13 Dec ‘I had to see my son be put in a body bag.’ Frankfort mom shows 8th-graders the heartbreaking aftermath of heroin overdose.
Alex White took his first steps at 10 months old.
Once he could walk, he ran. Once he could run, he climbed. The neighbors used to call his parents and say, “Did you know Al’s on the roof again?”
“From the time he was little,” his mom, Kim White, said, “I knew it would take every ounce of my being to keep this beautiful, high-spirited young man alive.”
He was a hugger.
“Never a handshake, always a hug,” his friend Austin Zenere said. Alex and Austin met in first grade. They played travel baseball together. “And it wasn’t a quick hug. He made sure to hold it.”
Alex wouldn’t abide teasing.
Kids were harassing another boy on the school bus when Alex was in fourth grade — stealing his hat, passing it around. The boy’s mom called Alex’s mom that night to thank her. Alex had shut down the teasing and returned her son’s hat.
“He was the type of guy who 100 percent wouldn’t do anything malicious,” his friend Adam Meyers said. “He was never going to join in on poking fun.”
He was loving.
Even in front of his football-playing, weight-lifting teenage friends, he always reminded his mom, “I love you.” For her birthday one year, he wrote her a poem:
You’ve been at my side since I was small enough to hold.
I can see why you’re never cold.
When you have a Heart full of Gold.
Your son will Always Be here to watch
You grow old.
Love, Al
He was fragile, like all kids. But maybe a little more so.
“He took things a little harder than most people,” his younger sister, Kelly White, said. “Even simple things like a breakup. It was harder for him to get through that stuff than other people. Even as a little kid, he was very, very sensitive.”
Kim White wonders if her son’s beautiful, breakable heart is what killed him.
‘A bit fragile’
Alex died of a heroin overdose at age 23. It was five years ago in August.
Since then, his mom has been on a mission to keep her firstborn son’s story alive and true, serving as a cautionary tale about the way opioids sneak into a family and wholly ravage it.
“I have found, through talking to other moms in my situation, that most of the young people that fall into substance use are extremely sensitive and a bit fragile,” Kim White said. “They could be really tough on the outside, but inside, not so much.”
Alex grew up in south suburban Frankfort, in Will County, where the coroner’s office recorded 85 deaths related to heroin and the synthetic opioid fentanyl in 2017, up from 78 the previous year.
Opioid overdose deaths in Illinois increased 82 percent between 2013 and 2016, according to Illinois Department of Public Health data. In 2016, the state saw 1,946 opioid overdose fatalities, twice the number of fatal motor vehicle accidents and one and a half times the number of homicides.
Nationally, more than 72,000 people died from drug overdoses in 2017, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data, and more than three out of five drug overdose deaths involved an opioid.
“Almost 200 people lost their lives to drug overdoses every day last year,” Kim White said. “That’s like if a plane crashed out of the sky every single day. That’s how many people are dying.
“Don’t you think we should be talking about that?”
‘The pain never leaves’
Kim White talks about it with eighth-graders. Hundreds of them at a time.
She goes to middle school health classes in Frankfort and nearby Manhattan, Mokena and Orland Park and tells them the story of Alex — the story of a kid who grew up a lot like they did, a kid who played on or against their teams, a kid whose family will never recover, not really, from his absence.
“The pain never leaves,” Alex’s dad, Bob White, said. “We lost Al over five years ago, and I remember the day as if it were 5 minutes ago.”
Kim White started emailing middle school principals in 2016, three years after Alex died. “I tell them, ‘I lost my son. This is an epidemic, and it’s not going away.’”
Several schools ignored her or turned her down. But Hickory Creek Middle School, where Alex and his younger siblings, Kelly and Jake, attended, invited her to speak.
“First I thought, ‘I can’t do this,’” Kim White said. “‘I’m just going to stand up there and cry.’”
For moral support, she brought her friend Kathy Dyer, whose son Billy died of a heroin overdose eight months after Alex died. Billy was a year older than Alex. He also went to Hickory Creek.
