SHOOTING UP & CHECKING OUT

Drug Overdoses Spike Across Northern Michigan

Aubrey Checks and Konrad Winston Pressley partied in Traverse City on
New Year's Eve and stayed with friends.

The next day they returned home to Gaylord and headed to a trailer on
Arrowhead Trail, a gravel road in the woods about five miles southeast
of Gaylord. The couple hoped to score some heroin there.

Maybe they hoped it would take the edge off the suffering they felt
from the night before.

That's not what happened.

At the trailer they met Anthony Jerome Beaty who sold them seven
bindles of heroin, police said.

Each package contained a single dose, or an amount equivalent to about
one-tenth of what's in a typical packet of sugar. Bindles of heroin
are typically wrapped in a scrap of a Club Keno lottery ticket and
cost around $20 to $25 in Northern Michigan, about $10 more than what
they cost downstate, Gaylord Police Det./Sgt. Doug Kussrow said.

Someone else's money was funding this purchase, the detective
said.

Twenty-one-year-old Pressley and 18-year-old Checks planned to take
two of the packets for themselves and skim a little off the top from
the other five packets, Pressley later told police.

When they got to the home they shared in Gaylord, they loaded some of
their share of the heroin into a syringe. Pressley shot up first, and
he quickly realized they had some potent stuff.

"It is strong, after he booted it, he tells her, 'Don't use all of it,
this is strong shit,'" Kussrow said.

Pressley soon passed out, he told police. When he regained
consciousness, Checks was on top of him, dead.

Pressley called 911 and an operator attempted to walk him through CPR
but it was too late.

There was nothing that could be done for Aubrey Checks.

CONSEQUENCES

On her Facebook page, Checks looks like any other, pretty young adult
with a promising future.

Checks described herself as in a relationship with Pressley. She
wrote: "I'm Aubrey...18, just graduated... and in college. I have a 8
month old beautiful baby girl, and she is the light of my life..."

The death of the young mother prompted police and prosecutors to act
quickly to hold someone responsible.

Beaty, 31, was arrested Jan. 28 and charged with multiple drug
charges.

He pleaded guilty in a plea bargain and was scheduled to be sentenced
June 6 on charges of delivery of a controlled substance causing death
and maintaining a drug house. Beaty had also faced an habitual
offender charge due to a 2008 conviction for third-degree child abuse.

Beaty's attorney, Colin Hunter, said he had no comment prior to
sentencing.

Pressley, 21, also pleaded guilty to drug charges. He awaits
sentencing June 7 after he pleaded guilty to a charge of delivery of
less than 50 grams of a controlled substance in a case unrelated to
Check's death.

Pressley's attorney, Kevin Hesselink, said his client was devastated
by the death of his girlfriend and he has been on suicide watch in
jail.

"This is the mother of his child," Hesselink said. "He's not only lost
her, but his parental rights have been terminated."

FLOURISHING TRADE

Beaty and Pressley are just small characters in a much larger world of
Northern Michigan heroin trade and overdoses.

In Gaylord alone, police blame heroin for the overdose deaths of five
people including Checks in the past year.

Three more are suspected of dying of heroin or opiate overdoses in
Benzie County recently and police investigated another case in Manistee.

In other areas, overdose deaths may have gone unreported, said Benzie
County Sheriff Rory Heckman.

Dr. Matthew Houghton, medical examiner for Benzie, Grand Traverse, and
Leelanau counties, said there was one heroin overdose this year and
one last year in Grand Traverse, but that his office has recently seen
far more methadone overdoses.

"Methadone is our number one overdose substance," Houghton said.
"Heroin is coming into the area, but it's not resulting in a lot of
overdoses at this point."

A look into the size and scope of the local heroin scene could be
glimpsed when police raided Beaty's rural home in January.

When police arrived after dark to serve a search warrant, inside the
trailer they found 200 bindles of heroin packaged and ready to go,
Kussrow said.

Police also found a couple from Traverse City who had come to Beaty's
place with their infant child, allegedly to purchase heroin. Also in
the house were Beaty's two toddler-aged children.

Kussrow believes heroin, once a fairly rare drug, has seen a
resurgence in the past couple of years in Northern Michigan as
Oxycontin, methadone and other pharmaceuticals have become more scarce
and expensive.

Prosecutions and public awareness campaigns have made doctors more
cautious about prescribing Oxycontin and other powerful
painkillers.

Kussrow wonders how many non-fatal heroin overdoses are treated at
hospitals but go unreported.

Heroin is so dangerous because on the black market its potency is
unknown and it does not come packaged with dosing instructions.

"It's a bad idea" for people to be shooting themselves up, the
detective said. "Nobody's a phlebotomist out there."

MIDDLE AGED ADDICT

Misty Heidman hopes the day comes when someone faces consequences for
supplying her husband the heroin that took his life.

David Heidman, 47, a father of eight children, ages seven to 17, died
in a Gaylord motel room of a heroin overdose last October. Neither of
the men who were with him when he died have been charged, though the
case remains under investigation by the Gaylord Police Department.

