The agony of ecstasy
Families of two B.C. teens bond in grief to try to save other youngsters
Cheryl McCormack and her three girlfriends had a lot to celebrate at their slumber party: The school term had just ended, Christmas was just around the corner and their Grade 12 prom was only months away.
They arrived at the sleepover with pyjamas, their youthful naivete and 14 ecstasy pills.
It was Dec. 19, 2011, and the teenagers chatted about the death, just three weeks earlier, of Tyler Miller, a 20-yearold from their hometown of Abbotsford, B.C. who had taken an ecstasy pill laced with the lethal chemical paramethoxyamphetamine, or PMMA.
The tragic death of this smart, musical young man was a warning sign the girls shouldn’t pop their pills that night, said Cheryl’s friend Drew Fournier, 17. But the teenagers thought they had bought pure ecstasy, and dismissed any worries.
“We still just did it anyway because we are kids,” Drew recalled.
“We literally said that night: ‘It won’t happen to us.’ “But it did.” Within hours Drew was making a frantic 911 call after her best friend Cheryl, 17, fell to the floor, unable to speak or move.
Days later, Cheryl, a bright, funny rugby player, was dead. The coroner found the ecstasy she took was also contaminated with PMMA.
The deaths of Cheryl and Tyler galvanized public debate about ecstasy at a time when more than a dozen other young people in B.C. and Alberta had also died after taking the so-called love drug.
Privately, the mothers of the two victims connected over Facebook and bonded in their grief, vowing to try to save other families from experiencing such an enormous loss.
The result was a shockingly raw video made by the Abbotsford police department, in which the two mothers and Cheryl’s friends tell the haunting stories of these deaths to warn other young people about the dangers of ecstasy.
In June, the video was shown to 15,000 students at more than a dozen schools in Abbotsford, and was followed by emotional speeches from Cheryl’s girlfriends.
The presentation was so successful that several other B.C. school districts have expressed interest to the police.
Tyler’s buddies also spoke at the school events, often shedding tears as they remembered their kind-hearted, funny friend.
“Having to share the notion of one of our best buds dying, it’s tough to portray to other people,” said his friend Jason Peters, 19. “But it’s just the (goal) if you don’t want this to happen to anyone else.”
Tyler’s friends speak frankly about the reason he died.
“I think he took (ecstasy) for fun, but also to experience things in a whole new way,” Josh Williams, 19, said.
“It was a beautiful escape at a terrible price.”
The stories of Cheryl and Tyler are not isolated in the province, where ecstasy-related deaths claimed 15 lives in 2011, and the drug was linked to another seven as of July this year.
The numbers spiked in late 2011 and early 2012, when several of the B.C. victims — and at least five in Calgary — were found to have taken ecstasy laced with PMMA.
One tainted pill can kill. And it can kill indiscriminately. None of Tyler’s buddies became ill that night. Neither did Cheryl’s pals.
Eight months ago, Tyler’s friends and family were strangers to Cheryl’s loved ones. But now this dynamic group calls itself Family X — after the Abbotsford police film Operation X — and plans to continue spreading this message: If these two regular kids can succumb to ecstasy, then everyone who uses it is at risk.
“I don’t want people to think that Cheryl and Tyler were druggies. They weren’t.
“They were both happy with life,” said Cheryl’s sister, Shawna McCormack, 20.
“They made a mistake and it cost them their lives.”
Cheryl, a Grade 12 student, tinkered with ecstasy about once a month for a year before she died, her friends said.
She wasn’t a partier and didn’t drink, so “E” was a way to let loose and have some fun for Cheryl, who got good grades in school, had two parttime jobs and was a leader on her high school rugby team.
Ecstasy seemed safer than harder drugs like cocaine or heroin, said Lauren Miller, 16, who hosted the slumber party in the basement of her parents’ house that fatal night.
They believed the 14 capsules of white powder they bought contained pure ecstasy, or 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine, known as MDMA, Lauren said.
There was less chance it had been tainted in an illegal lab, the friends thought, because it had not been turned into the candy-coloured tablets of pressed powder that are often stamped with cute logos and consumed at allnight raves.
The girls popped their first capsules at 9:30 p.m. and each took two more later in the evening.
It was a regular ecstasy trip, Lauren recalled, for everyone except Cheryl.
At first Cheryl complained her heart was beating too fast.
Then she became so hot she took off her shirt. Her hair was sweaty, causing her bangs to stick up.
Cheryl’s eyes would take on a look of wild desperation. Her lips turned blue.
She threw up, which is not uncommon during an ecstasy high. Cheryl’s friends gave her water and Chapstick.
For a short time Cheryl appeared to be looking and feeling better.
“And then everything just went completely downhill,” an emotional Drew said.
Cheryl was having an animated conversation with the wall. She was speaking so quickly her friends couldn’t understand a word.
They took Cheryl outside for some fresh air, but she insisted she wanted to go back into the house. Once inside again, she stumbled so badly that Drew yelled for Lauren to call 911.
“Then Cheryl looked at me and said, ‘You don’t need to call the ambulance unless you become unresponsive,’” Drew recalled.
