Tag Archives: Facebook

Dispatches from the frontlines of America’s addiction

The Addict's MomAs I’ve spent the last year-plus writing a book about the opiate abuse epidemic in America, I’ve come across some remarkable people in times of frightening stress.

Along the way I encountered one of the most poignant pages on FB. It’s called The Addict’s Mom, run by Barbara Theodosiou, a Florida PR consultant and mother of two addicts, one in recovery and one in jail. She set up the site a few years ago feeling that no one could understand her but another mother of an addict.

The site now has 12,000 members. They are American mothers who write in the rawest, most honest terms about the arguments, jail, kids who lie and steal from grandparents, prison, their children homeless, raising their children’s children, mortgaging all they own to send their kids to $40,000 rehabs, the joy of seeing a child 200 days clean, and the terror of the late-night phone call, or policeman’s knock on the door.

I hope to be quoting some of these posts, without names, simply because they, like poetry, evoke stories you can imagine in full. (Note: AS=Addicted Son.) Here’s one that I’ve broken out from the original prose into verse:

I have found myself planning my AS’s funeral in my mind.

Recently I have even found myself praying for God to at least take one of us because the pain is just too much.

And then I step back and ask myself what kind of mother could pray for death for one of her own children !?!

I feel horrible even putting these words on paper but i just need to let it out.

I am tired of fighting this fight.

I am tired of seeing my only son destroy himself.

I am tired of all the arguments with him.

I am tired of living with fear of getting that ‘phone call’.

I just don’t know how much longer he can survive at the rate he is using .

 

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Filed under Drugs, The Heroin Heartland

LOS ANGELES: Grim Sleeper photos on Facebook

The LAPD has put up a Facebook page of photos of  women whom they are trying to identify that were in possession of the suspected serial murderer, Lonnie Franklin, Jr., known in the media as the Grim Sleeper.

Franklin, 60, is charged with 10 counts of murder in the deaths of women — many of them prostitutes and drug addicts, whose corpses were often found dumped in alleyways and Dumpsters in South-Central Los Angeles — between 1976 and 2010, and who is believed to have taken a break of 13 years in between, hence the Grim Sleeper moniker.

Franklin was arrested in 2010 and at the time LAPD made public the photos, found in his possession, of some one hundred women they believed might be his victims. Some photos seemed to be normal snapshots, but others showed women undressing.

Many were identified through public outreach, but some were not. So the FB page is one more attempt to find the identify of women whose photos Franklin possessed when he was arrested.

For years, many Grim Sleeper killings were believed part of other sprees. News of an LAPD investigation into the killings as connected to one man was made public in 2008 by Christine Pelisek in the LA Weekly.

The Grim Sleeper case is fascinating for several reasons. But one of them is that it involves a black man. For decades, serial murderers were almost all white. Think Ted Bundy or the Green River Killer. But the chaos of the crack-epidemic years apparently created black serial killers, who often prayed on street women, and whom DNA technology has only recently allowed police to identify, in LA at least. Franklin is suspected to be one of them. Chester Turner and John Floyd Thomas are others.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Filed under Los Angeles, Southern California, Streets