DESPERATE CRIMES
Opioid addict lost his way
PAINKILLERS: OPIOID ADDICTION’S DEADLY PATH
Thursday: Dying too young Friday: Road to addiction Saturday: An addict’s tale Today: Desperate crimes Tuesday: In the trenches Wednesday: Kicking the habit Police caught him on a stormy January day, just before 4 a.m. He was trudging down Seminole Street in a blizzard with no jacket on, carrying a 42-inch flat screen TV, two DVD players and a charity donation box.
Brandon McCann’s capture after breaking into an east end hair salon that snowy day would be the last in a long string of arrests for him — so many that his mother can’t even guess at a number.
Before dropping dead on his kitchen floor in June 2016, Brandon spent 16 years in the depths of an all-consuming drug addiction, stealing everything from meat to water bottles to feed his insatiable need.
His mother, Lisa McCann, said that even for Brandon, breaking into that hair salon in 2014 was a low point. It finally made him realize how far he’d sunk.
“I don’t believe he was alone because he wouldn’t do something like that,” said McCann. “But the fact is that he did. He said ‘I can’t do this anymore. I’m an idiot.’ He didn’t even remember doing that.”
Windsor police said break and enters, along with many other crimes including assaults, robberies, shoplifting and shootings, are symptoms of the opioid crisis as people either try to feed their addiction or make money off the afflicted.
The narcotics are pricey on the street, and drug dealers don’t tend to be the charitable kind. To pay for the extreme markup, desperate addicts will do what it takes to get the cash. Investigators laid a drug charge once a day in 2016, according to Windsor police statistics, but it might be the volume of other crimes that better paint a picture of how big the problem has grown.
There was a break and enter or an attempt in Windsor in less than every six hours last year. There was a theft under $5,000 every three hours and a theft from a motor vehicle about every five hours. Windsor police laid a charge for possession of stolen goods about once a day. There was a robbery or a robbery attempt about every two days.
“There’s no doubt that addiction and illegal drug use goes hand-inhand and gets stretched to other crimes because it is expensive and illegal,” said Windsor police Sgt. Steve Betteridge. “And for people to fund that there’s always a correlation stretching into thefts, break and enters, crimes of that nature.”
He said drugstore robberies are an “excellent example” of crimes that addicts commit to feed their habits.
“The need takes over the priorities in their life,” he said.
“It becomes someone’s sole purpose and they don’t think of the ramifications of that crime they’re doing. Their only mindset is feeding that addiction.”
Jessica, who asked to be identified only by a pseudonym, said she carries a knife for protection because people want her dead after the havoc she caused as a desperate fentanyl addict. She doesn’t want her real name used for the same reason.
“If somebody told me when I was 15: ‘Hey stupid, if you do drugs you’re going to end up $50,000 in debt, on the street, selling your body,’ I never would have done it,” said Jessica, 25, who has been clean for several months.
She owes that $50,000 to the government, credit card companies and other legitimate lenders. She said it doesn’t include the many thousands she owes dealers, who are still looking for their money.
Jessica became a one-woman crime wave.
She drained her parents’ bank accounts and broke into factories to steal aluminum and copper. She worked as an escort. She enrolled in a local private college and obtained a $20,000 Ontario Student Assistance Program loan for classes she rarely attended. She spent $5,000 of that money on drugs in five days.
Jessica said she used empty envelopes to make fake deposits at bank machines then withdraw the funds. She also wrote bad cheques. Another one of her scams involved grabbing an item off the shelf at Walmart and bringing it to the customer service desk to return it.
Over the course of it all, she also lost her daughter and ended up homeless.
“It’s the most addictive drug in the world, they say. I can tell you it’s true,” said Jessica.
She started with Percocets in Grade 9 after jaw surgery, and eventually escalated to smoking fentanyl.
To finance her habit, she sold as well as used. She even got banned from Brentwood Recovery Home after getting caught peddling drugs there.
A lot of the people she bought patches from were seniors. One woman in her 70s sold her husband’s patches while he was on his deathbed.
She also knew a woman working in a doctor’s office who forged prescriptions for a fee. Jessica took the bogus prescriptions to the woman’s friend who worked in a pharmacy.
Other people cut out the middleman and just rob the pharmacy. There have been more than 20 pharmacies robbed over the last year in the Windsor area. Weapons used in the robberies — often perpetrated by reckless addicts unconcerned about consequences — have included knives, a crowbar and a shotgun.
Melissa Teves was behind the cash register at Hunter’s Pharmacy on Tecumseh Road East when two men burst in and vaulted over the counter. The men seemed desperate, they were jumpy and they had a gun.
The robbers wanted fentanyl. To drive home how serious they were, one of them pointed the gun at Teves as she cowered on the floor.
“They were kind of frantic,” said Teves, 25, a pharmacy technician.
If somebody told me when I was 15: ‘Hey stupid, if you do drugs you’re going to end up $50,000 in debt, on the street, selling your body,’ I never would have done it.