Read more on Saline's heroin issues: After a year in heroin's grip, Saline tries to fight back



When you think of a heroin addict, you won't think of John Strawbridge.

He played hockey, hunted ducks, enjoyed riding snowmobiles and loved playing the guitar. He didn’t spend a lot of time indoors as a kid, preferring to be out in the fresh air. A kind, sensitive boy, he was an inspiration to his mother.

Kimberly Ray poses for a photograph with a framed photo of her son John Strawbridge in her Saline home.

Kimberly Ray said raising Strawbridge was almost too easy.

“He was the best kid to raise, ever, in the world,” she said. “I thought I was the luckiest mom alive, because he never caused me any problems.”

His father, also named John Strawbridge, said his son was a blessing. Strawbridge said he felt lucky for each day with his son.

“He was a good kid, everyone liked him,” John Strawbridge said. “He was smart, talented.”

Yet, Strawbridge followed the familiar path so many heroin addicts take: Prescription drug use breeds an opioid addiction, opioid addiction breeds financial stress and those things combined lead to heroin, the cheaper alternative.

The younger John Strawbridge died at the age of 21 on Dec. 2 from a heroin overdose in Saline, one of three fatal overdoses from the drug in the community in 2013. He’d been using off and on for about two years. That time period included another overdose, a night in jail and a stint in rehab followed by eight months of sobriety.

In the end, heroin still took his life, no matter how much he wanted to stay away from it. His mother said he never knew the power the drug could have over him.

“He just got involved with something that, I know for a fact, he was too naive about,” she said. “He thought he was invincible. He’d tell me all the time, ‘Mom, Mom, I’m not gonna die.’ But, that’s what I would say to him: ‘I don’t want you to die.’”

Early signs of trouble

Strawbridge was a sweet boy, but Ray said she noticed a change in her son when he turned 16 and started driving. It was at that time Strawbridge started smoking marijuana and skipping school, which led to Ray disciplining him and keeping a closer eye on her son.

A black and white photograph of John Strawbridge hangs on the wall in Kimberly Ray's Saline home. Ray says she plans to move from the house where her son overdosed in December.

After he graduated from Saline High School, Strawbridge moved out of Ray’s home and close to Washtenaw Community College, where he was taking classes. Living on his own seemed to suit Strawbridge. Ray said he was going to school, working and earning promotions, paying some of his own bills and just generally doing the things expected of young adults recently on their own.

“I was looking at that and thinking there’s nothing to worry about, he's growing out of all this stuff,” she said.

But, she didn’t know Strawbridge had started dabbling in prescription drug usage.

His father said Strawbridge started out using Valium and Oxycontin, crushing up the drugs to snort them with his friends. And, like so many other users who start out taking pills, Strawbridge eventually moved to the cheaper, more readily available opioid: Heroin.

“They started out with their parents’ pharmaceuticals,” his father said. “Once they get locked out, they get driven into the heroin.”

Ray said she’d noticed her son's face was a little more gaunt than usual and dark circles were forming under his eyes, but she figured it was because Strawbridge was working a lot. She said she never confronted him about drug usage before he told her about his heroin use, but was constantly telling him wake up, get to work and do the things he needed to do.

Seeking a way out

When he was 19, roughly two years before his fatal overdose, Strawbridge told Ray he’d been using heroin for a couple of months and was hooked.

“I about hit the floor,” she said. “He wanted me to help him get something to help him get off it.”

Before Strawbridge went to rehab, Ray went so far as to kick him out of the house. She told him she refused to support him while he was using heroin and called it an attempt to “raise the bottom.”

Strawbridge ended up in jail for an unrelated incident (court records show numerous traffic violations, but no serious crimes), and Ray refused to bail him out. That convinced him to go to rehab.

He completed an 18-day program, but it didn’t take long for him to relapse. Strawbridge overdosed on Jan. 5, 2013, when his family found him unconscious in a bathroom.

The January overdose was enough to scare him straight for a time, with a period of sobriety lasting until the autumn of 2013.

Trying to stay clean

Kimberly Ray looks at a board filled with photos of her son, John Strawbridge, in her Saline home. Ray's daughter put the photo boards together for Johnny's funeral after he passed away from a heroin overdose in December.

During the summer of 2013, the elder Strawbridge said he saw his son often. But, he was disturbed by how often the shady people from his son’s past kept trying to muscle their way back into his life.

He said he knew his son was getting text messages from dealers telling him about their wares, trying to get him to use again. The anger in his voice is palpable when he speaks about the people who sold his son drugs.

“He’s trying to get clean and he’s getting dealers texting him,” Strawbridge said. “It’s overwhelming.”

That time period will go down as one of the most stressful in Ray’s life, with constant decisions about how to talk to her son, and how much to talk about heroin, were challenging.

She compared every day to playing Russian roulette poker — she’d play the best hand she could and her son would pull the trigger.

