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Thursday, February 4, 2021
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Chad Staley’s legacy carrying on after his tragic death TED CLARKE Citizen staff
Chad Staley had been home just two weeks after finishing his first pro hockey season in Italy when he decided to join his buddies in Kennewick, Wash., in a men’s league four-onfour tournament.
In one of the games, the 25-year-old former Prince George Spruce Kings captain got hit with puck in the mouth hard enough that it broke his teeth. He returned to the rink the next day with his face still swollen and wore a full face shield so he could play. But his pain did not go away. It just got worse and he reached out to a friend for help. He gave Staley a little blue pill stamped with ‘M’ on one side and ‘30’ on the other, thinking it was the prescription drug oxycodone, but the pill was laced with fentanyl. On March 9, 2020, while watching a hockey game in his TV room surrounded by shelves of his hockey trophies, Staley swallowed what his friend had given him. A few hours later, Staley’s mother Jennifer came in to the room to call him for dinner when she found his lifeless body. “From what we can tell, he had taken one and it killed him instantly,” Jennifer Staley said. “He was home alone and we have cameras in our house. He had worked for me in my office and got a massage and got lunch at his favourite Mexican restaurant
and he got home and I could see him going through the house laughing and singing and you could tell he was happy and having a good day. “We came home at 5 and went to get him and found him and he had been gone for many hours. The paramedics came and tried to revive him, and we tried CPR, but it was no use. The paramedics tried Narcan and things like that. They tried for 45 minutes but it was no use and pronounced him dead. They said this fentanyl, when they take it, they usually die within eight minutes of taking it.” Produced in labs and sometimes mixed with heroin or cocaine, fentanyl is considered 20 to 40 times more potent than heroin and 100 times more potent than morphine. According to Health Canada, in the first six months of 2020, 1,628 people died of opioid toxicity and all but three per cent of those deaths were accidental. In those six months, fentanyl was the cause of 75 per cent of the accidental opioid overdose deaths. The majority of the victims were male and most were in the prime of their lives in the 20-49 age category. “I want people to not take street drugs or anything that’s not prescribed to you,” Jennifer said. “You don’t know what’s in these drugs. From what I’ve learned, they’re coming up from Mexico, they’re called Mexi-30s, they’re blue pills and they’re killing people left and right.”
HANDOUT PHOTO
Chad Staley poses for a photo with his birth mom Jennifer just before leaving to begin his pro hockey career in Germany in July 2019. Chad Staley arrived in Prince George in April 2012, along with winger Jeremiah Luedtke, his longtime hockey buddy from Seattle, when they were invited to the Spruce Kings’ spring camp. Both were undersized forwards but their chemistry together on the ice was obvious. The Kings signed them right after their weekend audition and they remained linemates throughout the three years they played in the BCHL. Staley was a shy 18-year-old junior rookie when he first put on his No. 22
Spruce Kings jersey but it didn’t take him long to come out of his shell. That season, the five-foot-nine, 160-pound centre scored nine goals and had 27 points. He won the Kings’ most improved player award and with every game his popularity with his teammates, coaches and fans skyrocketed. “He was one of, if not the, hardest worker every day,” said Dave Dupas, the Spruce Kings head coach from 2010-15. See HE JUST on page 8