Sorry Dad, Goodbye Daughter

Not just another OD in Comanche Creek

On May 2, 2022, BCFAC, our local Facebook group that routinely reports on things that come over the scanner, made this simple report:  https://www.facebook.com/groups/butte.county.fires.accidents.crimes/posts/1669301610108303

“Chico 5/2/22 BCFAC 9:41 am Subject not breathing in the Comanche Creek parking lot.

Eight minutes later, the following sad news was broadcast and reported by BCFAC:

Update: Heroine OVERDOSE. Fire, medics, and police en route. 9:49 update from fire/medics: This is a confirmed 11-44 (fatality)”

If you read through the comments on that post, you can see that given the location, and the history with this sort of thing, people began to speculate about who it was.  For example “I hope he’s OK” was made before the report of the fatality.

Then 3 days later, BCFAC posted this:

5/5/2022: BCFC News — Chico, CA — We regret to report the death of Audrey Parker (22) and extend sincere condolences to her family and friends.

Audrey was found deceased from an overdose at Comanche Creek in Chico on Monday, May 2, 2022.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/butte.county.fires.accidents.crimes/posts/1671602943211503

It is not what anyone expected.

A friend spoke with a man who was there at the time, and here are some of the additional facts she learned.

It occurred in the “Warming Tent” placed their compliments of the City of Chico, having relocated it from Depot Park.  Ironically, I shared a post recently that showed the condition of that tent at the time. 

On April 30, I shared a post that had some pictures of the place.  https://www.facebook.co

m/groups/chicofirst.org/posts/1409801266137129

Here is a picture of the warming tent.  It has been decorated by the local artists there. The residents call it the “opium den”. It is a shooting gallery for opioids and meth.  Word gets around.

Here is some additional information that comes from someone who was there.  It is well known that there are ample drugs in a place like Comanche Creek.  Although Audrey was not a Chico native, she attended PV in her senior year a couple of years ago.

She was not living in Comanche Creek or any other homeless camp in town.  So one must presume she went there with a purpose.  The purpose was drugs, which she readily found.

As with most nights, the “opium den” was a drug party most nights.  When I say party, don’t imagine music and dancing.  Given the two most prevalent drugs in use, meth, and fentanyl, the “party” takes on two distinct forms.

For the met users, it’s a place to smoke or even shoot up.  When you are high on meth, you are awake.  So when you are high, you need to do stuff.  If you have ever visited a so-called “tweaker” camp, you know what I mean.  Everywhere you look, there are disassembled bikes, intricated knots, and strings holding up this corner of tarp or this tree branch.  The very idea of “tweaker” comes from this incessant activity.  Also, those high on meth are strong “foragers”, so they wander around the adjacent neighborhoods, liberating anything and everything that catches their hyped-up attention. 

If you’ve been awake for a while, or are using the now plentiful P2P meth, you are also likely to be paranoid and dilutional.  A few of these become violent.  But the whole symptomology of meth use involves wakefulness and activity, even if that activity might seem bizarre to a sober soul.

Opioids are the opposite kind of party.  People who use “nod off”.  There was a famous picture of two parents in their car slumped over in the front seats with their child in a car seat in the back.   You may have seen it.  That’s nodding off.  Other users know this and expect it, so seeing a user drop into deep slumber is the normal reaction to “partying” with opioids of any kind. 

But not all opioids are the same. The current rage is fentanyl, 100 times more potent than morphine.  Just a few salt-grain-sized doses of pure fentanyl can be such a strong depressant that it stops your breathing altogether, and eventually, your heart stops.  If you wanted to painlessly euthanize a human being, fentanyl is a good choice.

I once had fentanyl administered as the drug of choice during a heart procedure.  Although the dose was small, the effects were unmistakable.  First, there is a warm, contented sense of euphoria.  No word describes it better than “pleasant” in every way.  It comes on almost instantly.  I remember that because the nurse warned me before they shot it into my IV drip.  The words were hardly out of her mouth before I felt its effects.

It goes away just as fast.  Once they dosed me, they kept a minute drip going throughout the procedure.  As soon as they stopped that drip, the feeling vanished, completely.  Now in my imagination, I can understand how a dose 10 times, 100 times stronger than the one I had would feel.  It would be a rush of pleasure.  It would feel so good that very little in the real world could ever compete with that feeling.

The thing with such a powerful drug is everyone involved is an amateur. It is made by mostly Mexican cartel labs, based on a Chinese recipe and precursor drugs.  It is mixed in poorly run labs and pressed into pills. The pills are ingested or dissolved and injected. The problem is because the fentanyl is so strong, most of the pill is some inert substance, and the mixing is critical to distribute the powerful fentanyl into these other powders.  That doesn’t always go so well, and this is one reason there are so many ODs and why Narcan is being used many times a night in our town.

Anyway, at some point, Audrey, young, beautiful Audrey, shows up at the “opium den” in Comanche Creek, with the “Welcome to Hell” painted on the doorway.  She goes inside.  Maybe she says she’s looking to party.  Maybe she has money.  Maybe not.  She was young and pretty and didn’t look much like many of the other people residing there. She must have been quite welcome.

According to a first-hand account, she scored the drugs.  How she ingested them I don’t know, but, according to a witness, she sort of curled up on the dirt floor and nodded off.  The party went on, and those there assumed she was sleeping.  Unfortunately, she was not.  At some point, she stopped breathing, but no one noticed anything unusual.

I guess someone tried to wake her, or noticed she hadn’t moved at all in a while, or for some other reason, discovered she was not breathing.

Narcan is everywhere.  It is definitely in this camp, as it is used all the time.  Someone called 911 and BCFAC reported the call.

