When Jodie Barwiler woke up to find her son Coty Piasecki slumped over in her living room, still gripping a grilled cheese sandwich he had made the night before, she knew in the pit of her stomach that this was it.
She walked through the living room, scolding her 20-year-old son for drinking too much the night before and passing out in front of the television. She pushed him and yelled at him to wake up.
His body was cold to the touch.
Barwiler frantically called 911 and then dialed her fiancé, Kelly Fisher, a trucker who was on the road in Nebraska. She tried to tell him what had happened but couldn’t find the words and collapsed to the floor. Fisher called his father, who lived down the street, and asked him to go the house and find out what had happened.
When Fisher’s father arrived, he found Barwiler crying on the floor. She pleaded with her future father-in-law to wake up her youngest son, but there was nothing that could be done. Coty had been dead for nearly six hours following a heroin overdose.
More than 4.2 million Americans have used heroin at least once in their life, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse. An estimated 23 percent of people who use it become addicted.
On Jan. 12, the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy released data showing that heroin-related deaths had increased 39 percent between 2012 and 2013. Attorney General Eric Holder said the statistics showed opioid abuse was a “growing public health crisis” in the United States.
Despite spending more than $1 trillion since the U.S. government declared a war on illegal drugs in the 1970s, thousands of people still die of overdoses every year. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 43,982 people died from drug overdoses in 2012; more than 80 percent of those fatalities were unintentional. Among people between the ages of 25 and 64, drug overdose was the leading cause of death by injury that year.
Northwest Montana is lockstep with many of these trends. Derek Dalton, a clinical supervisor at the Flathead Valley Chemical Dependency Clinic, said illegal drug use is more prevalent in the valley than other areas of the state due in part to the growing population. However, exact numbers are hard to pin down. A 2010 report states that 10.7 percent of Montana residents reported using illicit drugs in the previous month, nearly two percentage points higher than the national average.
A decade ago, prescription drug abuse was grabbing headlines nationally and in Montana. But Dalton said in recent years he has seen a decline in clients using prescription medicine to get high. For one, prescription drugs have become harder and more expensive to obtain, thus many abusers have returned to substances like methamphetamine and heroin.
“People are looking for a cheaper high and so they go back to heroin,” he said.
The Piaseckis moved from Ohio to the Flathead Valley in 2007, looking for a piece of the Montana lifestyle that attracts so many to this part of the country. That spring they toured the state, getting to know the area and the local schools. High on the family’s list was a school with a good wrestling program for their two boys, Caleb and Coty. Jeffrey Thompson, a business teacher and wrestling coach at Flathead High School, still remembers his first encounter with Coty, then an excitable sixth grader.
“He always had a smile on his face,” Thompson said, recalling that first visit. “I remember him seeing some girls in the school and saying, ‘These Montana girls are super cute. We should move here, Mom.’ I just remember laughing so hard.”
That fall Piasecki quickly joined youth wrestling and other sports, including baseball, basketball and football. When he was a freshman at Flathead High School in 2009, he focused on wrestling. His coaches and friends remember a capable athlete with a big heart. Lucas Mantel, 20, was one of Coty’s closest friends and wrestled at Glacier High School. He said some of his favorite bouts were against his crosstown rival.
“Whenever (Coty and I) stepped onto the mat, we were not close friends anymore,” Mantel said, laughing. “But we always hugged it out after.”
Piasecki also jumped headfirst into the Montana outdoors and family members said his love for nature was immense. He would take any opportunity he could to get outside, either by camping, hunting, fishing, skiing, snowmobiling or hiking.
But Piasecki also began to dabble in another recreational activity: drugs. Barwiler, his mother, said she caught him multiple times when he was in high school using marijuana and that she had zero tolerance for drug use. But most of his friends thought little of Piasecki smoking some weed, in part because some of them were doing the same.
According to a 2013 survey of more than 600 high school students in Flathead County, nearly 31 percent had smoked marijuana at least once in their lives; nearly 18 percent reported smoking weed in the previous 30 days when the survey was taken.
But Piasecki’s use of drugs went beyond marijuana. In his early high school years, Piasecki and some friends began experimenting with prescription medications one of them had gotten for a broken leg.
Soon after, Piasecki began using heroin – first snorting it but later injecting it with a needle. He would later tell people it was the greatest high he had ever felt. It was about the same time in 2012 that his parents filed for divorce and his father, Bryce Piasecki, moved back to the Midwest. Barwiler said that might have contributed to his drug use, but she thinks it was only one piece of the puzzle. She said her son had an addictive personality.
Barwiler said her son started to sleep more and was always asking for money – heroin in the Flathead Valley can cost upwards of $400 a gram. His personality also changed.
“He was so angry,” she said. “He was a lost soul.”
Six months after he graduated early from Flathead High as a junior, Piasecki’s drug use hit a tipping point. Barwiler said he was neurotic and often missed work. She gave him a choice: Get his life in order or get out of her house. Piasecki chose the former and Barwiler took two weeks off from work to detox him.
Barwiler had completed some research and read that suddenly cutting her son off from heroin would not have any long-term health effects. That does not mean, however, that quitting cold turkey does not have adverse impact. Someone who has become addicted to heroin will go into extreme withdrawal without it. Symptoms include vomiting, anxiety, sweating, a lack of motivation and drastic mood swings.
