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Kelley Kelley was honest with voters when she campaigned three years ago for mayor of Turtle Creek, a Rust Belt town about 12 miles southeast of Pittsburgh.
She told them her husband, Kevin, is a recovering heroin addict who was arrested nine years ago for a nonviolent crime. She said proper treatment, not jail time, saved his life and their marriage. And she promised that, if elected, she’d take an empathetic approach to ease the pain heroin has inflicted on her hometown.
“You can make all the arrests you want, it’s not going to solve the problem,” says Kelley, 42, who this year will complete classes to become a certified substance-abuse counselor. “It needs to start in every home, and it’s a discussion they need to start having.”
She was elected mayor in 2014, and then came the hard part. Emergency responders reported a spike in the number of heroin and prescription-opioid overdoses that year in Turtle Creek, a town of about 5,000 with an average household income of $31,000. Drawing from a master’s degree in criminology, her experience with a local advocacy group and her fandom for Wonder Woman — who stands with hands on hips on a shelf in her office — Kelley took a three-pronged approach to buck the trend.
— Train police officers to educate nonviolent offenders who have an opioid addiction about nearby treatment options at the time of arrest.
— Provide affordable treatment options in and around Turtle Creek and teach residents how to prevent a fatal overdose.
— Empower residents to report suspected drug activity outside their homes, anonymously if need be.
The plan might already be working.
Emergency responders who serve Turtle Creek reported nine heroin- and prescription-opioid-related overdoses in 2015, after an average of 14 overdoses each of the previous four years. This while heroin-related deaths throughout Allegheny County increased for the fifth consecutive year in 2015.
“[Kelley] is educating people on the disease, and she’s providing tools not just for police, but for everyone,” says recently elected Turtle Creek Borough Councilor Connie Tinsley, who also has taken classes to become a substance-abuse counselor.
Enforcement vs. Education
One of the first officers Kelley helped hire was Joe Wincko, whose childhood friend died in 2014 of a heroin overdose. Wincko was in the police academy when he received the news.
“This guy was pretty much like a brother to me, and it crushed me,” he says.
The fatal batch was laced with fentanyl, which the Allegheny County coroner linked to 14 other deaths in January of that year.
“At first, I was upset with him, which turned into trying to seek knowledge,” Wincko says. “I wanted to know why he did it and [what] the addictive properties are in heroin. I wanted to know the right steps for someone on the road to recovery and how to get them there.”
In light of what the Centers for Disease Control has deemed an epidemic in the U.S., officers in Turtle Creek have taken on a new role as educators, police chief Dale Kraeer says. They’re trained to speak with nonviolent offenders who show signs of addiction, and their family members, about inpatient and outpatient detox and counseling in the area. He said the end game, from a law-enforcement standpoint, is to reduce the number of thefts, robberies and burglaries fueled by addiction.
“If you’re a victim of drugs, you’re capable of all kinds of crime,” Kraeer says.
The word “victim” is indicative of a paradigm shift among law enforcement throughout the U.S. as the rate of heroin-related overdose deaths nearly quadrupled from 2002 to 2013.
A program spearheaded in June by the police chief of Gloucester, Mass., linked 150 people with free treatment, in lieu of arrest, within the first three months of its inception. People traveled to the police station from out of state for treatment.
And as an increasing number of state and city leaders have voted to reform marijuana laws, the war on drugs has started to become a war on heroin.
In August, the White House announced an initiative that paired drug intelligence officers with public-health coordinators to trace heroin from port cities, such as those in New York and New Jersey, with a special interest in batches laced with a deadly additive. Federal and local law-enforcement officers in retail-heavy Monroeville, which borders Turtle Creek, have pointed to such port cities as the starting point for millions of dollars worth of heroin transported to the east suburbs over the last five years.
Treating the problem locally
Turtle Creek residents treated for substance abuse last year at New Freedom Recovery Center in Irwin often mentioned an arresting officer or borough official as their referral to the inpatient detox and counseling facility, says director Sherry Philips.
“A lot of them have said they got the number from an officer, or they picked up a pamphlet in the reception area of the [police department].”
But not everyone can be treated, due to a lack of beds, government funding or health insurance, Philips says. “There used to be county funding, but now there’s a delay with that.”
