By Judy O’Brien
Doty resident
Note: Judy O’Brien shared the following words with friends as they commented over the weekend on a news story about recent suspected drug overdoes in Centralia.
She last saw her 37-year-old daughter 18 months ago in Olympia. Stacey O’Brien Hofland grew up in Doty and went to W.F. High School.
DOTY – The battle of drug addictions is an internal war in which those who are not users in that war can not truly understand. I can’t understand it but I do know it is the saddest and most dangerous of addictions.
Stacey O'Brien Hofland
The newspaper article said a decomposed body had been discovered in a sleeping bag off of Interstate 5 in Tumwater this past Thanksgiving day.
The average person reads that, shakes their head and moves on to another article. For the last several years I have never read those and moved on.
I would then start the search to know if that homeless and newly discovered body was that of my daughter. It won’t be necessary for me to search any longer … she is no longer a meth addict, or homeless. She is just no longer.
The story of Stacey O’Brien is like so many; it is not unique.
The lack of uniqueness is the problem our individual families face throughout our society. Many intelligent young adults become meth addicts.
Stacey was raised in Lewis County, attended our schools, had siblings, grandparents, husband, children and parents that cared. She was smart, pretty, manipulative, cunning, a convincing liar and outgoing.
These personality traits made it possible for her to appear functional while her life of addiction was anything but functional.
She has been gone from my day-to-day life for a very long time.
I had never quite got over having a sliver of hope that she would “hit bottom”. As her life spun out of control and she became more dependent on drugs she made the choice to live in a bottomless pit.
She gave birth several times over the years, and was unable to care for her children. Others stepped in and brought home a child to give them a better life. After the completion of the last adoption, she told me then she just was no longer going to fight the addiction.
I remember clearly the eyes of acceptance that looked at me to understand she could not do it anymore. I understood.
My last time with her was a step back in time, she was my daughter and I was her mom. We cried and explained how we wished things were different, explored how her life had become what it was.
As she loaded the last of her belongings into my car she hugged me, said “I love you Ma” and walked down the alley from the church parking lot back into the streets of Olympia.
She did not look back and I just stood there in tears knowing I would not see her again. It was our good-bye.
She would call me at our agreed time frame so I would know she was still among the living. I was left feeling hopeless and helpless after each call.
There won’t be a call in a few weeks and this time I will not have to look for unidentified bodies or go to Olympia looking for her in the corners of the drug world. She has finally found a place where meth won’t torment her any longer and she will no longer to be destructive to herself or the world around her.
The coroner’s office told me it was a death by natural causes. She had crawled in her sleeping bag, fell asleep and died at the age of 36. The assumption is a drug overdose that caused a heart attack.
As the words droned on I could have sworn I heard the voice of my daughter praying her childhood prayer:
Now I lay me down to sleep,
I pray the Lord my soul to keep,
If I should die before I wake,
I pray the Lord my soul to take.
If your family has been impacted by addiction please know you are not alone. Join a support group and learn how to cope with the addict and the consequences of addictions.
There is a 24 hour / seven day a week drug and alcohol help line available; it is sponsored by the state and works through DSHS: 1-800-562-1240.
Join us
Notes from behind the news: What readers wanted to know in 2010
Sunday, January 2nd, 2011A vigil drew more than 200 mourners to Morton after the body of 16-year-old Austin King was found almost a month following his disappearance last summer
By Sharyn L. Decker
Lewis County Sirens news reporter
I realize 2010 has been over for a couple of days, but I’m going to take a look back briefly and tell you about the top stories of last year here on Lewis County Sirens.
Well since I started in June anyhow.
I can’t say for sure exactly what the most read news stories were, because if they are ranked somewhere in my web sites statistics, I haven’t found that part.
Austin King, found dead
But I can see the numbers for when people Google (or use other search engines) looking for something, and then come to Lewis County Sirens to read about it.
It’s sort of a toss up between the August fatal shootings that left 16-year-old David West Jr., his father and his father’s friend dead and the summer time saga of the missing 16-year-old Austin King of Morton who eventually was found dead.
More people were looking for news about “Austin King Morton” and “Jack Arnold Silverthorne” – the young man charged in his homicide – and related search terms than for stories about the Salkum-Onalaska area triple homicide. That is, if you leave out searches for Robbie Russell and variations on his name.
Three fatally shot, Salkum
I say it’s a toss up because who knows if people wanted to read about Russell a so-called person of interest in the slayings, or if they wanted to read about his (many) other reasons for being in the news; such as confessing he brought methamphetamine into the jail hidden in his “keister”, trying to outrun deputies in his red Corvette through the Chehalis Industrial Park, getting pulled over with a tennis ball sized clump of methamphetamine in his car or … you see what I mean.
The third most widely read story seems to be October crash of the Cessna from the Chehalis-based Pacific Cataract and Laser Institute that killed pilot Ken Sabin and his passengers Rod Rinta and Dr. Paul Shenk.
Chehalis Cessna crashes
After that, news on July 2 that 21-year-old Ivy M. Dolowy was killed when her car crashed into a tree on state Route 6 was near the top of the list.
The name of the young woman from Chehalis shows up as the most searched for name of all.
More specifically, key phrases searched for are ranked. The most searched for terms are “Lewis County Sirens” and its variations, and next comes “Ivy Dolowy”.
However, there are so many ways to look for John Allen Booth Jr. – the former Onalaska man charged with aggravated first-degree murder in the triple homicide – that when I add those all up, a handful of people were more interested in him than her.
Ronda Reynolds case
The next most popular story is Ronda Reynolds, the Toledo woman whose death more than a decade ago resulted in an unprecedented judicial review of a coroner’s decision last year. And then of course, author Ann Rule published her book in October renewing the public’s interest in the case.
Finally, an awful lot of people wanted to read about Donato Valle Vega, the man indicted in September after federal agents found nearly 10 pounds of cocaine in the attic of his Centralia Auto Sales business.
So those are the top six or seven stories readers were looking for when they came to Lewis County Sirens.
However, all that doesn’t really tell me what people have read the most or enjoyed reading the best, because the majority of visitors have bookmarked Lewis County Sirens and presumably just look over whatever news appears on the homepage.
I’d be very interested in hearing what readers liked, didn’t like or would hope to see written about in 2011. Feel free to send me a note or comment.
And hopefully by the end of this coming December, I will have found a statistics program that simply ranks each story by number of readers.
Tags:By Sharyn L. Decker, news reporter
Posted in Columns and commentary | 2 Comments »