Joe stood and watched while Dan convulsed. Whatever thoughts, panic or guilt going through either of their minds was between them and God.
Dan’s nose was caked in dried blood, and his mouth was covered in a sticky white foam.
Joe gave Dan the heroin.
The detectives who arrived later knew that much. Joe later admitted that he was there “when Dan was in bad shape,” but left without saying anything to Dan’s grandmother.
No one called 911.
The next morning, Joe knocked on the door to say he’d forgotten his skateboard. That’s when Dan’s grandmother realized he was still upstairs.
That’s when they found him dead.
I was nineteen, and Dan was a friend of my brother’s. I still have a photo of Dan sitting on our living room couch with Marc.
His death shocked me because he was only fifteen.
I twisted the phone cord around my fingers as I listened to the gossip from the edge of the blue bathtub. The water from the faucet warmed my feet and muffled the conversation, but my mind buzzed loudly.
I thought briefly about the drugs I was occasionally doing with my friends, but quickly assured myself it was OK because my friends and I would never do heroin.
Dan’s death was one of six fatal overdose cases directly involving Joe, who was about 20 at the time.
Detective Tony knew this was another heroin overdose as he approached the door.
Decades later, Tony told me he was “pissed” because Dan could have lived if Joe said something. Instead, he walked out and left Dan alone for more than 15 hours.
Tony’s stepdaughter was about the same age.
“I brought the Polaroid and showed her the bloody foam coming out of his nose – she was shocked,” he said.
But it didn’t stop her from later misusing drugs and alcohol.
Dan’s death may have slowed some of his closest friends’ self-harm, but destructive decisions radiated within my circle of friends.
Marilyn’s friends were celebrating her birthday when they found out about Dan.
“He died a couple days after my fifteenth birthday,” she said. “I remember that vividly because my friends brought me birthday balloons to school the day everyone found out he died.”
Marilyn exchanged her excitement for shame when she walked down the hallway smiling and carrying colorful balloons and met blank, pale faces in shock from news of their friend’s fatal heroin overdose.
“I wanted to hide the balloons,” she said. “They were this symbol of happiness and I didn’t want to rub it in people’s faces.”
She remembers Dan’s death as her first exposure to the effects of heroin use, and, unfortunately, just the first of many drug-related deaths.
“It’s still to this day the most shocking,” Marilyn said. “He was so young.”
Joe died during the investigation by what is believed to be suicide by heroin overdose.
“However, his death did not scare me away from trying heroin two years later,” Marilyn said. “Although, I feel like when it gets to that point, there must be some underlying death wish anyway.”
We found the canary dead in the coal mine.
Twenty-nine people died by heroin overdose in my hometown between January 22, 1997, and September 7, 1998.
I was almost No. 30.