Mother shares grief over losing her only child to opioids
They had tacos for dinner, one of her son’s favorite dishes, on a night when everything seemed OK, would be OK, when all arguments and worries and admonishments were shelved and only good memories and better promises were topics of conversation.
“Before he left that evening he told me of a vacation he booked in Red River for him and his girlfriend,” Bernadette Miller wrote. “He gave me a hug and kissed me on the forehead.”
I love you, Momma, he told her. I’ll talk to you in a couple of days.
In a couple of days, an Albuquerque police sergeant arrived on her doorstep and broke the news. Chuckie, her 21-yearold son, was dead. Days before, he had purchased counterfeit oxycodone pills laced with fentanyl.
The sergeant’s words were not real to her. That night was not real. That body in his bed, covered hastily by a white sheet because her husband refused to let her see her only child that way,
was not real. But that foot. She spotted it sticking out from under the sheet. “I needed to touch my son, my Little Bear, my Chuckie,” she wrote. “I remember touching his foot and it was so cold, so very cold.” That’s when she knew it was all real. She wrote about Chuckie — her boy, her blessing and her best friend. She wrote about how his death March 11, 2017, shattered everything, shattered her.
Her words became a seven-page victim impact statement that she had intended to read last week at the sentencing of the man who prosecutors say had supplied the lethal pills.
But neither Jeremy Brown, 26, nor co-defendant Crystal Campos, 33, were charged with manslaughter or murder. Brown, whose case went first, pleaded guilty to a federal firearms violation in exchange for the dropping of the drug charges. Last Tuesday, he was sentenced to five years in prison.
Because the drug charges were dismissed, Miller was not allowed to give her impact statement. So she came to me. It was important, she said, that her words be heard, her grief be acknowledged, her warning be heeded. It was important that Chuckie not be remembered as a stereotype but as a person who struggled, who grew up happy in a good home — his mother a devoted parent and counselor, his father a police officer — but who succumbed anyway to an opioid addiction that last year killed more than 70,000 Americans, a record.
He was funny, his mother said. Smart, generous, an unabashed mama’s boy.
“Chuckie was a born helper and a healer,” Miller wrote. “He was also an athlete that enjoyed playing soccer, baseball and then football throughout his lifetime. After graduating from (La Cueva) high school in 2014 with a 3.0 GPA, he enlisted in the Army pursuing a career in nursing.”
It was at La Cueva, she said, that an older classmate introduced him to cocaine, telling him it would help him lose weight and play better football.
She sent Chuckie to a psychologist, which seemed to do him good, she said. He was clean for the next two years. He enlisted in the Army but was discharged because of foot issues.
After that, he worked at a medical equipment company, rented a house, had a girlfriend his mother hoped he would marry and give her grandchildren.
In 2016, he asked to move back home so he could pay off bills. Months later, his addiction resurfaced, this time it was oxycodone.
They sent him to inpatient rehab in Rio Rancho, but he was released too soon, Miller believes.
He returned home in February 2017, and so did his addiction.
“I told him there’s no drugs in this house, that he needed to find someplace else to live if he wasn’t going to stop,” she said. “I can sit here and tell you all the regrets I have about that day, but it is not going to bring my son back.” He moved in with a friend. Weeks later, he was dead. According to federal court documents, Chuckie had contacted Campos on March 9, 2017, and asked her to get him some pills. Campos contacted Brown, who supplied her with pills known as “dark blues” for $25 apiece.
Miller found the pills in a baggie weeks later, hidden among her son’s belongings.
She said prosecutors told her that neither defendant could be charged in Chuckie’s death, because it was not certain whether the pills killed him. His death certificate states that he died of cocaine, oxycodone, oxymorphone and fentanyl poisoning. Miller knows it was the pills. “The thought of other families losing their loved ones in a similar way we lost my son is terrifying and traumatic for me,” she would have told the court had she gotten the chance.
She would have told the court how her husband suffered a heart attack brought on by grief and how she now takes seven prescription medications to keep anxiety and despair from swallowing her whole.
“Most days I can barely function,” she wrote. “I feel so raw and empty.”
She has learned to compartmentalize her life, put on a brave face. But it is all not real.
Campos’ case is still pending. If she is convicted and sentenced on drug-related charges, Miller is ready.
She has already written her victim impact statement.