LOMBARD MOTHER 'TRIED SO HARD' TO KICK HEROIN HABIT

Another Overdose Victim

Gayle Evans sat on the floor in her Lombard apartment, sifting
through her daughter's black purse, tears streaming down her face.
She held up a handful of thin paper: admittance sheets to three
different drug rehabilitation programs.

Proof that her daughter, Hazel Brewer, tried to kick her drug habit, she says.

"Westlake, St. Elizabeth's, Sacred Heart," Evans read, shaking her
head. "She tried so hard. So many times."

Brewer, a 39-year-old mother of four, got out of a detox program for
heroin addiction Monday. At 11 a.m., she picked up a friend and, with
the $25 Brewer had with her, they bought drugs, her mother said. By 4
a.m. Tuesday, Brewer knew she needed medical attention.

"She told him she wasn't feeling good. She said, 'Oh no, something
ain't right,'" Evans said. The friend took her to Sacred Heart
Hospital, where she was admitted. At 4:10 p.m., Brewer was pronounced
dead of a suspected heroin overdose.

Evans said her daughter had been using heroin and crack, buying them
from people she knew near the Austin neighborhood in Chicago.

"She couldn't give it up," her mother said Wednesday. "She's been in
a million hospitals trying to kick the habit. But then she just gets
in it again."

Brewer was a headstrong, bright daughter, the older of two children,
her mother said. Her brother, John Evans, remembers her as an
aggressive sister who poked fun and tussled with him. She loved to
roller skate and was a gymnast who once dreamed of opening a gymnastics school.

But her bold attitude turned troublesome in her early teens, her
mother said. She would sneak cigarettes from her father's stash and
push family limits, her brother recalled.

When her father, the tough disciplinarian in the home, died when she
was 13, Brewer's life spiraled, her family said.

That same year, she was raped by a friend and tried several times to
run away, her mother said. She graduated from Glenbard North High
School, had her first child at 18, and got married.

Cigarettes led to marijuana, and marijuana to crack and heroin, her
brother said.

Brewer separated from her husband more than a decade ago, when he
couldn't take her drug abuse any longer, her mother said.

In recent years, Brewer spent more time in drug rehabilitation
programs than she did on the outside. She would "binge"--take drugs
for days at a time--in Chicago, then check in to treatment programs,
and then go back to drugs again, her brother said.

"I lost count of how many times," he said.

Brewer rarely spoke about her addiction, except to promise family
members that she was going to get clean, her brother said.

Gayle Evans doesn't know if her daughter knew about or used drugs
laced with fentanyl, a powerful painkiller that authorities believe
may be responsible for a rise in heroin overdoses recently.

Brewer's family members have custody of her four children, ages 21 to
4, and were raising them with occasional help from Brewer--when she was sober.

"She wasn't the perfect lady. She had her ups and her downs," said
her daughter Sahari, 11, Wednesday. "But I know that she loved us. I
know that she did what she could do to be here for us. I know she was
a good mother."

John Evans said his family supported his sister and went to drug
counseling with her, he said, but there wasn't much more they could do.

The moment Brewer first touched heroin, she started a path that ended
her life, her mother said.

"If I could say one thing, I would say that one time is too many,"
she said. "A million more is never enough. So don't do it the first time."