PICKING UP THE PIECES
As opioids become harder to get, addicts turn to potentially deadly alternatives
In hindsight, all the odd events added up. ❚ The missing soda bottle caps and the vanishing spoons from the kitchen drawer. The hollow excuses and the irresponsible decisions. ❚ How Heather Baltz would sleep through her infant son’s cries and return to the tidy brick ranchstyle home that she shared with her parents and two children hours after her waitress shift ended. “I had to help a friend, Mom,” she would tell Tina Baltz.
Their once responsible daughter was suddenly short of cash, asking her dad for $50 or $100 to pay her phone bill or to get to the next paycheck.
“I was a sucker,” said her father, Mickey. “I wasn’t paying for her phone bill. I was paying for drugs. I believe people when they tell me something. ’Course, with her, I believed it for way too long.”
Heather Baltz died Feb. 23, during the reporting of this story, of a heart infection doctors said originated with a contaminated needle used to shoot heroin. She had turned to heroin after running out of pain pills prescribed for gallbladder surgery in 2014.
She was 28, and by then, the Baltzes were long past denial.
“I was a sucker. I wasn’t
paying for her phone bill.
I was paying for drugs.
I believe people when
they tell me something.
’Course, with her, I
believed it for way too
long.”
Mickey Baltz Heather’s father
For years, the center of the state’s opioid crisis has been northeast Tennessee, where small towns and rural communities that dot the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains have been devastated.
The state has the dubious distinction of having the second-highest rate of opioid prescriptions in the nation.
In the past four years, the drug epidemic has crept steadily westward, morphing into a heroin-driven public health crisis as opioid prescriptions became more closely regulated.
People addicted to opioids turn to heroin, a cheaper and more readily available opioid, when medications such as oxycodone get harder to come by. They also turn to fentanyl, a powerful opioid that can be cheaply manufactured in illegal labs and often proves fatal in small amounts.
From 2014 to 2016, Nashville’s drug overdose rates jumped by more than 71 percent, a sudden increase that left city health officials, emergency responders and a porous safety net of treatment providers scrambling to catch up.
The city’s drug overdose rates have surpassed rates in rural Appalachia, according to data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
People addicted to opioids turn to heroin, a cheaper and more readily available opioid, when medications such as oxycodone get harder to come by. They also turn to fentanyl, a powerful opioid that can be cheaply manufactured in illegal labs and often proves fatal in small amounts.
Too many knocks on the door
Heather Baltz’s death marked the family’s most brutal encounter with Nashville’s opioid and heroin crisis. But it was not the only one.
In 2013, they were awakened by a 3 a.m. knock on the door. A Metro police chaplain informed them that Tina Baltz’s brother, Paul Shoulders Jr., 47, had been killed in a car accident.
Shoulders was driving on an interstate when his pickup was clipped by Robert “Todd” Harrell, a former bassist for the band 3 Doors Down. Harrell was convicted of vehicular homicide.
He was speeding at 101 mph with the opioid oxycodone and the muscle relaxant alprazolam in his system. (Last month, Harrell was arrested again in Mississippi on unrelated drug, gun and domestic violence charges and faces a revocation of his probation in Shoulders’ death.)
In 2016, a police chaplain came knocking again.
This time, it was to report the death of Heather’s former boyfriend, Ralph Hardin, who lived with the Baltzes and was helping to raise the two children he and Heather shared.
Hardin, 29, was fatally shot with his own gun in a hotel room, where the Baltzes said he had gone to confront Heather’s drug dealer.
Police closed the case, concluding Hardin may have accidentally shot himself.
Two days before his death, Hardin had posted pictures of heroin paraphernalia on his Facebook page, promising he would track down whoever had supplied drugs to Heather.
‘She was a happy child’
It was during Harrell’s trial and its aftermath in late 2015 that the Baltzes confronted their daughter.
“She said it was pills,” Tina Baltz said. “We told her she needed to get help. She was scared to death. She was worried about what would happen to the kids and losing custody.”
One day while the family attended Harrell’s trial, Heather leaned over to her mother and whispered that she had bought drugs from the same dealer who supplied the man who killed her uncle.
For the next two years, Heather was in and out of jail for stealing, followed by three brief stints in rehab. Her parents kicked her out, then welcomed her back in, loaned her a car, then demanded it back.
They formally took custody of the two children Heather left behind, Braelyn, 8, and Tyler, 4, after Hardin’s death. Heather agreed to the custody change.
“Heather was high when she signed the papers,” Mickey Baltz said.
While Mickey, who is 58, and his wife, 50, were raising Heather’s children, they visited pawn shops to buy back the jewelry, the power washer and the iPad Heather sold to buy drugs.
Her father cruised neighborhoods where he thought Heather might be living.
Married for 29 years, the couple held down full-time jobs. Mickey works as an auto body technician. His wife works as an administrative assistant for an insurance company.
Tina Baltz said she felt like she was watching the brown-haired, hazel-eyed, sweet girl she raised simply disappear.
“The whole time I was thinking, will she ever be the same person again?” she said. “And I didn’t think so, and she wasn’t.
“You see shows like ‘Intervention’ – and we’ve watched them for years even before anything with Heather – and everyone starts out saying they were a happy child or a happy baby, and then they go into the bad stuff. Then you think, why was everyone who was a happy child go into that problem.
“She was shy, and she was a happy child. And then this happened.”
‘The worst I’d ever seen her’
Last year on Braelyn’s birthday, Heather called to say she wanted to see her daughter.
She told her parents to meet her outside a Family Dollar store. They met for a meal, then Heather left, walking west.
Mickey Baltz returned the next day, driving down a side street on which he thought he’d seen her, and he noticed a house that was in the backdrop of a photograph Heather had texted him to prove to him she had not sold his car. He called police.
Heather had outstanding probation violations.
“I thought at least in jail, she wouldn’t be doing drugs, hopefully,” he said. “When we saw her for Braelyn’s birthday, it was the worst I’d ever seen her. I’m thinking, ‘Now I can relax. She’s safe in jail.’ ”
In court for her hearing, “she cussed me as she walked out the door” as she was taken into custody, he said.
‘I cannot regret anything I did’
Heather returned home in September, but she did little to care for her children. She never gave them a bath. She lay on the couch much of the time.
“She’d been gone two years by then,” Tina Baltz said. “I didn’t push her to get up in the morning. I would get the kids up and feed them and take them to school. I wanted to give her time.”
By January, Heather appeared ill. She had bronchitis-like symptoms, an ear infection, a sty in her eye and a large abscess on her back.
A visit to the emergency room ended in her being sent home with a diagnosis of stress.
Eighteen days later, Heather was dead.
Doctors at another hospital diagnosed a heart infection, most likely caused by intravenous drug use.
The last few weeks of Heather’s life were filled with frustration. Her parents had spent years dealing with Heather’s addiction.
“I got upset with her because she was just laying around,” her father said. “I told her that if you don’t do something, you need to get out of my house.”
“I cannot regret anything I did or said because it will ruin me,” Tina Baltz said four months after her daughter’s death. Then she closed her eyes and cried.