Struggle ends amid hurricane
Hurricane Irma didn’t kill Kyle Whaley. Not technically. It was heroin, maybe fentanyl.
But who knows what would have happened had Whaley, 25, a former Ohio State University student, not been
released from a Florida drugtreatment center in the middle of the night during a hurricane evacuation. What if he had not ended up in a halfway house 20 miles away? What if he had not sneaked out to meet a drug dealer? What if Ohio had enough treatment beds, so he didn’t have to leave the state?
The story might have been different. No one will ever know for sure.
Kristy Herndon Whaley, of Westerville, just knows her son is dead after a four-year battle with drug addiction. His body was found about 10 a.m. Wednesday behind a barbershop in a shabby strip mall in Delray Beach, Florida. Police found a straw and three small bags of gray powder near his body. An autopsy is being performed to determine the exact cause of death.
His mother has so many questions and so few answers.
“He was a person, not a statistic. He was not trash. He was not something to throw away,” she said in a tearful interview. “He fought it so hard. He didn’t want to be that way.
“In my wildest dreams I never imagined that my son would die behind a barbershop in Delray, Florida.”
Kyle Whaley’s story is, unfortunately, like so many others in Ohio and across the country — a young life, full of hope and potential, cut short by a ruthless killer that takes no prisoners.
“My future is 12 hours long,” her son once told her. “I’ve got 12 hours to get the money to get high again.”
Like most grim overdose
stories, Kyle’s started out much differently. He attended high school in Louisville, Kentucky, before coming to Ohio and eventually enrolling at Ohio State.
Comments on his mother’s Facebook page describe Kyle as a “cool dude” who enjoyed life, liked making friends laugh, and was a whiz at tearing down and rebuilding cars.
He bought an Acura Integra that his mother described as “his girl. He and his dad modified it, added turbo. He even had his graduation photos taken with the Teg.”
“My heart aches for you and your family,” a former classmate wrote. “Kyle was my friend in both middle and high school. I distinctly remember him making me laugh until I cry with his South Park impressions and incredibly obnoxious yet irresistible sense of humor. He was always such a joy to be around. He will be missed!”
A former teacher said on Facebook, “there are a few students who would always know how to make your day better. Kyle was one of those. His ability to make us all laugh even when social studies didn’t allow it is something I will never forget. Rest In Peace Kyle. My prayers are with your family.”
While at Ohio State, majoring in economics and statistics, Kyle began taking pain pills, finding they did more for him than the prescription antidepressants he was using. As so often happens, the downward spiral began: drugs, addiction, jail, treatment, relapse, over and over. His 3.4 GPA dropped off the charts,
and Kyle left Ohio State in 2015 a handful of credits short of graduating.
By that time, he was hanging out at a McDonald’s on High Street in the campus area until they chased him away. Homeless, he often slept in his car, living on Milky Way bars and fast food, Mrs. Whaley said. He was picked up for shoplifting five times and staged a fake robbery at his mother’s home to get items to sell to buy drugs.
His parents got him into several treatment centers in Ohio, but eventually, when there was no room for him here, Kyle was sent to a facility in Florida this April. He would never return.
At end of June, Kyle was moved to Legacy Healing Center in Margate, a community northwest of Fort Lauderdale. He was there last weekend when Hurricane Irma began threatening Florida, leaving a swath of death and destruction in its wake. Mrs. Whaley got a call from her son saying the treatment center was being evacuated to a nearby mansion where there was safe shelter, food and water.
But instead, Kyle was abruptly dismissed from the Legacy facility around midnight Friday during the hurricane evacuation, his mother said. He was dropped off, without discharge papers and only a suitcase, at a “sober house” 20 miles away in a residential area of Boynton Beach.
A Legacy Healing Center spokesman declined to comment on Kyle’s case, citing federal patient privacy regulations. He said all patients are released with a complete discharge plan.
Hurricane Irma hit on Sunday. Having never been through a hurricane before, Kyle was frightened. He sent his mother an 11-second phone video of the storm roaring though the area. The sober house lost power and water but survived.
By Monday, Kyle, unsupervised and untreated, was apparently feeling the gnawing pangs of his addiction. While he mother didn’t know it at the time, he used her credit card to hire an Uber driver to take him to nearby Delray Beach, apparently to meet a drug dealer.
Mrs. Whaley sat in her car in the parking lot at her workplace on Tuesday afternoon having what turned out to be her last conversation with her son.
“I was able to tell him that if he ever lost his fight, he would know that his family did all they could for him and that he was loved,” she recalled saying.
On Wednesday morning, Mrs. Whaley texted Kyle, “How are you, sunshine?” There was no reply. Kyle was already dead, probably for several hours.
There is no consolation to losing a child to drugs, but Mrs. Whaley knows, at last, that her son’s struggles are over. No more nightmare cycle of hope followed by despair.
“I am grieving as is the rest of his family, but we have fully expected this outcome,” she wrote on Facebook. “It is a relief as his troubles are over. He was my Bud, my Bud Man and I will miss him immensely. ... Remember him for how he lived and not how he died.”