#local cop finds fentanyl at local hospital

[kootenaygoon]

Prologue When we pulled up to the Balfour ferry terminal the RCMP were already there. It was a quiet, cloudy afternoon in late November 2017 and my roommate Mika was behind the wheel of my sky-blue RAV4. We were en route to the Cranbrook Airport and I’d been vibrating angrily in the passenger seat the whole way from Nelson. I was dressed in bouncer black, with a slick grey tie tucked into my vest and a toque pulled low over my eyes. I’m dressing up for my breakdown, that’s what I kept telling myself. 

In the previous two weeks I’d lost first my job, then my mind, but I was determined to handle the continuing plummet with a modicum of dignity. After spending a week running manic laps between the Kootenay Lake Hospital and the Nelson Police Department, causing unnecessary social media spectacles and dumping my drama on whoever would listen, I was finally going home to the coast.

Shit was out of control.

“What’s going on?” I asked Mika, my journalism senses tingling. “Look at all the cop cars up there.”

“They don’t have their lights on.”

“Holy shit, there’s what? Like four? They’re parked down both sides of the causeway.”

“There’s one over there too.”

A few weeks earlier, during a mundane Wednesday lunch hour, my boss at the Nelson Star had summoned me to his office. I was nearly four years into one of the most fulfilling gigs of my life, and had written over 1300 articles during that time, but I’d attracted the publisher’s attention after attending the funeral of a young woman. I was on the fentanyl beat, and she was the latest casualty in a vicious opioid epidemic that was making headlines across the province, but some of her family members had sent furious emails about my attendance to the paper and, after reading some social media posts I’d written about the girl, he decided to jettison me from the team. Without a sustainable option readily available, I didn’t know how I could survive financially in the Kootenays. For two weeks I was enraged, therapy-painting in my living room as I tried to come up with a new life plan. 

I told people I was trying to “spin it positive”.

Looking back now, my meltdown seems inevitable, though I couldn’t let myself see it coming. Within a few days of receiving my walking papers I began searching for employment, working my local contacts and reassuring everyone that I was okay, while inside I was tortured and furious. I drove Mika to school, slept in when I felt like it, and kept up my second gig as a bouncer. I started posting new stories on my blog — including an interview with a local First Nations Chief and another with a cannabis compassion club director, and weighed the viability of going freelance somehow. Then one night at the bar, after being nearly hit by a drunk driver while leaving for my break, I ended up talking to a friend who confided that her ex-boyfriend had threatened her and her family. That was the moment I really snapped, and I remember the surge of vertigo I felt the moment I let go. I knew what I was doing was dangerous, I knew it was uncalled for, and I didn’t give a fuck. The resulting social media posts resulted in me losing the second job, and within a few days my parents were scrambling to get me on a plane.

The morning of my flight home I woke up to a light snowfall, and from the second floor of my house I could see that the police had returned my vehicle — I’d left it parked diagonally in their lot before charging in to demand to see the police chief the day before. I called down to ask for my keys, and a few minutes later stood in the street talking with one of the constables about everything that had gone down. He reassured me that people understood what I was going through, and would empathize, despite my demented vitriol. He wished me luck while snowflakes fell, and shook my hand.

“Your job now is to take care of yourself. You’re going to be just fine,” he said.

At the ferry a few hours later I clambered out of my RAV to figure out what was happening with all the cop cars. There were three or four lineups of vehicles waiting for the approaching ferry, and I counted at least six cruisers parked strategically around the terminal. The closest one belonged to Lisa Schmidtke of the Nelson Police Department, a cop I’d written about more than once for the Nelson Star — she was one of the officers who went around the district to teach students how to hide during a school shooting. As it turned out, she’d also been looking to get a statement from me about the drunk driver I’d reported. After nearly getting into an accident with him outside the bar, I’d actually ran into him a second time in the hospital, strapped to a gurney. I was in a nearby room meeting with nurses who were trying to figure out whether they should commit me or not.

“Lisa, hey,” I said. “I know you want to talk to me.”

She was carrying an assault rifle, slung across her chest, and she slammed her car door. “Not now, Will. We have to get this guy into custody.”

What guy? I didn’t know what she was talking about, but while she jogged up the line of vehicles I went into a nearby bakery and asked for a piece of paper and pen. I quickly scribbled down my recollection of the night’s events, then left my parents’ phone number and the name of another officer — I’d already described everything to him. There was a slight misting rain drifting by as I slipped the piece of paper through her window.

“What’s happening?” Mika asked, when I returned to the car.

“I don’t know,” I said. “But I’m going to find out.”

For those moments I was calm. I had something to fixate on, to learn more about, which had been my function for the past four years. I wished I had my camera, but then I remembered I didn’t have a job anymore. I thought about what the police chief had told me — “this isn’t your job, it’s ours” — but I couldn’t help myself. I walked down to the shoreline, where a pair of cops were getting ready to board. I nodded to one I recognized from my CrossFit gym, and stood within hearing distance while they strategized.

“He’s in the fourth car, down the middle lane,” one of them said.