Now please remember that the Fire and EMS staff are first responders, true, but they are people. They are people who are used to this kind of call.  They are not used to this kind of victim.  Some of them have daughters, I’ll bet.

I once had a good friend and neighbor who was a Battalion Chief for the Santa Clara fire department.  We sailed together, and during those times he would tell me stories of some of the strange and the difficult calls, and how much of an issue it is for fire(wo)men to deal with the stress of the job.  Responding to car accidents and extracting people and bodies from the wreckage is one of the most traumatic.  But the worst traumatic event, one for which there is a special protocol that all responders must go through, not unlike police-involved shootings, is when dead children are involved. 

He told me a story of a plane crash in LA, where fire was responsible for recovering bodies and body parts.  Some of those bodies and parts belonged to children.  According to a study of this incident, something like half of the responders to that incident became alcohol abusers, spousal abusers, or committed suicide.  That was the beginning of the very formal stress management protocols in fire departments across the country.  I’m sure that protocol was put to good use after 9/11 for example.

So one thing to think about is the tragedy of the end of life of this young woman, barely beyond what we might call a child.  Another thing to think about is the tragedy of being one of the first responders to this scene.

And then there are the parents, and in this story, the father.  The word is that Audrey’s boyfriend came to Comanche Creek looking for his girlfriend.  I don’t’ know whether he found her, whether she refused to leave with him, or what.  She stayed.

After Audrey was pronounced dead, and her parents were notified of this tragic news, the father wanted to visit the place where his daughter died.

Many of you have daughters and sons.  I know it is not hard to imagine the heartbreak any parent would feel at the news that your child had died.  I don’t’ know whether that heartbreak would be any greater or lessened by the way your child died.  Some ways seem worse than others.  Suicide, whether intentional or unintentional seems like one of the worst, perhaps because it is so avoidable.  It would be tempting and easy to blame oneself and scream your lament over not being there to save your daughter from herself.

But as all adults know, at some point, earlier or later for some, parents just cannot protect their children from themselves.  One of the emancipating facts of turning 21 is the freedom that comes with no longer having to ask your parents for permission.  Sometimes that doesn’t work out for the best.

We don’t know, and perhaps we never will know what led Audrey to seek out the drugs she was after, or what she was thinking as she put those drugs into her body.  It saddens me as a father to think of the many nights ahead of these parents, trying fatally to answer that question as they lay awake at night, going over every detail of the short life of their daughter, Audrey Parker.

Based on what I’ve learned, the father wanted to see where his daughter died.  For that purpose, he visited Comanche Creek and entered the tent with the message “Welcome to Hell” painted on the entrance. The inside is strewn with the expected debris, and the floor is well-trampled dirt.  Perhaps someone pointed out the exact location where Audrey’s dead body was discovered.  Maybe he took a look around.  Maybe he experienced the world of Comanche Creek that is depicted in these pictures taken just a few days before his daughter’s death.  Maybe it all made him feel worse, knowing where she died.  I hope I never know what he experienced.

As for the police, they are not failing.  Here is a post of just one man accused of selling fentanyl.  There is no know connection between him and the young victim. But there is a connection between him and fentanyl.  And we know that there is a connection between fentanyl to Audrey.  https://www.facebook.com/groups/butte.county.fires.accidents.crimes/posts/1671471023224695/

While we are at it, here is a picture of an accused meth dealer.  https://www.facebook.com/groups/butte.county.fires.accidents.crimes/posts/1671874506517680/

These are current residents of our community, both now residing at the county jail.

What are we to make of all this?  I have no idea.  What I can say is it is a terrible failure.  It is a failure for Audrey to make responsible decisions for herself.  It is a failure of her parents to obtain what every parent prays for, to die before their children.

It is a failure of the harm reduction crowd, who promote the “safety” that comes with the availability of Narcan.  I’m sure there was some nearby, and I’m certain the EMS folks had some, but I also know Audrey died doing that thing that Narcan was invented for.  She might have used a clean needled, too, not that it would have mattered in her case.  The mantra from the harm reduction crowd, defending the wide availability and use of Narcan is “You can’t recover if you’re dead.”  Audrey will not be recovering.

It is a failure of our homeless industry and those who are fighting and defending and enabling the right of people to live in places like Comanche Creek.  They fail to acknowledge the now undeniable fact. Not only do their policies fail to help the homeless people who live on the streets, but a consequence of their existence is the open-air drug markets that prosper at Comanche Creek and elsewhere.  If you are a troubled youth living in a house, and for whatever reasons you decide you want to take some really powerful narcotics, it is not much of a challenge to know where to go.  For years, when kids wanted to buy drugs, they went to the homeless camps.  That is where the drugs are.  If a 14 or 18 or 22-year-old knows that, it seems like we should all know that, and be willing to do something about it.

This brings me to the failure of government.  It is impossible to know who or how to blame “government” or even if it is mostly the responsibility of local cities, counties, the state, or the national institutions for what we are experiencing.  But it is happening, and the death of Audrey Parker reminds us that this is not some hypothetical discussion about a remote problem that doesn’t affect us. If you have a beating heart, you can feel the pain this has caused anyone and everyone who is touched by it.

Finally, if this is a failure of government, it must also be a failure of society.  No civilized society would permit such tragedies to happen without an outcry, a demand for immediate action, change, a return to community standards, and most of all, a culture that treats our children with a protective shield of safety, cleanliness, and beauty.  Audrey was a beautiful young woman, and now she’s dead. What a tragic, preventable, irresponsible waste.

We all own this in one way or another.  What, I wonder, will we do with this knowledge?