METH ADDICTION ROBS FAMILY OF YOUNG MAN'S LIFE

Drug Creeps Across Border, Catching Small Community Off Guard

Chippewa Falls - The last picture taken of Justin Cherrier, from the late
spring of 2002, describes a profound sadness, a 20-year-old in the deep
clutches of addiction.

Popular and beloved and quick with a joke, he had for a time obscured with
smiles his enslavement to methamphetamine, the synthetic stimulant now
described by officials as the No. 1 threat to public safety in northern and
western Wisconsin.

In his troubled twilight, though, Cherrier wept to friends and family about
his wish to go clean, he entered a treatment facility, he made promises.

But his use only accelerated.

He subsequently would lose his job at a local manufacturing plant, dozens
of pounds from his burly frame, and his car. Several months later on
Father's Day weekend 2002, he would lose his life, shooting himself with a
.30-06 rifle in a rusty Mazda parked in the family's driveway. His eldest
brother found him.

The paranoia, the wasting, the craving, the deep depression that Cherrier
experienced during his precipitous decline are symptoms of hardcore meth
users, but only now, with mournful hindsight, does his family know.

"I had never even heard of crystal methamphetamine," said the brother,
Travis Cherrier, 28, a gymnastics instructor in Minneapolis. "Now, looking
back on it, you can see it. The insomnia, losing weight. . . . He had
stopped caring about the Packers."

Other family members recall Justin Cherrier making his grandmother duck
down to avoid being seen in the window, sure that he was being stalked by
dark forces. A friend remembers him warning of conspiracies involving
transmission towers and helicopters.

"I remember thinking, 'This isn't supposed to happen to families like
ours,' " said his mother, Sue Cherrier, 51, a special education teacher at
Bloomer High School.

She spoke on a recent day at the family's new ranch home, just outside
Chippewa Falls, on Lake Wissota. She is more voluble about her son, the
third of four children. But her husband, Jerry Cherrier, also 51, a
scheduler at a local computer manufacturing plant, is less talkative about
their son, the grief still etched on his face.

The family waited a year, just as the counselors advised, to move from the
home where Justin grew up and where he died. The mementos of him at the
house include three teddy bears, made from swatches of his clothes.

They buried him near the entrance to the fairground in Chippewa Falls,
where Justin used to delight as a child. Not far away, at Irvine Park,
where he often played Frisbee golf, the family donated a bench in
Cherrier's name.

As in almost every other small community in hard-drinking Wisconsin, it is
not uncommon in Chippewa Falls for teens to experiment with alcohol and
even to graduate to smoking pot. As the life of the party, Cherrier
gravitated to these behaviors.

"We just thought he'd grow out of it," his mother said.

Instead, he matriculated to harder drugs, including one that had in the
late 1990s begun flowing into the community from the nearby Twin Cities.

Over his last years, he went from hale and outgoing to retiring and morose,
up at odd hours and often short of cash, hitchhiking long distances and
receiving threatening phone calls. He was broke and in the spring of 2002
returned home, the best shot he had at staying away from the drug.

Sue Cherrier said that her hard-won knowledge about meth abuse has made her
current job difficult.

"I tell (the students) about my Justin, but I don't know if they listen,"
she said. "Sometimes I just want to shake them and say, 'Wake up.' "