“It’s just so haunting even thinking about it. It was so weird. That was the last thing she said to me.”
Cheryl fell to the floor and appeared to be having a seizure. Her body then went rigid, her breathing became laboured, and she tried to speak but no words came out.
“Her eyes were open and they had tears running down,” Lauren said. “It was like she was trapped in her own body.”
Scared and unsure what to do next, Drew called Cheryl’s family, who live just minutes away.
Cheryl’s sister Shawna vividly remembers that 2:30 a.m. phone call: “Drew said, ‘We did ecstasy. Cheryl is not acting normal. You need to get here right away.’”
Shawna and her mother Cathy McCormack raced there and, after taking one look at Cheryl, told Drew to call 911.
Shawna sat on the floor beside Cheryl and stroked her little sister’s hair, saying over and over again that everything would be all right.
Drew’s frenetic 911 call can be heard in the Abbotsford police video, which has now been posted on YouTube.
Drew: “It’s a really big emergency. I think my friend is having withdrawal and she’s not responding any more.”
Operator: “Did she overdose on something?”
Drew: “I don’t know. I think she might be. But she’s not responding…”
Operator: “How old is she?” Drew: “Seventeen.” Operator: “Is she awake?” Drew: “Hardly. Is she breathing? Barely…”
Operator: “Is there anything in her mouth?”
Drew: “We can’t get her mouth open … It’s clenched shut.”
Operator: “So we have no idea why she’s acting like this?”
Drew: “No. I know why. Because I think she’s overdosing.” Operator: “On what?” Drew: “On MDMA. It’s, like, it’s ecstasy. Her eyes are open but, literally, it’s like nothing. You ask her to do anything to try to make it look like she’s paying attention and she just doesn’t.
“Oh my God, I’m really scared right now.”
Cheryl was rushed to Abbotsford hospital. Her core body temperature was 43 C, compared to a norm of 37 C, and her heart rate was 197 beats per minute, roughly twice as fast as usual, Shawna said.
Countless tubes zigzagged between Cheryl’s bloated, cold body and the machines keeping her alive. It was such a horrific sight that Shawna took a photo so she could later show her sister — who wanted to be a nurse — how badly she had scared them.
Cheryl would never see the photo taken by her sister.
hree agonizing days went by as she appeared at times to rally, but then her major organs began to shut down.
Fifteen family members gathered in Cheryl’s hospital room on Dec. 22 after doctors advised the end was near.
“All the machines were turned off,” Shawna said. “We watched as her heart (rate) dropped lower and lower.”
The death devastated her friends and family. It was also troubling for Tyler’s loved ones, coming just three weeks after he had died.
Tyler’s mother, Laurie Mossey, reached out to Cheryl’s mother through Facebook. Mossey gave McCormack a favourite book about living through grief, and the two have since bonded over their lost children.
Mossey, a compassionate and strong woman, speaks proudly of Tyler, the only child she had with husband Russ Miller.
The death has left her life in “ruins,” but it also ignited a determination to protect others from the grief she is enduring.
“Because what else do you do?” Mossey asked matterof-factly.
Both she and Cathy McCormack agreed to participate in the Abbotsford police video.
“I felt I had to do something,” said McCormack, a caring stay-at-home mother who had no idea her academic and athletic daughter was using ecstasy.
“I don’t want this to happen to anyone else.”
Abbotsford police asked a focus group of students how to warn teenagers about ecstasy, and were told the greatest impact would come from real stories about real people, Const. Carrie Durocher said.
While the video produced by the police is powerful, the students at the school presentations in June connected the most with the speeches given afterwards by Cheryl’s and Tyler’s friends.
“They speak about their losses, which are real and genuine and something tangible. It is realistically something that could happen to any of the kids that we talked to in June,” said Durocher, a member of the Abbotsford youth squad.
“Every single presentation we were at was emotional and it was raw. There were kids who were crying. There were pockets of students holding each other and hugging ... They were able to relate.”
The McCormack family designed a rubber bracelet bearing Cheryl’s and Tyler’s initials, with the phrase “I live to let you shine,” which were sold for $2 each at the Abbotsford school events to support a foundation to be established in Cheryl’s and Tyler’s names to help youth stop using drugs.
More than 2,000 bracelets have been handed out, and Durocher hopes they will give the teenagers who wear them the courage to say no when offered ecstasy.
“E” has long been considered a relatively harmless drug, something much safer than harder options such as crack or heroin. It is often associated with regular young people, like Cheryl and Tyler, looking for a euphoric high, rather than troubled drug addicts.
Before Cheryl’s death, Lauren thought of her own tinkering with ecstasy as good times. Now she finds the memories “extremely scary.”
“I want people to know that ecstasy kills. I think that people don’t understand. They think it is not going to happen again,” Lauren said.
Last spring students reacted with emotion and gratitude as Cheryl’s and Tyler’s friends told their stories, and Drew hopes young people will continue to listen to their first-hand accounts this fall.
“I hope (people) realize it is just a lot of normal kids doing this. They go to school, lead a normal life,” Cheryl’s friend Drew said. “They are just doing it to have fun…
“But what happened to Cheryl and Tyler can happen to anyone.”