For seven precious months, all of the lies, stealing and suspicious behavior seemed to be over.
The son that David and Susan Plew thought they’d lost was back. Leland Plew had started taking prescription opioid pills as a teenager, which eventually led to an addiction to heroin. At his lowest point, his parents enrolled him in detox and then a 90-day recovery program.
Living at home, working a steady job and regularly attending recovery meetings, the personality that Leland had displayed before his addiction took hold was returning.
[sc:text-divider text-divider-title=”Story continues below gallery” ]
“Once the opioids were out of his system, we saw our son come back,” said David Plew. “The relationship that was coming back was like it had been before there was an addiction. When we look back, we’re so grateful we had that time with him.”
But relapse is a constant threat to people recovering from addictions. Over the course of a weekend in mid-July, Leland relapsed. He died from an overdose of heroin in his Center Grove home on July 13, 2014, just weeks shy of his 23rd birthday. His parents found him in his room.
The loss of their son is still difficult to talk about; the pain will never go away. Still, the Plews have decided to use their experience to call for change in the way people think about opioid addiction.
They couldn’t save Leland’s life, but they may be able to prevent other people from dying.
“We want to help other people and parents and addicts, to let them know what our experiences were, where our faults were, where we failed, so that they don’t make the same ones we do,” David Plew said. “We can keep our son’s memory alive, using his tragic ending to help other people.”
Even nearly four years later, the Plews are haunted by questions about their son’s addiction. They admit they made mistakes in overlooking the severity of opioid addiction, and had misconceptions about opioids in general that, had they been educated, may have saved his life.
Leland’s death is the end of a surreal and baffling chain of events that the Plews still don’t completely understand. For the prior four months, he had doggedly committed to his recovery from addiction.
He had a job at Buchanan Hauling and Rigging, where his father worked. Throughout the week, he attended 12-step meetings, carrying on the program he had started during a three-month stay at a drug and alcohol treatment center.
But on a Saturday night in mid-July 2014, he disappeared for 12 hours. His parents couldn’t reach him on his cellphone. Friends that they called didn’t know where he was.
At 5:30 a.m. the next morning, Leland showed up to their home with a stray dog. He had been dropped off by a tow truck, claiming that the dog had jumped out in front of him and he crashed the car swerving to avoid it.
His parents believed him. They had built back trust in Leland with his commitment to recovery.
“As a parent, our failure was that we wanted so much to believe him. We were being duped, very convincingly,” David Plew said.
Leland went to his room to sleep as the Plews pondered his story, which made less and less sense as they thought about it. They realized they would need to confront their son to learn the real story, and waited for him to wake up.
As he slept, they checked on him regularly to make sure he was breathing, and he was all throughout the morning.
About 10:30 a.m., David and Susan Plew heard footsteps in Leland’s room. They waited for him to come downstairs. When he didn’t, they decided to go get him.
“Something wasn’t right, and we needed to figure it out,” David Plew said. “We went up to his room, and we go to open the door, and it’s locked.”
When the Plews knocked and yelled for Leland to let them in, there was no response. Increasingly terrified, Susan Plew kicked in the door.
Leland was laying on the floor, his skin white and pale. He wasn’t breathing, and they couldn’t find a pulse.
Susan Plew gave her son CPR, while David Plew called 911. Emergency crews came, and he was given doses of naloxone, a drug which reverses the effects of an overdose, but it was too late to save his life.
Investigators found a baggie of heroin in Leland’s room, but there were no syringes, spoons to cook the drug, straws or rolled-up dollar bills used to snort it, residue powder or other evidence that he had taken the drug the morning he died.
“We’re all baffled. If he was awake and fine that morning, when did he overdose?” David Plew said.
The Plews have reconciled the fact that their son had a combination of the genetic predisposition, social pressures and the biological changes drugs impart on the brain that lead to addiction.
But David Plew is haunted by incidences that, though he has no definitive proof, he believes led to Leland’s later struggles.
EARLY INTRODUCTION
As an 11-month-old baby, Leland needed to have frontal cranial reconstructive surgery to reopen the soft spot on his skull that had fused too early, putting pressure on the young brain.
Though they don’t know for sure, the Plews have been told by pediatricians that for a surgery like that, Leland would have received morphine for pain.
“Here’s this 11-month-old brain introduced to an opioid. Obviously, he’s too young to understand the euphoria, but the brain knows,” David Plew said.
When Leland had his tonsils out as a teenager, he received opioid pain pills. Following surgery to have his wisdom teeth removed at age 17, he was prescribed opioids again.
“By the time he’s 17 years old, his brain has already been introduced to opioid pain pills three times,” David Plew said. “Then when he goes off to college and he’s doing them recreationally, no wonder he likes them so much.”
In school, Leland played lacrosse and soccer. He loved to golf and fish. He was an amateur artist who enjoyed painting, abstract art and sketching.
But as he reached graduation from Center Grove High School in 2010, his parents began to notice signs of substance abuse. That summer, he was arrested for possession of alcohol by a minor. The Plews also believe this is where his addiction to prescription opioids started.
