Eau Claire mom’s overdose death leaves family devastated | Front Page

Melanie assured her worried parents she was getting help and had everything under control.

A month later, while enjoying a weekend getaway to Bayfield, the Eau Claire couple received a middle-of-the-night phone call from a police officer informing them Melanie was being treated for an opioid overdose.

Melanie’s five children stayed with their grandparents for about two months while Melanie sought treatment and attempted to get her life in order.

As far as Rich and Janice knew, their beloved daughter was on the road to recovery until they got the call Dec. 3 that family members of people struggling with addiction dread most: Melanie had overdosed again, and this time there would be no recovery.

Their witty, vibrant daughter, a former softball and volleyball player at Regis, died of an apparent opioid overdose that night — becoming another statistic in the epidemic that claimed the lives of 7,505 Wisconsinites from 2000 through 2017.

The alert came from 10-year-old Lily Ruhe, Melanie’s second-oldest child, who called to inform her grandparents and her dad that she couldn’t wake up her mom.

Richard and Janice raced the few blocks to Melanie’s house, arriving about 10:30 p.m. — just 45 minutes after her last Facebook post and a couple hours after a phone chat with Janice about snow boots for the kids.

“We both knew she was gone,” said Janice, who called 911 as Rich desperately performed CPR in hopes that, somehow, he could bring his daughter back.

Five-year-old Jayla Goss, Melanie’s middle child who had been sleeping in her mom’s room, reported that Melanie suddenly slumped down in her chair and then fell to the floor. Melanie’s two youngest children, Carter Goss, 3, and Cashton Goss, 2, slept upstairs as police and ambulance personnel responded.

Two months later, Rich and Janice said they got a death certificate showing that Melanie had a mix of heroin and the synthetic opioid fentanyl in her system when she died.

Fentanyl, which is 50 times more potent than heroin, is at the center of the latest and perhaps deadliest wave of the opioid epidemic, as officials say many users aren’t aware that suppliers have cut fentanyl into their drugs.

Sgt. Andy Falk, an Eau Claire police officer and supervisor of the West Central Drug Task Force, confirmed that the increasing presence of fentanyl in the past few years represents the biggest shift in the Chippewa Valley’s opioid world.

“It’s absolutely making it more dangerous,” Falk said. “Heroin dealers are selling it as heroin. It’s normally cut down to be similar in potency to heroin, but if they screw that up, that’s where we see more of these overdose deaths.”

Fentanyl’s potency is well known, even in the drug world. Falk said local undercover drug agents making a buy occasionally receive a warning from dealers: “Be careful with this stuff. It’s really powerful.”

Major sources of the synthetic drug reaching the region are China, Mexican drug traffickers and the dark web, making it challenging for law enforcement to prevent its distribution, he added.

Fentanyl was implicated in slightly more than half of the 916 opioid overdose deaths statewide in 2017, according to data from the state Department of Health Services.

Eau Claire County Sheriff Ron Cramer agreed that opioids, and fentanyl in particular, are becoming a bigger problem in the area.

“Unfortunately, opioids are pretty prevalent now in the Chippewa Valley,” Cramer said. “Four years ago I would have said meth, meth, meth, but now we’re starting to see more people using and experimenting with opioids, and that is leading to more deaths from opioids and fentanyl.”

While methamphetamine remains the biggest drug-related threat to quality of life in the Chippewa Valley because of the frequency that users resort to property crimes to support their habit, Falk said, opioid abuse presents a greater threat to life itself.

“Opioids absolutely lead to more deaths,” Falk said.

In Eau Claire, Chippewa and Dunn counties, 128 people died of opioid overdoses from 2000 through 2017, including 12 in 2017 alone, the DHS statistics show.

The death toll could be far worse if not for the availability of the overdose reversal medication naloxone, which Falk estimated is administered daily by emergency responders in west-central Wisconsin.

In just Eau Claire and the 13 surrounding municipalities that receive emergency medical service from the Eau Claire Fire Department, responders administered 27 doses of naloxone in the first three months of this year, a rate nearly double 2017, when crews gave 57 doses the entire year.

