2023-03-31 01:12:05
Radiolab is on a curiosity bender. We ask deep questions and use investigative journalism to get the answers. A given episode might whirl you through science, legal history, and into the home of someone halfway across the world. The show is known for innovative sound design, smashing information into music. It is hosted by Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser.
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Before we start, the following story contains a moment or two that's pretty intense and may not be suitable for young kids.
Wait, wait, you're listening to Radio Lab.
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From Radio lab.
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Six, six, yep.
Three, one.
Yeah, so Peter, Yeah, Matt, yeah. Where do you want to launch into this?
Uh, yeah, we're going to start with this um call.
Tuesday, August 8, 2017.
This is a call from Bath County, eastern Kentucky. Thirteen, fifty, one and twenty-six seconds.
It's a call from Dispatch to the Bath County EMS station.
These are the people that are dispatched to medical emergencies.
Best I can remember, it was like one or two o'clock in the afternoon, something like that.
Tones went off for a, uh, unresponsive male.
Alright, so that's Scotty Whiteman.
Yep.
The other voice is Jay Foe.
We were partners in the EMS service in Bath County, Kentucky.
Anyway, call comes in.
It's the middle of the day.
Scotty and Jay hop in their ambulance and they rush over to this apartment complex. Uh, they've been there before, it's this sort of squat, two-story building.
Like a strip mall, almost.
Well, we get there, jump out, put the gloves on, enter this small apartment.
And immediately when they come in off, to the left is the living room.
Law enforcement's there.
The Chief of Police was there talking to the two people that were alert in the house, a woman and a guy.
Who are sitting on a couch?
And then if you look immediately to the right, it's just like the kitchen is there.
And you see.
Lying on his back, his arms to his side.
A guy in his mid-fifties.
Completely unresponsive.
He was laying in water about three inches deep, where I guess somebody in the house.
Had taken the sprayer from the kitchen sink and had sprayed him down.
Trying to revive the guy.
Bring him back to life and it doesn't happen that way. So this guy?
So Jay and Scotty enter the kitchen, stand over this guy.
He hadn't started turning blue yet.
So I checked to make sure he was breathing and he was.
But barely.
Really low, shallow breaths.
And then I pulled his eyelids back and checked his pupils.
They're tiny, pinpoint.
He was overdosed, pretty indicative of opiates, so I said, okay.
So Jay grabs his medic kit, he goes into his bag and he pulls out this nasal spray. It's a drug called naloxone.
It's also commonly referred to as narcan, and it's a drug that's known as being this Lazarus drug.
Yeah, because it immediately throws an opioid overdose into reverse, like brings people back from the brink of death.
So Jay crouches over this guy and he takes this nasal spray, sticks it up, one of the guy's nostrils, sprays it, takes it out, waits a beat.
Does the same thing to the other nostril.
Back awake within seconds.
The guy opened his eyes.
Talked What's going on?
I grabbed a towel and started drying him off.
And then I pushed him up so I could sit him up.
Got him up.
Got him onto the stretcher.
Loaded in a truck and we take off to St. Clair Hospital.
Scotty's up front, he's driving the ambulance.
Jay's in the back with the patient.
Everything was good with him.
Everything was routine.
When, all of a sudden.
Scotty hollered through the window. He yelled at me, I don't feel right.
I can remember a weird taste coming into my mouth and a real odd smell hitting my nose.
What do you taste?
I can't describe it, it was just it was like chewing on steel.
Go ahead.
Scotty While he's driving, he gets on the radio. I need a unit to.. ..
I'm hollering at the next county over saying, Hey, I need help, I've got a light failing. Increased temperature.
I need you to send me an ambulance on the eastbound exit ramp of the 137. Just have them meet us there, please.
Can 4..
Made it to the bottom of the ramp, put the truck in park.
Jay jumped out of the back and ran up to the front.
Went through the passenger side.
Got to Scotty.
He was already slumped over.
Unresponsive.
It was that quick.
Like he was out cold, not waking up anything. No, no, he's not responding at all. So what's happening? Well, this is like this is.
The thing that I don't know was so shocking to me is that when Jay then checked out Scotty.
He had pinpoint pupils snoring, respirations.
He seemed to have the exact same symptoms as the patient in the back of the ambulance, who had overdosed. Wait, what? the exact same symptoms? Yeah, that's what it looked like to Jay. Well, how can...?
How does that even happen? Well, so, um, so Jay explained it to us, like, Uh, they, he says, if you wind back. They had gone into this apartment to treat this guy who was on the kitchen floor.
Yeah, I was wet.
And he said he believes that when they were helping him up.
And Jay said he believes that what likely happened in that moment is that whatever drug this guy had taken had now gotten onto Scotty's arm, absorbed through his skin, into his system, and then, like 15 minutes later, had caused Scotty to pass out.