“It was hell,” Barwiler said of the detox. “I had never seen the devil until I detoxed him. He was vomiting and shaking. His personality would change, too. At one point he would be fine and then the next minute he was screaming at the top of his lungs.”
After three or four days though, Barwiler saw a change in Piasecki’s personality and soon it was clear that the detox had worked. After the detox, Piasecki took a job at Blacktail Mountain Ski Area as a lift operator and spent the winter living, working and skiing at the mountain. Piasecki stayed clean for much of the season, but that changed almost immediately when he came home. Within a few weeks he was regularly shooting up again.
Throughout 2013, Piasecki’s addiction worsened. Family members said he was working just enough to supply his habit, but other than that he was aimlessly coasting through life. Barwiler was constantly trying to get him to quit using heroin, even going as far as following him around town to see what he was doing.
By Jan. 11, 2014, she had had enough. After going shopping with a friend, Barwiler went home and tried to commit suicide by overdosing on Xanax. When Piasecki found her later that day, Barwiler did not have a pulse. The family rushed her to the hospital where she was revived and then spent five days on a ventilator.
“I had never done heroin a day in my life but that drug was absolutely ruining my life,” Barwiler said. “I knew Coty was going to die and there was nothing I could do to fix it.
“I could see him slipping through my fingers,” she said.
Barwiler’s suicide attempt scared Piasecki and, for a little while, it seemed he had stopped using. But by June his addiction had again hit a tipping point and his mother and her fiancé gave him another ultimatum – either choose heroin or family. Piasecki again chose his family and they detoxed him a second time. He stayed clean for a few weeks and soon started working for Montana Helical Piers, working on projects in Washington, Wyoming and North Dakota. The company had a strict substance policy and would often drug test employees. As far as his friends and family could tell, Piasecki stayed clean until the fall of 2014.
In early October, during a break from work, he was at Barwiler’s house and something slipped out of his pocket: a piece of tinfoil used to burn and inhale heroin. Barwiler and Fisher confronted him about the foil and he admitted he had relapsed. However, he insisted that he didn’t want to use any more and so they gave him another chance.
Friends of Piasecki who used heroin with him said it is not surprising that he relapsed when he came back from long work trips.
“It’s really hard to come back to the Flathead Valley and not use,” said one of his friends who asked not to be identified in this story.
“For me to stay clean when I’m back here I can’t even leave my house without seeing something or someone that is a trigger,” said another friend who also wished to not be identified.
On Oct. 30, 2014, Piasecki returned after another long work trip and spent the next few days with his family. On Halloween night they went to Scotty’s Bar in Kalispell for dinner and then Piasecki spent the rest of the night at home with his mother. The following day, on Nov. 1, he went out and got a haircut before cutting wood with a friend. At some point during the day he started drinking heavily and some friends said they met him at a bar not far from his mother’s house that afternoon.
That evening Piasecki called his mom to see if she wanted to meet him for a drink. She declined and said that she was going to stay in for the rest of the evening.
At some point during the next few hours, Piasecki acquired some heroin, burned it on a piece of tinfoil and either smoked it or injected it. The heroin he had gotten from a dealer was called “China White” and was, according to friends, probably some of the most potent drugs he had ever consumed.
At about 1:15 a.m., Piasecki went home and slammed on his mother’s bedroom door. When Barwiler came out she found her son drunkenly making a grilled cheese sandwich in the kitchen. The two made small talk for a few minutes and she asked what his plans were for the next day. He told her that he would go to church with her in the morning.
Piasecki finished making his sandwich and walked into the living room. He placed the sandwich and a beer on the coffee table and sat down on the couch. As he did, he probably began to feel tired as his respiratory system began to fail. Soon after he slumped over and stopped breathing. Piasecki was dead by 1:30 a.m., less than 15 minutes after he talked to his mother.
Piasecki’s death shocked friends and family, including those who had used heroin with him.
“Out of all the people we hung out with, Coty was the one we never thought would overdose,” a friend said. “He had a job and was doing things with his life. He seemed to have a life outside of drugs.”
Since Piasecki’s death, some friends have said they quit using drugs, but Barwiler said there are others like her son who have not stopped and she hopes by telling her story, that will change. On Feb. 25 at 6 p.m., Barwiler and a handful of guest speakers will hold an event called “A Mom Speaks Out” at Gardner’s Auction in Kalispell. Barwiler said just because her son has died doesn’t mean she will stop fighting against a drug she believes is tearing apart families in the valley.
“I don’t want anyone to feel the way I do,” she said. “He should have never died this way and if I can save one mom or one family from ever having to bury their child because they died at the hands of this heinous drug then it was worth speaking out.”
Barwiler said since she decided to tell the story of her son’s struggle with addiction and drug use, many parents in the community have been reaching out to her. She said she hopes the upcoming event will encourage people to form local support groups for addicts and their families.
She said the outpouring of support from parents like her is what keeps her going. As she sat in her living room last week – the very room in which her son died three months earlier – she reached for her phone to read one of the messages someone had recently sent her.
“The thing that really gets me is I’m waiting for the same thing to happen to my son that happened to Coty,” the text read. “I’m sorry to say that but I’m preparing for it. None of these kids are learning from Coty.”