DRUGS ifty-eight-year-old Tony Williams was coming apart. He was spending nights on a cot in a Seattle hospital while his 75-year-old mother battled cancer in May of 2018. Simultaneously, Williams was reliving the regular beatings and physical abuse he endured from her as a child. He also had auditory hallucinations stemming from his schizophrenia resurface. “It just all came flooding back — the auditory hallucinations, the PTSD, the fear of being hit,” he says. Days before his mother finally succumbed to cancer, Williams wandered into a small park near the hospital to smoke a cigarette. Surrounded by hedges, the space was secluded and peaceful. He sat down on a bench and lit up when a stranger walked into the park and sat next to him. The man broke out a pipe and a small baggie of crack cocaine. “You don’t mind if I take a hit here, do you?” he asked, according to Williams’ recollection. “No, go ahead,” Williams responded. The stranger then offered to share: Do you want to take a hit? Williams, who had been sober for over a decade at that point and was a professional drug counselor in Spokane, said “yes.” Then they got high together. Relapsing on the park bench that day marked the beginning of Williams’ unravelling as a well-respected drug counselor. Less than a year later, in April 2019, he was booked into the county jail on charges that he sold large quantities of methamphetamine and heroin in Spokane. He’s now being held at Geiger Corrections Center on $100,000 bail while his case slowly plods through the courts. News of his arrest and the allegations against him sent shock waves through the local addiction-recovery community, who knew Williams as an accomplished and exceptional counselor with lived experience that made him relatable to his clients. “He was just kind of a rock. He was one of those people that everybody kind of gravitated to,” says Sabrina Ryan-Helton, a current staffer for the Bail Project nonprofit and a recovering meth addict who met Williams roughly a decade ago. “There was no one who didn’t like him and look up to him.” While Williams wouldn’t comment on the pending charges against him — he maintains that while some allegations are true, “a lot of it’s not” and that he never sold to clients — he agreed to sit down with the Inlander while incarcerated for a series of interviews. He opened up about his ongoing struggle with addiction and his remarkable journey from selling and using drugs to becoming a well-educated addiction professional and then allegedly going back to the beginning, feeding the addictions of others. His story is also indicative of the brutal grip addiction holds on many people, and how it can still tear down even those who have years of sobriety behind them.
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LIVING UNDER THE GUN
For Williams, much of his life was defined by his relationship with his mother — and the beatings she gave him as a child: “I was pretty angry. I was pretty good in sports. I was a pretty good fighter,” he says. “I’m a product of being physically abused by my mom.” For Williams and his younger sister, Rita Green, their mother, DeCharlene, was a person of paradox. A descendant of slaves from Texas, she was known as a fearless, outspoken, hardworking and prominent member of Seattle’s black community. She started her own successful beauty salon and boutique before going on to found the chamber of commerce for the Central District
24 INLANDER JUNE 20, 2019
DeCharlene Williams (above), Tony’s mother and a prominent black leader in Seattle, and Tony (right) as a child in an undated family photo.