Mother grieves after daughter ODs, dies
Throughout the week before her daughter’s death, police and emergency sirens screamed along the streets near Barbara Schaefer’s Port Orange home.
Looking back now, it seems like an omen.
Seated on a living room sofa with her husband, Mark Schaefer, and other family members hovering nearby, Barbara Schaefer thumbed through a journal filled with memories she expected to share with her daughter, Kaia Marie Banios.
“I’ve been slowly doing her bucket list,” she said — a self-defense class, Painting with a Twist, planting an herb garden. She commits each experience to paper.
It’s a way forward through the grief that has gripped her since Saturday, Nov. 11, 2017 — the day she learned Kaia, 28, was dead.
Kaia was one of 153 people in Volusia County who died from drug use last year, and one of 130 killed by opioids.
Parents, children and loved ones of the deceased seek support in local therapy groups, such as Halifax Health’s traumatic loss program. There they find sympathetic ears and longterm support.
Schaefer recently attended her first group therapy meeting. She has wanted to open up about Kaia’s death for “a long time,” she said, but she wasn’t quite ready. Now, she is.
“This child of mine is gone and I can’t bring her back,” said Schaefer. “Maybe (sharing her story) can help one person.”
A ‘free spirit’
Kaia was bold and daring — a “free spirit,” Schaefer said.
She would drive cross-country for a job, or to connect with a boyfriend. She enjoyed health foods and juicing. She made “dance with your fears” her mantra, and had it inscribed in ink above her heart.
But Kaia wasn’t always so adventurous. As a child growing up in New Prague, Minnesota, about 45 miles southwest of Minneapolis, she was “very, very shy,” Schaefer said.
She enjoyed writing short stories and reading, Mark Schaefer recalled. “Just talking and meeting new people was a struggle for her as a young lady,” he said.
Mark Schaefer and Barbara began dating in the mid-1990s, following Barbara’s divorce from Kaia’s father. They married in 2010.
Kaia split time between the homes of her mother and father, which sometimes were in different states. Barbara joined Mark Schaefer in Port Orange in 2003, and Kaia followed two years later.
She enrolled at Atlantic High School for 10th grade and spent significant time with Anna Schaefer, Mark Schaefer’s niece, “doing normal teenage stuff,” Anna Schaefer said — going to the beach and hanging out with friends.
“(Kaia) boosted my self-confidence more than anybody ever could,” Anna Schaefer recalled. “She just made you feel special.”
Kaia didn’t use drugs then, Anna Schaefer said. “Being around her so much, I feel like I would’ve known.”
But Kaia did have a few brushes with police.
As a high school senior in September 2007, she was charged with a DUI, arrest records show. She was charged twice with retail theft in 2008, and a February 2010 traffic citation for driving with a suspended license noted that it was Kaia’s fourth such violation in six months.
“She regretted that,” Mark Schaefer said. “Every time she applied for a job it would take her forever.”
Kaia moved to Ohio in 2010, then to Minnesota, out to Oregon and back to Minnesota, bouncing between jobs and boyfriends. Through it all, Kaia and Barbara Schaefer remained close.
Schaefer visited Oregon, and they took a mother-daughter trip to the Columbia River Gorge. There, Schaefer took a photo that now hangs in her home’s entryway and decorates the front of Kaia’s memorial service programs.
In it, Kaia stands smiling at the gorge’s edge, long, wavy brown hair splayed across her shoulders. Behind her, the Cascade Range rises against a cloud-covered sky.
Schaefer cherishes the photo because it captured Kaia’s vulnerability, she said. “It bares her soul. That’s the way she was.”
‘None of us saw it coming’
A few troublesome memories, in hindsight, stand out as possible clues to what may have bubbled beneath the surface.
In July 2017, a couple of months after a messy breakup, Kaia used cocaine. But she was so shaken by its effect that she dialed 911. She later called her mother from a hospital.
“I made her stay on the phone with me until she felt OK to fall asleep. That’s the only incident I’ve known of for years,” Barbara Schaefer said.
Otherwise, when she reflects on the years Kaia lived away from home, she always comes to the same conclusion: “I know she was clean back then.”
In August 2017, Kaia returned to Port Orange in search of stability and a fresh start. She moved in with her mother and stepfather.
She suffered from back pain, Schaefer said, and self-medicated with kratom — a legal stimulant derived from the leaves of a Southeast Asian tree that can induce pleasure and decrease pain.