She got through that first presentation and emailed more schools. She learned to contact the health teachers directly. They almost always said yes.
In 2017, retired Chicago police Officer John Roberts started joining her. Roberts is the co-founder of Heroin Epidemic Relief Organization (HERO), a foundation he helped launch after his own son Billy died from a heroin overdose in 2009. He started telling Billy’s story to the students, and Dyer started telling her Billy’s story as well.
Kim White estimates they will have talked to 2,000 eighth-graders by the end of this school year.
“If we can walk away and have even two people, anybody, look back and say, ‘Remember those parents came and told us they lost their kids and told us what they were like and told us what it’s like to live without them?’” Kim White said. “That’s our goal. We want them to have a future. We don’t want their families to suffer like we have.”
She and Dyer and Roberts sat around the Whites’ kitchen table on a recent Thursday, sharing chicken salad and cranberry muffins and taking turns holding one another’s pain.
“We had over 400 signatures in the guest book at Billy’s service,” Dyer said. “All these young people filled my house beforehand, making posters with pictures and glue sticks. I’ve still got 50 or 75 of them in my basement.”
Roberts talked about his wife. She’s struggling to keep weight on since their son’s death. She just dipped below 90 pounds, Roberts said. Nine years after Billy died.
“It brings you to your knees,” Kim White said.
It’s a tricky balance, they said, to share enough of their grief to make an impression on the students, but not so much of their grief that they traumatize them.
“I think what gets their attention, though, is relating to these guys who grew up near them, who went to their schools,” Dyer said. “They think, ‘How did they go down that path? How do you get to a point that you can’t stop?’ This opioid addiction is so, so tough to get through.”
‘Al’s taking pills’
Alex didn’t start taking opioids until college, his mom said.
After high school, he attended the University of Iowa, where he roomed with Meyers. They were kicked out of the dorms freshman year for smoking marijuana, and they moved off-campus. Later that year, Alex was arrested for possessing alcohol as a minor. He decided to transfer to Illinois State University.
“It was kind of like a three-year thing,” Meyers said. “It went from, ‘Al’s with me and we’re partying and we’re young and we’re dumb, but everything’s fine,’ to ‘Al’s hanging out with different people, most of whom I know and like from high school, for the most part,’ to, ‘Al’s taking pills. Have you seen Al? Al’s so skinny.’”
Alex broke his hand during college, his mom said. That may have been when he started taking pain pills.
He graduated from Illinois State University in May 2012 and moved home. He found a job. His parents thought his behavior was odd — he was moody and quick to anger, he was putting inexplicable miles on the car. A friend of Kelly’s called her and said she heard Alex was taking pills. In July, his parents found a white, powdery substance and a straw on his desk after he left for work one day.
“We were panicked,” Kim White said. “When your child is born, there’s not a manual that tells you, ‘When your son is 22 and you find out he has a substance use disorder, here’s what you do.’ I called counselors, doctors, rehabs. Anyone I could think of to ask, ‘What are we supposed to do?’”
They tried several different rehab centers, but none of them took. At the time, Kim White said, most of the rehab centers they found didn’t offer Suboxone, methadone or naltrexone — medications that ease symptoms of withdrawal during detox and help patients maintain abstinence from opioids.
“Your brain has changed,” Kim White said. “The drugs rewire your brain, and you need something to help you get off of them. Al was at a point where he couldn’t even help himself.”
He checked himself out of every place they checked him into.
“We tried a place in Arizona,” Kim White said. “We tried a place in California because it was 30 miles from the nearest town, and they said no one ever leaves. He left.
“Eventually, we tried a place in Florida, and this was our reasoning,” she said, her eyes filling with tears. “If we send him to Florida and he leaves, he’ll be OK because it’s warm there. I mean, as a parent, you’re thinking, ‘It’s warm there. He won’t freeze. It’s warm there.’”
