I would find syringes, then I’d get upset and say something to him or just be ugly to him, not knowing that he needed my help instead of getting mad like that. I just didn’t know. And a lot of people don’t know, and they need to know.”

Throughout his 20s, Sonny struggled with the disease of addiction, which led to various stints in jail and attempts at rehabilitation. The prospect of his death hung about like a specter.

“Two weeks before he died, actually, I dreamed that I cracked his door open and he was already dead,” Gillis said. “So I knew it was coming.”

Despite the pain Sonny caused, those who knew him never failed to mention his sweet disposition, his sunny outlook, how he was always smiling. To White, Sonny talked about his ambition, about wanting to go to school to be a pilot.

The last weekend in September, Sonny headed to Billy’s Barn, the restaurant and music venue in Salem. Friends had gathered to remember a man who had died. Gillis thinks he might have picked up heroin then.

He used again that Monday night, she said, after his Narcotics Anonymous meeting. On Tuesday, she noticed that his bedroom light was still on. He was supposed to be at work at the airport, fueling private jets.

She opened the door, and found him lying on the floor.

“So of course I was just freaking out, I was running back and forth and I thought, Oh, God, Narcan. Went and got it,” she recalled. “And I Narcanned him and of course the bubbles come out of his mouth. All it did was go in and come out. It didn’t, of course, go down.

“I called 911, they told me to do CPR but I knew. I knew he was dead, and I knew I would have tried anything at that time. So she was telling me how to do it and of course I was screaming, ‘Please. Just please open your eyes just for a second so I could see you.’ And he wouldn’t, of course.”

Later that day, a few miles away, Thomas Sample noticed that his brother Steve hadn’t come out of his neighboring home.

“I said, well, trash is tomorrow. He’s probably going to stay here just to deal with this bear, so whatever,” Sample recalled.

The week before, Sample had come across a bear in the yard, in Steve’s trash can. Sample’s dog would chase the beast a few feet then run back, the bear would do the same. Sample threw the bear some hot dogs.

“A little later Steve come in and said, ‘Why are you feeding the bear?’ ” Sample told him so it wouldn’t tear up his trash. Steve just shook his head, went back into his house. “I just left it like that,” Sample said.

The Samples came out of North Carolina. Grandad Amos fled north to the coalfields after he got in trouble with some white folks, the story goes. At 16, he started in the mines, where he met Grandma Cornelia.

In the ’40s, they moved to the outskirts of Salem and tended a 50-acre farm with trees of apples, cherries and peaches. In the ’70s, they sold the farm, and built three homes for their three daughters on a secluded plot of land. The Sample children grew up there, near what’s now the regional jail and Dixie Caverns.

Steve was the youngest of four brothers. After high school he moved to Richmond to attend Virginia Commonwealth University. He joined the Army and served in Germany.

While Thomas was in the Marines, Sample heard that Steve had come out as gay, and was discharged from the service in 1985 when he told his superiors.

Steve served as a deacon at Big Hill Baptist Church, where he had been baptized as a teenager. He traveled to the Balkans for missionary work. Friends describe him as a deeply caring man, somebody who listened to your problems and gave help to anyone who needed it.

Early the afternoon of Oct. 3, Steve’s co-workers from the Kroger distribution center came to his house. Sample got a key and opened the door.

Water was running. He found his brother on the floor of his bedroom. His death, at 55, was a result of methamphetamine and fentanyl. Sample and two of Steve’s friends said they had no idea he had ever used drugs.

“I just feel that if telling his story helps somebody else, then that’s good, you know,” Sample said. “Not just a selfish — that I want to get something out of his life — but just something positive for somebody else.”

Later, in an email, he said that if he’d known of his brother’s drug problem, he naturally would have done more.

A week after Sonny’s death, Chris Gladden found his son Sean, 36, in the unit behind his home where the younger man lived. For his family, the end came after a long, harrowing journey.

“Counselors told us this kind of heroin addiction, it’s rehab, jail and the funeral home,” Gladden said. “And that’s the process that we went through.”

Sean had an addictive personality, his father recalled, never able to do anything in moderation, whether it was going down the swimming pool slide as a kid, or collecting baseball cards, or eating, or making friends.

“As a parent, you stay terrified your whole life, I mean since he was 15 years old, whether he’s out and doesn’t come in at night or whatever else,” Gladden said.

“We knew what the situation was. You develop a very fatalistic outlook with a lot of hope that you’re wrong, but you’re not surprised. And it’s a daily thing. You don’t get a daily reprieve. You don’t from addiction, either. It’s been a rough time. It was a rough time for him, too.”

Sean shied from the spotlight. Playing basketball when younger, he liked to pass the ball to someone else to take the shot. Despite star pitching a little league game, he opted not to do so again, fearing the pressure.

“The heroin kind of spoke to his anxiety,” Gladden said.

The first day of eighth grade, he went to school in a Tiki Barber football jersey. Some football players started calling him Tiki and the nickname stuck.

“I know that must have mortified him the first week of school, and then it got to the point that he owned it,” Gladden said, “and that was part of his personality.”

While in the Roanoke County-Salem Jail on a possession charge, Sean got “Tiki” tattooed on his shoulder.

At first, Gladden said, he was reluctant to talk publicly. At 70, he was too physically and emotionally stressed, he said. He was also in the process of moving. In doing so, amid the boxes and boxes, he would come across photos of Sean and the sorrow would come back in waves.

But he wanted others to hear the toll addiction can take, and understand the patience required to fight it.

“If I can help one person, if I can help some parents understand a little bit more that it’s not something you can really point a finger at and say, ‘Well you should have just straightened up and not done it, flown straight or whatever.’ It’s not the way it works,” he said.

“I realized it’s just a long process. Might not take long to get there, but once you’re there, you’re in for a long haul.”