A DAD’S GRIEF
21-year-old daughter latest victim of fentanyl’s deadly toll
A 21-year-old Maple Ridge woman who died after using fentanyl-laced cocaine was preparing to start a real estate course and turn her life around, after a troubled past that included a string of bad boyfriends, according to her grieving father.
An ex-boyfriend found Charly Ann Torikka unresponsive in her Maple Ridge apartment early Nov. 6. Paramedics were unable to revive her.
George Wolf said he doesn’t know much about the night his daughter died. He remembered his daughter as a teen who liked singing, but not the spotlight.
“About Grade 9 she started getting into musical theatre,” Wolf said Tuesday. “She was a little shy as far as being out front, but she sang in the chorus a lot.”
Wolf, a manager for a Delta security firm, said his daughter’s shy nature eventually led her into doing makeup for the musicals at Abbotsford Traditional Middle School. She got good grades, her father said, but her life got complicated when she discovered boys around Grade 10.
“I would say to her you’ve got to meet some nicer guys, and then she would go meet somebody worse,” Wolf said, adding Charly changed schools after she was the subject of bullying at the school.
She finished her schooling at Abbotsford’s W.J. Mouat Secondary, and gave birth to a daughter before graduating. The baby was adopted by a family friend, but Charly was able to maintain contact with the little girl, Wolf said.
Charly’s death has devastated his blended family, where she was one of six children, Wolf said. “My son, who’s 18, still lives at home. My 17-year-old daughter, she can barely get through the day without crying.”
After graduating high school, Charly moved to Maple Ridge. She worked at a coffee shop and a grocery story, and had decided this fall to upgrade her education.
Now she has joined the growing list of B.C.’s fentanyl-related deaths. The family plans a memorial for her Saturday.
The B.C. Coroners Service has logged 555 apparent drug overdoses deaths from January to September 2016, a 60.9 per cent increase over the same period in 2015, when there were 345 such deaths.
Fentanyl, an opiate used medically to relieve severe surgical and cancer-related pain, has been a growing factor in those deaths since 2012. Drug deaths with fentanyl detected, either alone or with another drug, rose from five per cent of illegal drug deaths in 2012, to 30 per cent of such deaths in 2015, to 60 per cent so far this year.
Coroners service official Barb McLintock said a team of coroners was set up earlier this month to look into this year’s rise in illicit drug overdose deaths.
“The most common mixed drug overdose death we get is indeed fentanyl and cocaine,” McLintock said, adding the coroners team is looking for “more detailed information about provincewide drug deaths, which we will then share with our various partners, in the hopes that we will be able to get some improved prevention strategies going here.”