Leland moved to Bloomington that fall to attend classes at Ivy Tech Community College, but by Thanksgiving, he had failed out of school. When his parents demanded that he move back home, Leland started outpatient recovery at Valle Vista Health System.
“That seemed to help a lot. The behavior seemed to change more for the positive, and he enrolled in Ivy Tech here in Indianapolis. He made the dean’s list that spring,” David Plew said.
EMOTIONAL JOURNEY
But the Plews would soon learn the exhausting and exasperating up-and-down nature of addiction. For all of the strides that Leland seemed to be making, he relapsed less than a year later.
His parents started to see the erratic behavior return. He quit going to classes, failing out of school again. The Plews caught Leland lying more and more. He would leave the house for long periods of time and not explain where he was, getting angry when he was questioned.
“I would just get so frustrated with him and say, ‘Just quit! Why are you doing this to yourself?’ I didn’t understand that there was a brain disease,” David Plew said. “It was a roller coaster emotionally. You don’t like the person that they become. This disease, it’s not them. You have to understand that.”
Again, he agreed to go to outpatient recovery treatment at Valle Vista. Leland assured his parents he was back on track with his sobriety. He spent a summer in Wisconsin with family members, where he was hired to work landscaping. From everything the Plews had heard, he was healthy, happy and staying sober.
The next relapse was the hardest.
Leland couldn’t hold down a job, getting fired from a local restaurant then a retail store because he was repeatedly late.
David and Susan Plew noticed that items from their home were missing. Leland would borrow an iPad or something similar, then when they questioned him about it, he’d tell lies about where it was.
“What was happening was he was taking things and pawning them for his addiction,” David Plew said.
The nightmare deepened when a childhood friend of Leland’s called David and Susan Plew. The friend had heard from others that Leland was using heroin. They confronted him, but he said he’d never stick a needle in his arm, David Plew said.
But on Dec. 23, 2013, Susan Plew found cotton swabs and other heroin-related paraphernalia. Again, his parents confronted him, and this time, Leland broke down, admitting that he was using heroin, a habit that had started two months prior.
“We had a big knock-down, drag-out screaming match. Again, we didn’t understand that it was an addiction,” David Plew said. “At one point, I told him to get out. He looked like the world had crashed in on him, and said that if that’s what we wanted, he’d go. But he didn’t know where he was going to go.”
‘LOSING A GENERATION’
Despite their anger and hurt, the Plews’ parental love took over. They agreed to let him sleep at their home that night, and they’d figure out the next step in the morning.
“The one thing about someone who’s in active addiction: they don’t like it, they don’t like themselves. They’re embarrassed by it. They’re remorseful,” David Plew said.
The next day, the Plews took Leland to Fairbanks, a drug and alcohol treatment center on the northside of Indianapolis. He started a week-long detox on Christmas Eve. By this point, he had been struggling with addiction for more than three years.
Afterwards, Leland entered a recovery center called La Verna Lodge, located in Carmel, where he would be immersed in recovery treatment, from group therapy to medication-assisted treatment with drugs such as suboxone and vivitrol to a traditional 12-step program.
He spent 87 days in La Verna, and in March of 2014, he came home to Center Grove.
“Leland felt like, and his counselor felt like, that he was ready to take the next step and move away from the facility. He was accepting his treatment and his rehab, and was very open to it. He didn’t want to be an addict, he wanted to be healthy mentally, physically and spiritually,” David Plew said.
Leland’s recovery, though tenuous, stayed on track when he returned home.
The friends that he was hanging around with when he was using opioids weren’t part of his life. Trust was building back, David Plew said.
Then, four months later, he died from an overdose.
Since his death, the Plews have thrown themselves into learning more about opioid addiction. The family also has become involved with Overdose Lifeline, an Indianapolis nonprofit organization that educates communities, particularly parents, students and first responders, about opioids and the dangers of overdose. The group also trains and helps distribute naloxone.
And they’ve used their experience to teach others. David Plew has spoken at community forums throughout central Indiana, including in Johnson County, to talk about how opioids have impacted their life.
Every fall, he speaks to the Center Grove High School boys soccer team, sharing Leland’s story.
“I talk about the mistakes we made, the number of deaths that are occurring. I tell everybody that if they have a loved one with an opioid addiction, go get a Narcan kit, because you’ll save a life of someone who’s overdosing,” he said. “We’re losing a generation of young people in this epidemic.”
[sc:pullout-title pullout-title=”About this series” ][sc:pullout-text-begin]
The United States is in the midst of the worst drug epidemic in history.
Opioids, including prescription painkillers, heroin and fentanyl, are killing Americans.
The Daily Journal is taking a yearlong look into the public health crisis that touches nearly every segment of our community and crosses all socioeconomic lines, from families who lost loved ones to health and law enforcement workers on the front lines.
Addicted & Dying will also explore solutions and a path forward.
Our project starts today by looking at the number of deaths in 2017, how the crisis is touching the community and its roots.
Got an idea for our project? Contact us as 317-736-2770.
[sc:pullout-text-end]