‘I am not one bit ashamed’
Opioids reduce the intensity of pain by going to work in the nervous system or on specific brain receptors. They can also cause drowsiness, euphoria, confusion and other symptoms. It’s common for people with a substance use disorder — the term used by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to replace “substance abuse” or “substance dependence” — to misuse legally prescribed opioids (oxycodone, hydrocodone) or switch from prescription opioids to heroin because heroin is more readily available and cheaper.
Because heroin is often mixed with other chemicals and drugs on the black market, people who use it are at an increased risk of overdose, compared with other opioids, according to the Department of Health and Human Services.
Kim White wants students to hear all of that. She wants Alex’s death to help them understand all of that.
“I am not one bit ashamed of my son,” she said. “Young people’s brains are being pruned and don’t fully develop until they’re 25. The part of the brain that controls impulses and understands consequences is the last part to develop. I’m not making excuses, but one bad decision shouldn’t lead to this.”
She and her partners, Dyer and Roberts, explain that their sons weren’t perfect, but neither did they deserve to be sentenced to death for their missteps.
They show the eighth-graders photos of their sons — from prom, from graduation, from family vacations. They tell them about receiving the phone calls that their boys were dead.
Dyer’s son Billy died at home. Dyer found him. He was 24. Roberts’ son Billy died at a childhood friend’s house. He was 19. He died while Roberts and his wife were driving frantically to the house, having received a call from Billy’s friend that he’d stopped breathing.
Alex died at his friend Austin Zenere’s condo. They’d spent the evening with a group of high school friends. Alex had been home from his latest rehab stint for a month. They were hopeful that he had stopped using. Kim White gave Austin enough money to get Alex some food.
“We were with him the entire time,” Austin said. “When he went to the bathroom, one person went with him. Before we went to bed, I gave him a hug and was like, ‘I’m so happy you’re back.’ He went to bed and never woke up.”
The coroner ruled Alex’s death an accidental overdose from “heroin and alcohol intoxication.”
“The coroner also told us that Alex didn’t have very much alcohol in his system,” Kim White said.
They don’t know when he used heroin that night.
‘I need an army’
“I had to see my son be put in a body bag,” Kim White told a group of eighth-graders gathered at Hickory Creek Middle School in late November. “That haunts me. We don’t want any of your families to go through that.”
The students sat in a windowless room, in row upon row of stackable plastic chairs. A white screen at the front of the room showed pictures of a smiling Alex.
When Kim White stopped talking, you could hear a pin drop. Dyer went next. Then Roberts.
“I tell their teachers, ‘You can have their minds. I want their hearts,’” Roberts said afterward.
He stands before them as a retired cop, a law-and-order guy. But mostly as a broken father.
“I need help,” he told the room of teenagers. “We’re not winning the war on drugs. I’m here to tell you we’re losing the war on drugs. I need an army. I need you.”
He begs them not to start. Not to experiment. To walk away the first time, every time, someone says, “Hey, you want to try something?”
“This could happen to you,” he said. “In this community. It happened to those two boys, Billy and Alex. It happened to my Billy. It could happen to anyone. It crept into my home and stole my son from me, and no matter what fight we put up or what fight he put up, it was too late.”
Kim White hopes the students talk to their parents about their presentation. She hopes that each conversation — in the classroom, at home afterward — chips away at the stigma that clings unfairly to her son’s death, to any death from a drug overdose.
She hopes more schools invite them in. She hopes more parents who’ve lost kids to substance use disorders consider reaching out to schools in their own communities.
“All over the United States, people should be doing this,” she said. “Chances are there’s got to be a couple of the kids who see us and see what it does to families. This is a disease. We have to talk about it.”
Talking about it keeps their children’s stories alive. Talking about it may keep other people’s children alive.
“Every day I do this is one more day Billy is with me, touching someone’s life,” Roberts said. “Just like this epidemic spread, I want these kids to be the epidemic that spreads.”
Join the Heidi Stevens Balancing Act Facebook group, where she hosts live chats every Wednesday at noon.
hstevens@chicagotribune.com
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