And outpatient treatment, offered at no cost by more than a dozen churches and nonprofits in the Pittsburgh area, comes with a low success rate for long-time users, according to medical experts.
“Their brain is injured, and they don’t know how to deal with stress,” says Dr. Harold Urschel, chief medical strategist at Enterhealth, in Dallas, Texas. “They need resident time to have a chance to get better.”
On a recent night at the borough building, Kelley met with Tinsley to brainstorm new treatment options for residents. A hand-drawn sign from Kelley’s niece reading “I love mayor Ni Ni” hangs on the wall behind her. Stacked on a shelf are free toys for kids in the community, leftover from a recent event. She sits at the same desk her father used when he was mayor in the early 1980s, though she laughs when asked if she had political aspirations as a young adult.
Then, life happened, the heroin epidemic happened and she’s found herself in a position to help. So after a full day of work as a grant writer for the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, long after the sun has gone down, she sits with Tinsley in her office.
Kelley says she hopes to partner with a nearby facility and a nonprofit group to provide more affordable long-term treatment. And in the meantime, assuming she’s a certified counselor this year, she could work with residents firsthand. Tinsley, who says Kelley inspired her to run for council, plans to offer yoga classes to help residents in recovery transition from a treatment center to everyday life.
One of the hardest stages of recovery was the homecoming, says Kevin Kelley, who after long-term, in-patient treatment moved to a transitional house with other people in recovery. Then he went home, where a fix was at the bar down the street or just a phone call away.
Seven years of sobriety later, Kevin is a lieutenant with the Turtle Creek Fire Department and a volunteer with an advocacy group for substance-abuse treatment. He says the only time he thinks about heroin or prescription opioids is when it comes up at community meetings, which he often attends to answer residents’ questions about addiction. Borough officials say it’s important for residents to put a face to a successful recovery.
“We need to show people that [addicts] can turn it around,” Kelley Kelley says. “I thought at one point my husband would die, but that didn’t happen.”
Kevin says he hopes an open discussion will inspire friends and family members of addicts to offer support, rather than deny the problem or break ties.
“I knew I had a problem and I knew I needed help, but I didn’t want to be looked at a certain way because of the stigma,” he says. “I just kept hiding and hoping one day I’d wake up and be well.”
A community effort
As residents arrived for a crime-watch meeting in November, they passed under a sign outside the borough building that read “Turtle Creek, Home of Chuck Blasko and The Vogues.” The 1960s pop vocal group used to sing on the front steps of the middle school as factory workers returned home through a vibrant business district. But long before the factories closed, families moved away and property values dropped.
Inside the building, more than 30 residents — some of whom remember The Vogues — questioned police about a recent shoot-out on a residential street; graffiti in a nearby alley that read “kill the cops”; and what they suspect to be drug deals outside their homes.
“We’ve gone from a blue-collar town to a no-collar town,” resident Beth Hamill said.
She’s one of the new faces at the meetings, and part of a collaborative effort between community leaders and government officials in recent years that has yielded an urban garden, refurbished homes, a community Facebook page and yard signs that read, “Won’t you be my neighbor.” Attendance at the meetings doubled after Kelley was elected, along with 911 calls to report drug activity.
Residents left the meeting with fliers for naloxone training, which until recently was reserved for doctors and emergency responders. The medication helps restore breathing to a person who is overdosing. In September, Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf encouraged school officials to obtain the medication in the event of a student overdose, citing a rate of opioid-related overdoses that is “unprecedented.”
Some experts question whether easier access to naloxone — more commonly known as Narcan — will tempt users to increase their dosage and thus lead to more deaths.
“I’m not saying it’s good or bad, but it’s not solving the problem,” says emergency medical responder John Licina, a 20-year veteran who serves the Pittsburgh area. “To be honest, when you see the same people overdosing time and time again, it gets irritating.”
New Freedom Recovery Center’s Sherry Philips says too often there is a sense of hopelessness when it comes to heroin addiction. She lauded Kelley’s emphasis on education and treatment, rather than enforcement and arrest.
“It’s not bad people that need to get good — it’s sick people that need to get well,” Philips says. “[Kelley] knows that, and she’s seen the other side to this.”
In order to reduce the number of overdoses and drug deals in Turtle Creek this year, Kelley says it’s going to take an effort from everyone. While the town is 20 percent black or mixed race, and more than half the residents are between the ages of 18 and 65, nearly every person at the November crime-watch meeting was white and over the age of 50.