Moments later, once the ferry had docked, I watched the officers tromp aboard. I’d always admired the police in the Kootenays, and it felt almost cinematic to see them in action. They fanned out around the cars, some of them with guns drawn. For a moment I wasn’t thinking about my own bullshit, I was just wondering who this guy was and what he’d done — then I saw him. The cops had him in handcuffs, roughly marching him down the gangplank, and I could see the prison tattoo beside his eye. He was sketchy-looking, with a puckered mean expression. I recognized him immediately: it was the same dirtbag from the bar and the hospital, the one who almost hit me with his car. These sorts of things happen all the time in Nelson — the population’s been hovering around 10,000 people for years — but I still couldn’t believe the coincidence. Chaotic images swirled across my brainspace.

“That’s him!” I shrieked, before I had a chance to decide what to do. “That’s the drunk driver I caught the other night! That’s him!”

I could see in the cops’ faces: oh, shit.

“That’s right!” I yelled, running out from among the cars. “Enjoy prison, fuck face! You could’ve killed somebody.”

The dude’s hateful eyes swung in my direction. He sneered.

“Fuck you, fatty,” he said. “Come at me.”

I’m sure I was waving my arms, I was also running, but I stopped just shy of actually tackling this dude (thank God). The officers screamed back at me, waving me off, as they loaded him into the car. I must’ve looked like an angry hobbit.

“Get back,” they said. “Or we’ll arrest you for obstruction.”

That shut me up for a moment, but right away I knew what to do: call Greg Nesteroff. Dude was my former editor and absolute hero, working at a local radio station, and like me he had a justice boner for holding assholes accountable. During our time sharing a newsroom he’d nailed a man charged with possessing child pornography, and had written a fiery editorial calling out a local police officer for punching a woman during an arrest. I quickly dialled his number, pacing by the cop car, and I tried to remember the drunk driver’s name from the other night. As soon as Greg answered I made sure to talk as loudly as I could so both the cops and the guy in custody knew exactly what I was doing.

“I’ve got the radio on the line,” I told one of the cops. “What’s this guy’s name?”

“We can’t tell you that, privacy reasons.”

Ultimately, I calmed down enough to walk back to where Mika was standing with her two friends by my RAV. I told them what happened, manic again, and they could hardly believe the coincidence. (As if I wasn’t dealing with enough that day.) A lady with a baby asked me to watch my language, so I quickly apologized and retreated to the car to seethe. I was feeling all kinds of uncomfortable emotions, unsure of how to bring myself back down, and I blinked back hot tears. Mika and her friends loaded in and began to chatter, their voices like birdsong, but I couldn’t pull myself into the moment. I hated that I was being forced to leave Nelson, and my chest felt like it was on the verge of bursting open from all the uncomfortable truths I was carrying. It felt like there had been a certain narrative presented to my community and I wasn’t being allowed to correct the record. I was being chased out of town at a sprint while other people were getting away without being held accountable.

This isn’t fucking fair, I thought.

Somewhere in these moments I began to tweet. I pulled out my phone and stabbed at the screen, writing histrionic posts I could tag people in. “The Nelson community threw me under the bus” I wrote, tagging fellow journalists and news outlets, and “You fire me in the middle of a fucking fentanyl crisis?”. I tagged anyone I thought might be able to intervene on my behalf, though I had no idea what that would look like. Mika was dealing with loading on to the ferry while I sat in the passenger seat in attack mode, calling out people I had a problem with. That’s when my editor from Maisonneuve, Andrea Bennett, reached out through a direct message. She was in the hospital on the verge of going into labour but took the time to tell me to stop. Another writer, Erika Thorkelson, told me “you’re in no state to be giving interviews” and encouraged me to get off social media. I sent her a “Thank You” emoticon and signed out, finally getting to a place where I could listen to some reason.

“I’m going to pace around the deck,” I told Mika, once the ferry was moving. “I need to clear my head.”

Kootenay Lake was gorgeous, glass-like, as I walked around the perimeter. Everything was calm except for me. I chatted with a truck driver for a few minutes, then pulled up my hood and started marching laps from one end of the boat to the other. The anger pulsing through my limbs didn’t feel like an emotion; it was more like a physical malady, like a stomach ache or a migraine. My fingers were trembling. My thoughts kept circling back to the same asshole, someone completely unrelated to my current crisis, but for whom I’d carried around a multi-year beef. I thought of him living safe and happy in Nelson while I lost everything I love and I just couldn’t fucking handle it. Finally I came around to the back, where some loose orange netting was the only thing between me and the water below. Staring down at it, I realized that I could easily jump into the cold arms of Kootenay Lake — I figured my coat would weigh me down enough that I would drown. Then someone else could deal with this.

Holy shit, I realized. That’s a suicidal thought.

It was the first time in my 33 years on the planet that I’d contemplated suicide, and it scared the shit out of me. Right away I knew it was a whole new line that I wasn’t ready to cross, so I quickly beelined back to the car and jumped in.

“Hey,” I told Mika. “I just thought about throwing myself off the back of the ferry. I don’t want you to worry, because I’m not going to do it, but I’m going to stay in the car, okay?”

She looked at me with exhaustion in her eyes.

“Yeah,” she said. “Stay right there and we’ll get you to the airport.”

The Kootenay Goon