“We have noticed a definite uptick in the number of overdose incidents,” said Jon Schultz, deputy chief of operations and EMS.

The Eau Claire Fire Department responded to 42 overdoses in the first quarter of 2019 after responding to 157 in 2018 and 156 in 2017, Schultz said, adding that overdoses now are among the area’s top five causes of emergency medical calls.

Those numbers likely don’t account for all local drug overdoses because some overdose victims are taken directly to a hospital without anyone ever calling law enforcement, Cramer pointed out.

The opioid crisis affects all 72 counties in Wisconsin, said Mark O’Connell, executive director of the Wisconsin Counties Association.

“As I talk to social workers from all over the state, they say opioid abuse is their No. 1 problem,” O’Connell said. “It’s pervasive.”

Despite the extent of the opioid problem, Wisconsin ranked just 25th among U.S. states in 2017 with a rate of 21.2 drug overdose deaths per 100,000 residents, which was slightly below the national rate of 21.7 and less than half the 57.8 rate posted by No. 1 West Virginia.

Following Melanie’s October 2017 overdose, the Whites helped out more with the grandkids and provided more meals to make life a little easier for their daughter, who had her hands full as a single mother running a household with five children.

Lily alerted her grandparents to one more relapse in 2018. In that instance, Rich rushed to Melanie’s house and found her collapsed on the kitchen floor. Fearing she was dead, Rich shook his daughter and was relieved when she popped up and immediately headed for her computer to perform a task for her job.

Even after that scare, Rich and Janice remained optimistic. They believed Melanie, a 2011 graduate of UW-Eau Claire, got back on a positive path.

She was holding down a full-time professional job she loved, shedding a few pounds, looking healthier and appearing proud of herself for successfully juggling all the things going on in her life.

“Things were looking up as far as we were concerned,” Rich said, fighting back tears while talking about his daughter. “We thought she was on the road to recovery.”

Melanie’s death leaves a trail of unanswered questions about how her addiction started, what she took, what steps she took to try to beat her addiction, what happened that last night.

But Janice has no doubt that Melanie’s death was an accident.

“I know it wasn’t suicide,” Janice said. “I know she didn’t want to do this. She didn’t want to leave five children. She didn’t want to die.”

As the family wrote in Melanie’s obituary, her children were the love of her life: “They meant the world to her. She meant the world to them.”

And now all of their lives are forever changed. The two oldest children are living with their father, and Rich and Janice have assumed guardianship of the other three.

Asked recently when she most misses her mom, Lily responded, “All the time,” adding that she thinks about her mom every day when she gazes at the portrait of the two of them she keeps in her bedroom.

Evidence of the shift from a grandparenting to a parenting role abounds throughout the East Side Hill home of Rich, 62, and Janice, 59. Their former TV room is now a bedroom for two energetic preschool boys. A virtual rainbow of colored sippy cups line the window sill above their kitchen sink. Tiny shoes sit neatly on a carpet by the front door, with an assortment of kids’ coats hanging on hooks nearby.

“We didn’t really have any time to grieve,” Janice said, noting that little things constantly remind her of Melanie. “I really, really miss her on so many levels.”

The Whites expressed frustration that so many Americans are tormented by opioids and yet it seems so little progress has been made in solving the problem.

“Helplessness” is the word Rich used to describe how he feels about the opioid crisis.

Still, the family was open about Melanie’s struggle with opioids in her obituary in hopes of reducing the stigma surrounding addiction.

“We wanted the world to know she was a beautiful girl who had many, many talents and this still happened to her,” Janice said.

The obituary summed up the despair that so often follows opioid overdose deaths.

“Unfortunately, when you lose someone so young in such a senseless way, there is no neat and tidy phrase to which we can find comfort,” the family wrote. “She left us too early. Addiction ravages, and in its wake, it leaves behind a devastated network of family and friends left to pick up the pieces.”