Eastern Connecticut |
The first thing Jeanne Clark noticed was the little rubber bands popping up in strange places around her Norwichtown home.
It was around 2003, when the word “heroin” still triggered images of longtime drug users wandering the streets, trying to find the next high. Clark thought those rubber bands had fallen from the hair of one of her boys’ girlfriends. She never imagined they had fallen from tiny plastic bags holding a substance that would take both of her sons’ lives. One died before opioid use had reached epidemic proportions. The other died in 2016, one year after overdose deaths seemed to peak in Connecticut. - - - Growing up, Chase and Christopher, separated by just 22 months, were nearly inseparable. Both played baseball and hockey. Chase, the youngest, tried soccer, too. After high school, Christopher took business courses at Three Rivers Community College and entered into the field of carpentry. Chase went to Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston and got a bachelor’s degree in construction management before becoming a licensed arborist. In retrospect, one might point to Christopher’s minor run-ins with police — records show he was convicted of misdemeanor liquor and marijuana possession in separate incidents near the turn of the century — as a sign of the brewing problem. Clark wrote it off as typical youth experimentation. Both brothers were gainfully employed, and people always complimented her on her charming sons. But she saw changes when the two were together at her home. Once lovers of the outdoors, they’d stay inside while she labored in the garden. Once full of energy, they struggled to get off the couch. If Clark knew then what she knows now, perhaps she would have confronted them sooner. Instead, she didn’t learn they had turned from social OxyContin use to heroin until 2005, when Chase frantically woke her in the middle of the night in the midst of a drug-induced frenzy. Her first reaction was one of humiliation. "I was embarrassed to know that my children were using drugs," said the 63-year-old Clark, now a Noank resident. Read more at www.theday.com/local/20170128/2-sons-2-deaths-mother-reflects-on-opioid-crisis-toll.
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ABOUTA selection of stories I wrote as a breaking news and police reporter for The Day in New London, Conn. Archives
July 2019
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