Kaia also showed signs of depression but turned down Schaefer’s suggestion that she seek medication or counseling. Kaia felt that being with her family and making positive lifestyle changes was enough, Schaefer recalled.
Around the start of October 2017, Kaia was hired at a Daytona Beach car dealership. She began dating a new boyfriend.
Then about a month later — a week and a half before Kaia died — Schaefer awoke during the night. Kaia was up drinking a beer. Schaefer sensed something was awry.
“I’ll never forget the stoned look in her eyes. She was very despondent,” Schaefer said. She figured Kaia was drunk. But now, “every time I go back to that night in my brain, (I think) she was on something.”
Schaefer knows people may call her naive or say she is in denial about her daughter’s decisions.
“None of us saw it coming. You might say I turned a blind eye, but (drugs weren’t) even in my thoughts,” Schaefer said. “I was more worried about drinking and driving.”
During the week before her death, Kaia broke up with her boyfriend and seemed stressed about her job.
Schaefer suggested some quality mother-daughter time might help, and Kaia agreed. They made plans to go out to dinner on Friday evening, Nov. 10, 2017.
At the agreed-upon time, Schaefer waited for Kaia at home. Kaia kept texting that she was tied up at work but would arrive soon. Schaefer left for the restaurant alone.
Kaia never arrived at the restaurant and didn’t return home that evening. When Kaia planned to sleep elsewhere, she let Schaefer know. But that night, she didn’t.
Just before 9 a.m. the next morning, a Daytona Beach man called 911 to report that Kaia was not breathing.
The man, Tommy Truong, said he and Kaia had been dating for four to seven days, a Daytona Beach police report states. The two were co-workers. Truong told police Kaia had spent the night at his home and he found her unresponsive when he tried to wake her for work.
Another of Kaia’s co-workers tracked Schaefer down at a Walmart to deliver the news. At first, Schaefer didn’t believe it. She called Port Orange police for confirmation, she said. “Then my worst nightmare began.”
Truong told investigators Kaia used narcotics — and admitted he snorted his prescription Percocet with a straw found at the scene — but denied he and Kaia ever used drugs together, according to the report.
Truong was known to Seminole County law enforcement. He was arrested in September 2014 for shooting six rounds at an occupied vehicle, a Seminole County Sheriff ’s Office report states. And in 2015, Altamonte Springs police found Truong in possession of a stolen iPhone, according to an offense report.
At Truong’s home the day Kaia died, detectives discovered a small backpack believed to be Kaia’s that contained more than a dozen loose Xanax pills — a medication prescribed to treat anxiety.
Truong wrote in a victim statement three days later that Kaia had stolen 91 of his 15-milligram oxycodone pills. But that’s not what killed her.
Kaia’s death was caused by combined drug intoxication from n-ethyl pentylone (a synthetic bath salt often substituted for ecstasy), cocaine, morphine, the powerful synthetic opioid fentanyl and acetyl fentanyl, an autopsy report states.
“I had never heard of fentanyl before that,” Schaefer said.
The night after Kaia died, Mark and Barbara Schaefer and a few close relatives gathered to compare notes. Had they missed the signs of drug abuse?
Barbara Schaefer tore apart Kaia’s room in search of hidden drugs, cash or paraphernalia that might reveal a substance abuse problem. She found no proof, only more questions.
She has reconciled herself with what Kaia’s autopsy report makes clear — Kaia ingested multiple illicit drugs, and the combination killed her. But that’s where the answers end.
“For the last week and a half of her life, I don’t know what she took. I am shocked at it, and I don’t know what to do with that information,” said Schaefer. “It’s so frustrating for us as parents, family, cousins.”
Speaking as if to Kaia, she wondered aloud, “What were you thinking?”
Troubling questions
Parents face many such troubling questions after losing a child, said Dr. Kimberly Beck-Frate, a licensed medical mental health counselor and the traumatic loss program developer at Halifax Health.
Was their child’s death an accidental overdose? Was it suicide? Could it have been prevented? Should they have responded differently to their child’s drug abuse?
Beck-Frate estimates 70 percent of her clients lost someone close to them as a result of opioid use. Halifax Health’s general traumatic loss therapy group allows clients to share their fears and sorrow in a safe atmosphere.
Because of the stigma attached to addiction, drug users’ parents often experience what Beck-Frate calls “disenfranchised grief.”
“People may or may not be as supportive because (they think), ‘Oh, your child must have lived a high-risk lifestyle. You’re not a good parent,’ ” she said.