But it’s a good start, says Kelley, as the disposition of older residents toward heroin use has begun to shift from condemnation to concern. She saw it on their faces when she campaigned for mayor.
“When I told them our story, I didn’t get that look,” Kelley says. “They were pretty receptive.”
This article appears in Feb 10-16, 2016.
What’s the “Wonder Mayor” doing about all the recent gun violence in Turtle Creek? A shooting in a crowded shopping center, 4 am drive by shootings where houses and cars are riddled with bullets, random gunfire in the middle of the night… What’s old KK doing about that? Looks like NOTHING to me and my neighbors.
“While the town is 20 percent black or mixed race, and more than half the residents are between the ages of 18 and 65, nearly every person at the November crime-watch meeting was white and over the age of 50. “
And there’s the elephant in the room (or in this case, NOT in the room). Just like every other town in the area, as TC became more and more “diverse”, crime increased. Why was there no black involvement in the crime watch meeting? Because as is evident time and time again, the black community refuses to admit that they’re the problem and would rather blame others for their shortcomings. Poor parenting, lack of work ethic, dependence on entitlement, drugs, and the glorification of the ghetto lifestyle in popular culture… all black problems. But you can’t say that for fear of being labeled racist (even if it is the truth).
Right, the black community is the problem, not the lack of involvement by the 18 to 50 year old white people.
There are strong correlations between poverty and drug use, between drug use and gun violence, between racial discrimination and poverty. So, racism may be contributing to the problems you mention. The problem isn’t the black skin color, it’s the racism.
Being unable to say something for fear of being labeled racist, but thinking it anyway, is still racist. Saying it just lets the world know that you are racist.
Great article! Thank you Kyle Lawson for taking the time to research and write this piece. As someone who attends all of these meetings, I know Mayor Kelley is very open and passionate about her desire to stem the drug problems we are seeing. For those of you who place blame…this problem does not have a color… it is an ‘equal’ opportunity problem. This can be proven by the number of ‘affluent’ drug abusers we hear about. In addition, drug usage does bring along other challenges in that it creates an atmosphere rife with other types of crime…including theft and shootings.
Drug addiction is something that, once it gets a hold of you, it controls you. It ruins the lives of not only the user, but the family. However, it can be overcome and Kevin Kelley is an excellent example of how you can turn your life around, and he deserves great respect for having beaten the demon. It is not easy by any means, but it can be done. However, those addicted need the love and support of their families and friends to get the help they need and stay the course to success. That is something we, as a community, should recognize and do what we can to help. The more users who ‘get clean,’ the fewer drug dealers will be in our neighborhood and crime will decrease. Those of us not affected by this addiction should thank our lucky stars. But, what if it was someone in your family….
So Brian, if I were to tell you that African-Americans only account for 13% of the United States population, yet are responsible for over 50% of the murders in this country every year, would you call me a racist? Bite your tongue if you do. Because telling the truth isn’t racism. Denying it is.
Look it up for yourself. US department of justice statistics. FBI crime numbers. They don’t lie. Black Lives Matter lies.
I commend the Mayor for her work. I smoked pot for over thirty years without addiction. The lies tell you it is addictive. When the youth discover all of the bad stories about marijuana are lies, they believe the same for heroin, and then try it and become addicted. I tried it once and I thought it was fantastic and I understood how easy it would be to become addicted – I never tried it again. If pot were legal, those youths who are looking for a good time, wouldn’t have to deal with drug dealers. Legalize it, and start going after the sellers, who contaminate our world. This is not a racist issue and any race can be addicted.
Before some troll starts calling me a brain burned pot head, I want to tell you about me. I am 86 years old, still design websites, I am healthy, and I also continue to dance and act in plays. that means remembering lines. My brain is happier now than at any other time.
Passion drives success. Be thankful you have a mayor doing all she can to make a difference in your community. But she can not do it alone. The people in the community need to stand up and work together to support her in order to make this work. Sadly I saw just as much negativity in these comments as positive. I don’t think that is going to help anything. Get involved!! Make a difference in your community. Kudos to this lovely Mayor!!!!
Not One More Overdose, Lost Spirit, Grieving Heart!!!
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