‘You don’t design to bury your child’: The relatives left behind in Thunder Bay’s opioid crisis
Ken Bailey doesn’t see his son’s genocide as an accident. For him, Mark’s overdose — from heroin laced with fentanyl — was a murder.Â
“It’s like me carrying a splash here and we put arsenic in it and we splash it and die. Is that an accident? That’s murder as distant as I’m concerned,” he told The Current’s horde Matt Galloway.
Bailey is one of 3 relatives who spoke to The Current about losing a child to an opioid overdose in Thunder Bay, Ont., that had a tip per-capita rate of deadly opioid overdoses in a province, according to a 2019 Ontario Public Health report analyzing 2017-2018 data. For each 100,000 people, there were scarcely 23 deaths, a news found.
As a child, Mark was unusually bright, Bailey says.
When he bought his son a Commodore 64 mechanism in a early ’80s, “within dual weeks he [was] coding — self-taught.”
But as a teenager, a drug use started. First, marijuana, afterwards tough drugs: cocaine, heroin, and other opioids.
Mark attempted methadone — a synthetic soporific used to provide opioid addiction — to get clean, Bailey says, yet it didn’t work.Â
Eventually, he was arrested for an armed spoliation of a pharmacy. When he got out of jail, he continued to spiral.
In Aug 2018, Mark was found passed in a motel in a center of Thunder Bay, with adequate fentanyl in his complement “to hit down a six-ton elephant,” Bailey says. He was 48 years old.
“You don’t design to bury your child. There’s only no description.”
Since Mark’s death, Bailey wants dealers who deliberately lace drugs with fentanyl to be charged with murder.
A flourishing series of military army opposite Canada are laying killing charges opposite people who allegedly granted fentanyl to people who overdosed and died, including a Ontario Provincial Police.
“That will be something that we’ll start to cruise as well,” Sylvie Hauth, Thunder Bay’s arch of police, told The Current.
But Dan Irwin, conduct of a Thunder Bay Police Service comprehension unit, says finding justification to lay killing charges in these cases is complex.
“It’s a whole building a box … it’s anticipating out where [the drug] came from — and they took it voluntarily, too,” he said. “There’s some-more investigate and things that need to be looked into for all these cases.”
Drug process experts have also argued that killing charges are an ineffectual apparatus to stop overdose deaths, and could even make a predicament worse by deterring some people dependant to drugs from seeking help, as people traffic drugs might be regulating them too.Â
Hauth says Thunder Bay military are also perplexing to keep people alive by looking during a opioid predicament from a broader perspective “whether it be a mental health crisis, either it be piece abuse, homelessness.”
She says all Thunder Bay officers must try and residence basic, evident needs for people, such as a protected place to nap for a night or medical services, and are compulsory to lift a overdose-reversing drug naloxone.
“What we do is unequivocally ensuring that people are OK and assisting them during a time of their need,” she said.
Still, Bailey frequently writes letters to officials, from a Thunder Bay military arch to Ontario’s profession general, and keeps a record with all a responses he’s received.Â
“All it is, is ‘We wish to extend a condolences,'” he said. Â
“I don’t wish condolences. we wish we to get off your donkey and do something — and they’re not.”
‘That’s poison, that’s murder’
Like Bailey, Keith Rojik felt his son’s overdose genocide wasn’t taken severely adequate by police.
Tyler Rojik had only incited 27 when he died final Jun with 10 times a fatal volume of carfentanil — a absolute veterinary drug meant for use on hippos and elephants — in his system.Â
“Ten times a fatal volume — that’s poison, that’s murder,” pronounced Rojik.
Rojik and his ex-wife Tara Libiak report their son as a kind, “very outgoing, really brave,” jaunty immature male with lots of friends.
“Everyone desired him,” Rojik said.
But in 2017, Libiak got word from one of Tyler’s friends that his celebration was removing out of control. Then she beheld a lane outlines on her son’s arms.Â
After she confronted him, Tyler confessed that he was regulating a accumulation of drugs, including heroin and heroin. Eventually, she and Rojik assured him to go to rehab.
“From afterwards on, we became flattering most best friends,” she said. “He would tell me stuff, even yet we would scream during him or repremand him.”
Despite his initial reluctance, Tyler thrived in rehab, his relatives say.Â
“He found himself a sponsor, went to all these purify places with them and luncheons and dinners,” Libiak said. “It worked, and he attempted his hardest.”
About 6 months later, she says, he fell off a wagon. But he shortly checked himself behind into treatment.Â
“The second time he wanted it. He did it all himself,” she said.
But it wasn’t prolonged after that that Tyler had to be rushed to hospital, after a relapse caused him to have a heart attack.
“His heart was so lengthened … and it was from his before injecting,” she said.
At that moment, Libiak gave her son a warning. “I said, ‘Tyler, a subsequent time we do drugs, we know, you’re going to die.’ And he says, ‘I know.'”Â
Six weeks later, on his birthday weekend, he did.
“We don’t know who he was with or if he was doing it with someone [at his apartment], yet his doorway was far-reaching open. And we still don’t know who called 911,” Libiak said.Â
Rojik pronounced a dual of them have selected to pronounce publicly about their son’s genocide in hopes that it might inspire others to find assistance before it’s too late.
“There’s only too many people that we’re losing here,” he said. “And it’s ridiculous.”
Written by Allie Jaynes. Produced by Lara O’Brien, Joana Dragichi and Documentary Editor Joan Webber.