Lydia Rivera, of Holly Hill, has experienced that backlash firsthand.
Her youngest son died 10 years ago in a car accident. Then in April, a prison inmate work crew found her middle son, Danny Rivera, dead in Holly Hill’s Sunrise Park. He had overdosed on heroin and fentanyl.
“My youngest son had over 200 people at his funeral,” said Rivera, 61. “(Danny) had maybe 10. And the cruel thing is the trolls on Facebook who make all kinds of comments.”
Their words compound her grief: “You know it was going to happen sometime,” or “He never tried hard enough.”
Lydia Rivera’s pain is raw, palpable. “He tried so hard and fought,” she said. “It’s not a moral failure, it’s a disease.”
She visited a Halifax Health therapy group after her youngest son’s death and still meets monthly with those same people.
“It’s just like this strange bond of friendship that has helped me get through this,” Rivera said. They understand the bizarre behaviors that can accompany grief.
“It’s not like putting the ketchup in the wrong cabinet. It’s like the need to check the door 20 times, or the feeling that every time someone knocks at the door it’s going to be the police,” she said. “Sometimes you think, ‘I’m going crazy.’ ”
Hearing others share similar experiences assured her she wasn’t.
Opening up about a dead loved one and focusing on positive memories rather than the sometimes-graphic details of their death — or the shock that accompanied the news — can be empowering, Beck-Frate said.
“It’s an opportunity to say, ‘You know what, my child wasn’t just an opioid addict,’ ” she said. “‘They had a life. This is what they did.’ It’s called restorative retelling.”
The principle applies to anyone who has lost a loved one to drug abuse.
Lindsey Trinkman, of Daytona Beach, said she started participating in group therapy after her father and mother both died in a two-month span in 2016. Her mother’s death stemmed from years of crack cocaine abuse.
“I really did not think I would survive,” said Trinkman, a former drug user. The grief “was just paralyzing. It took my breath away a lot of times,” she said. “(The waves) come like a ton of bricks.”
Sharing her story not only helped her process her own sorrow but unlocked others to speak about theirs. Rather than judging Trinkman for her past, the group embraced her.
“It was like a courageous act I was able to do that they were able to, like, get some freedom from,” Trinkman said. “And I stayed clean through all of it.”
‘A long journey’
Kaia’s family has passed many of the first-year milestones — their first Thanksgiving without her, then Christmas and Kaia’s April birthday — but what comes next may be even harder.
“As they move away from the loss, the support system goes down that was there in the beginning,” Beck-Frate said. “It’s normal that they feel it’s more difficult because it is.”
Barbara Schaefer attended her first therapy group meeting last week. She plans to return for the group’s next meeting in October.
It’s now been 10 months since Kaia passed, and Schaefer struggles to suppress her sorrow. She fears others have tired of hearing about it.
“But sometimes I just don’t know how to move forward so that I don’t sound like a broken record to the people around me,” she said. “I think that’s where the group might come in handy.”
In recent months, Schaefer has returned to her job as financial aid director at Keiser University. “I don’t want to (go to work) a lot of days, but it keeps you sane,” she said.
She cries less often. “I’m down to once or twice a week, but on weekends I tend to cry really hard for five minutes,” Schaefer said. “It doesn’t go away.”
Her journal connects her to Kaia. One entry dated June 24 is titled, “What I miss about you.” The list includes “sitting on the back porch just discussing life,” “a margarita at La Fiesta with you” and “calling me Mummy with tender affection.”
“She would draw it out,” Schaefer said, laughing through her tears — “like, ‘Mummyyyyy.’ ”
She taped a square of “Bucket list wish” stationery near the bottom of the page. On it, Schaefer wrote, “Planted an herb garden.”
She has sorted Kaia’s belongings, separating items to give away from those with sentimental value. And now, she has shared Kaia’s story — and hers. Closure may come, she hopes, when she finally buries Kaia’s ashes.
The family trekked home to Minnesota in April for that purpose, but a blizzard upended their plans. They’ll try again this week, on Saturday.
In the meantime, Schaefer goes on living. “I do a lot of fun things, and put things on Facebook, but after I put it on there I don’t feel the joy I should have. I’m just doing it to become normal,” she said.
Tragedy has a way of reshuffling priorities, and Kaia’s death sharpened Schaefer’s focus on two, in particular. She said they help her keep her mind off of herself: “Be kind and give more.”