“You have the information about the addict, and then I play the hand and he shoots,” she said. “That’s how I really felt every day: What card do I play today?”

She said she never felt her son got enough time in rehab. The 18-day program at the Brighton Clinic cost about $9,000 — too much for any more time to be spent in the program. She appreciated the help of rehab workers and counselors, but she said she always felt like she needed more information.

In a place like Saline, there were not a lot of places to turn, Ray said. Her son moved back in with her, but she wonders if she should have sent him to a halfway house to help him transition back into sobriety. She said she never got enough information about what to do after rehab was over.

Strawbridge told Ray in the autumn of 2013 that he wanted to use again. The cravings were beginning to be too much, so Ray bought some home drug tests. In October, Strawbridge failed a test.

“I was always waiting for a relapse,” she said. “You just don’t sleep as a parent.”

Ray helped him get more medication to lessen the cravings — “I couldn’t let him go on it again,” she said — but still felt helpless. He used heroin sparingly in November.

The elder Strawbridge said the last time he saw his son was on Thanksgiving. Even though the cravings for heroin were flaring up again, his son looked like he was doing pretty well, he said.

Strawbridge said his son told him he was going back to school soon, and he’d started working again.

“I thought he was out of the woods,” Strawbridge said. “I thought he’d kick this and he’d make it.”

He felt that way until Dec. 2.

The terrible phone call

Every parent fears getting “that” phone call, the one where he or she knows what’s happened as soon as someone speaks on the other end of the line.

At about 4:30 p.m. Dec. 2, Ray got that call. She was at her job in Troy when her fiance called and she immediately left the office when she heard the tone in his voice.

“He just said ‘It’s not good, it’s Johnny.’ And I just said ‘I’m on my way home now.’”

While paramedics tried to revive Strawbridge, Ray was stuck in rush hour traffic trying to get home in time.

Meanwhile, the elder Strawbridge was also at work when his son took the fatal dose. He’d talked to his son earlier in the day, when he postponed a scheduled meeting for a few days.

Strawbridge said he felt a sudden sickness come over him about 3:15 p.m. Dec. 2. It hit him so hard that he had to sit down.

He didn’t know what could have made him feel like that, until he too got the call at 5:30 p.m. from Ray telling him his son had overdosed.

“I didn’t realize that was my son passing,” Strawbridge said. “I felt it.”

For a time, he denied it. About an hour passed before he got another call from Ray, telling him that he needed to go to Mount Pleasant and pick up their daughter, Kelsea, at Central Michigan University. She didn’t know yet.

Strawbridge said anger hit him on the drive. He hit the steering wheel, yelling and cursing at his son while he drove U.S. 127.

“I was mad. I was cursing that boy out loud all the way to Central,” he said. “I was surprised. It scared me. I was like, ‘Why am I so mad?’ but I was.”

He found Kelsea at her sorority house at CMU and pulled her out of a meeting to tell her John was dead. The news hit her hard. Her screams of “No!” pierced the air and she hit her father. She told him she felt numb the whole way home.

Fighting for change

It’s been a frustrating few months for John Strawbridge's parents as they try to cope with their son's death.

Strawbridge said he’s tried pressing Saline police and Livingston and Washtenaw Narcotics Enforcement Team (LAWNET) investigators to access his son’s phone and get the names of dealers. He wants them prosecuted, he wants them behind bars — he just wants to see some justice.

“Law enforcement needs to be more aggressive and get it off the streets,” he said.

Saline police Chief Larry Hrinik said investigators did seize John Strawbridge’s phone after he died. The phone was turned over to the Livingston And Washtenaw Narcotics Enforcement Team.

Hrinik said LAWNET investigators downloaded information from the phone, but it wasn’t enough to bring charges against an individual.

“We did have the phone, we did look into it and we even had the drug unit look into it,” Hrinik said. “And, we got some information but not enough to charge anybody.”

Meanwhile, Ray grieves through organizing and trying to fight back against the heroin epidemic in Washtenaw County. She won’t let Saline forget about its heroin problem, because she won’t let herself ever forget about her son.

In the past month, Ray spoke to the Saline Addiction Prevention Task Force about her son and offered to do anything she could.

She didn’t wait for the next meeting to get started, organizing a meeting on March 10 for community members to discuss what they want the task force to do. She brought those talking points to the task force on March 13.

She said she can hear Strawbridge telling her to keep pushing, keep talking and keep telling his story. Ray says she’s only one woman, only a mother who misses her son, and can’t do it all.

But, she’s going to do all she can. It’s what John wants.

“It’s very therapeutic to me, and it makes me feel closer to him now, like he’s not so far gone,” she said. “I feel like we’re a team doing this.”

Kyle Feldscher covers cops and courts for The Ann Arbor News. He can be reached at kylefeldscher@mlive.com or you can follow him on Twitter. Find all Washtenaw County crime stories here.