MARCH 2 - 15, 2018 • VOL. 10 — NO. 5
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Brookhaven Reporter
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► Democratic candidates for governor stake out positions PAGE 4 ► Brookhaven Park is going to the dogs, residents complain PAGE 12
Coping with a Crisis: Opioid addiction in the suburbs EXCLUSIVE SERIES
Life after death: Families turn obituaries into protests against the stigma of addiction
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Builders challenge city on granite curbing, ‘sidewalks to nowhere’ BY DYANA BAGBY dyanabagby@reporternewspapers.net
Ronald Koenraad walked along Woodrow Way on a recent Saturday afternoon, pointing to the cracks and crumbling in the granite curbing that lines the road along a resident’s side yard. “You can see where it’s deteriorated,” the professional house-builder said. “They just don’t work.” At another stop, Koenraad showed where a large slab of granite curbing has tilted over into a ditch. It was another example of granite curbing failing in the city, he said. Walking with Koenraad was City Councilmember John Park. Park snapped a photo of the tilted granite curb with his phone and typed in information for Brookhaven Connect, the city’s mobile app that allows residents to report code violations, sidewalk problems or potholes. Koenraad, who lives in Brookhaven and has been building million-dollar homes in MAX BLAU
Larry and Peggy Lord display a childhood photo of their sons Ashby and Hunter. Ashby, at right, died of a heroin overdose last year.
BY MAX BLAU
O
n a Sunday afternoon last April, the moment Larry Lord had dreaded for roughly two decades finally happened. His wife, Peggy, found their 35-year-old son Ashby no longer breathing in the basement of their ranch home on Sandy Springs’ Mount Paran Road. She tried performing CPR and called 911. But nothing the paramedics did could revive Ashby after a heroin overdose. Larry was devastated. Like many family members after a death, he faced the task of writing an obituary so that newspapers and the funeral home could inform their loved ones. Larry, an architect, considered himself a problem-solver.
First of a 4-Part Series The combination of prescription painkillers, heroin and synthetic opioids is killing people around the nation, including within Reporter Newspapers communities. In this exclusive four-part series, we will look at how local families, nurses, prosecutors, recovering addicts and others are responding to a growing epidemic that already kills more people than cars, guns or breast cancer each year. To share your thoughts and stories, email editor@reporternewspapers.net
A doctor’s overview of the opioid crisis. See Commentary, page 10 ► Usually, he could sketch out new doors or windows to make design problems disappear. He’d written obituaries, too,
most recently for his first wife and Ashby’s mother, Shannon, after she died from complications of cancer. But the circumstances of Ashby’s life posed difficult questions in how to talk about his death. Euphemisms are a tradition of sorts for overdose victims. Their obituaries say that they left this world or entered eternal rest while glossing over how it happened. The reasons vary from not speaking ill of the dead to a fear that it might reflect poorly on the living. “For many years, you never saw the word ‘addiction’ in an obit,” says Dr. Frances Levin, a psychiatry professor at Columbia University Medical Center. “That’s because of the stigma related to Continued on page 8
See BUILDERS on page 14
City officials: SPLOST is flawed with no park funding allowed BY DYANA BAGBY dyanabagby@reporternewspapers.net
City leaders knew a new county tax was flawed and would end funding for parks improvements, but say they couldn’t do anything about it because it was destined for the ballot. “It is hard to make perfect legislation,” Councilmember Bates Mattison said in speaking of the 1 percent special local option sales tax overwhelmingly approved by DeKalb voters last year. “But it was going to See CITY on page 13