Misty Heidman said her husband turned to drugs after he crushed his
knee in an accident in 2001. David Heidman was a truck driver but
spent the last years of his life living on disability.

"Before all the drugs, he was amazing, a great father, a great friend,
husband, I'm going to cry, he was the type of person that would give
the shirt off his back for anybody," she said.

The injury led to operations and constant pain until he was diagnosed
with a nerve condition and was told he could expect to live with pain
for the rest of his life. He was prescribed methadone.

Heidman said her husband at first refused to take Oxycontin because he
was afraid of what that drug could do to people after he'd watched a
family member abuse the prescription painkiller.

Heidman believes her husband crossed into the world of illicit drugs
around 2006.

"When I started to realize something wasn't right was when he started
to get all of these odd phone calls, he would walk into the other room
to talk on the phone, which was something he never did before," she
said.

Strange friends also started dropping by, people he had supposedly
known for years but who Misty Heidman didn't know. These people gave
her a bad feeling. Among them was Anthony Beaty, Heidman said, though
police said Beaty is not a suspect in Heidman's death.

DESPERATE LAST DAYS

Toward the end David Heidman was prone to vanishing for a couple of
days at a time. Money and property disappeared. Lies were told. Misty
Heidman said she pleaded with the police.

She wanted her husband arrested so he might get some help through the
courts. One time, around a year before David's death, Misty said she
told a police officer that if something didn't happen, her husband was
going to die.

"I was pretty much begging him to pull him over, to follow him," she
said. She said she wanted to get her husband into treatment but what
the family could afford was not enough.

And yet, even in the end, there still existed something of the decent
man Misty had married.

On that last night, David saw two of his daughters off to a homecoming
dance. He had borrowed money and used it to buy dresses.

"The girls will never forget that night because he actually went out
and bought them dresses," she said.

It was later that night that he died at the Downtown Motel in
Gaylord.

"I want it to be out there, to let people know, I want it to stop, I
don't want another family to go through what we have been through,"
Misty Heidman said. "I think it's important that the community is
aware of what is going on around them."

BENZIE COUNTY TOLL

In Beulah, authorities are investigating a spate of recent deaths
linked to heroin or opiates.

In separate cases last month, Noah Thomas Maxwell, 25, of Ann Arbor,
was found dead at his family's second home in Benzonia of an apparent
heroin overdose. Two days earlier, Nikita Cheyanne Wheeler, 20, of
Onekema, was found dead of an apparent overdose at a Blaine Township
home, according to the Benzie County Sheriff's Department.

Wheeler was several months pregnant at the time of her
death.

In early March, Michael Lee Everett, 21, Beulah, died at his home of
what authorities called "acute heroin toxicity."

A family member of Everett said the family is shaken up and not ready
to discuss his death.

"The first one is confirmed heroin, the other two could be heroin but
we're still not sure," Sheriff Heckman said.

Wheeler had a prescription for Vicodin. Heckman said investigators
suspect she used Vicodin to trade for harder drugs.

Heckman said investigators are focused on where the drugs are coming
from and they hope to pursue cases against whoever supplied the drugs
that led to the overdoses.

"I don't think they realize they're going to pay for it with their
lives," Heckman said. "They all think they're smarter than that and
it's not going to happen to them, but it does."

SEEKING RELIEF, NOT HELP

At Dakoske Hall, a treatment facility run by Addiction Treatment
Services in Traverse City, staff have seen more heroin users come
through their doors, but that doesn't mean those people have been
seeking rehabiltation.

"Admitted heroin use is always a small number coming into treatment,"
said Wendy Croze, residential program director. "Heroin users will
come into detox when the supply runs out, but they don't come into
treatment. ... They don't really necessarily want treatment, they want
medical relief."

A detox like the one at Dakoske is a place for an addict to go for a
break, to get some relief from the pain of withdrawal until they can
find more heroin, or to hide.

"Because of the confidentiality laws people can come in and hide --
they owe a dealer money, maybe they're afraid someone is looking for
them," Croze said.

Chris Hindbaugh, executive director of Addiction Treatment Services,
said the number of heroin addicts seen at the facility has increased
recently. "In the last 18 months our number of admissions in our detox
program ... the heroin admissions have doubled," Hindbaugh said.

At the same time, treatment for users of other opiates has declined
proportionally.

Maybe a third of the people who go into detox -- for any substance --
move on to residential treatment, Hindbaugh said.

HELP IS OUT THERE

There is funding available for someone looking to get into treatment
even if an addict has lost everything.

There are three funding sources for someone who seeks treatment who is
unable to afford treatment on their own, Hindbaugh said. It is all
federal money administered by the state through Medicaid, block
grants, or something called adult benefits waivers.

There is another source of funding for someone ordered into treatment
through criminal court proceedings.

For people who are struggling to deal with a loved one who is
addicted, the best thing to do might be to get educated about drug
addiction and treatment.

"If they are willing, go to an open Narcotics Anonymous meeting and
listen," Croze said. "That's always a great resource. Or get
counselling for themselves and see where they go from there."

Open NA meetings are open to anyone curious about addiction. Closed
meetings are open only to addicts.