Wow.
That's that's really strange.
Yeah, it seems like a really unusual thing to happen. But the thing is like, I guess what's even weirder is that, like, this wasn't the first time I had heard this story.
Right, like, Peter's been following this for a while.
So yeah, I've been keeping a list of these types of incidents, and what I found is this wasn't an isolated incident. These types of things are happening a lot.
Now, at six, Emt's in danger.
There have been cases reported in North Carolina, Florida.
A police officer nearly died.
North Carolina.
West Virginia.
Texas, California.
Massachusetts.
Vermont.
New Hampshire, Nebraska.
There's been over a hundred reported incidents all over the country.
So, I mean, I've been reporting on opiates for a number of years. And I guess as I was watching these kinds of incidents occur, it kind of felt like I was watching a contagion like unfold in real time. I mean, I guess when I was reading all these stories, I was just thinking, like, what is going on here? like, what's happening?
I'm Jed Abumrad, I'm Robert Krulwich. This is radio lab. Today we have a story about what happened that day in that apartment, in that ambulance in Kentucky. Definitely kind of a mystery story.
But at its core, it's really a story about wanting to do good, choosing to do good, and then having to suddenly bear the cost of doing good.
The story comes to us from Peter Smith, freelance journalist, and it also was co-reported by.
Peter.
Our producer Matt Kilty.
Hey everybody.
Okay, so so, Kentucky.
Kentucky.
So.
We wanted to talk to Scotty and his partner Jay about what happened that day.
And about what's been happening.
So we flew into Lexington, we drove about an hour east.
And it was some nice rolling bluegrass hills.
Yeah, a lot of green, and we drove to this tiny little city called Owingsville and we're at the Bath County Emergency Medical Services.
Where the Bath County EMS is?
White building, linoleum siding, big garage doors like you'd see at an auto shop, couple big White Bath County EMS ambulances. So there's a washer dryer ashtray on top of it.
And attached to the garage is a one-story house, basically.
So we essentially just showed up at this place to introduce ourselves and say, Hey, yeah, go ahead.
Sit down, thank you, you're late.
There were a few people inside.
Gary, the director of the station, was there, yeah.
And you're serving the whole county.
It's 284 square miles, I think, is how big our county is.
You know about how many people that is.
Uh, a little over 12,000 now, I believe, and we're covering that out of one station.
Feels like there's beds in bath.
Yeah, beds in bath, yeah.
You all end up just kind of like living here.
Yeah, it's basically like an apartment.
There's a kitchen, we were in the living room, with Gary sitting on a couch. There's these big, lazy boys, a ginormous TV Billy Bob Thornton was on.
He's a mean dude, No, he's just a mean dude in real life. Remember that we went to a Willie Nelson concert and his band opened for Willie Nelson, and somebody in the audience heckled him.
He just about came off the stage after him, and he called him everything but a sewing machine and a milk cow. I mean, he made up cuss words, Yeah, he's a wiry little feller.
So we were kind of just hanging around with Gary.
It was probably like 15 minutes and then Scotty walked in.
Nice to meet you.
Matt Kilty.
How you guys doing?
This is the EMT who overdosed.
Yeah, Scotty's the guy that supposedly overdosed.
He's in his 50s, white, hair, tall.
He's got bright blue eyes.
I have a question, how did you even find out about all of this?
I read in the New York Times there was one line in the story about three EMS personnel. I don't know if that's the true story.
Pretty much, yeah.
Picked up on the story?
Yeah.
And so then I thought there was something unusual about that, and I was curious to hear the real story.
Give me just a few minutes, yeah, no rush, sit down and then discuss things, all right.
So eventually, it was just the three of us in this living room.
Set a table or.
I mean, maybe I should preface this by saying that you can't really understand this story unless you understand a little bit about what EMS personnel do. I talked to some other EMTs that told me that everybody has their why, everybody has this thing. They say this is the reason I got into this line of business.
I would say a very small percentage don't have second or third jobs, they don't make a lot of money, so everybody has this. Why? Yeah, maybe you can just tell, and so I asked Scotty what his why was.
And he told me this story. It's an incredible story that not only explains why he does what he does, but it also explains why he holds on to certain things.
So, in September of 1999, I was involved in an accident on the Pennsylvania Turnpike.
So it was early in the morning, it was raining.
Yeah, it was during Hurricane Floyd.
He was out there for work.
Cross-country trucking.
What kind of rig were you driving?
It was a freightliner and I was pulling a flatbed trailer with a load of pipe on it.
I was on the turnpike with this heavy load of steel on the back, and with the weather, visibility starts to get bad.
Slowed my speed way down, probably running approximately 50 55 miles an hour.
And he comes through this construction site.
And something happened in the front end of the truck.
You heard a pop?
The front tire had blown out and I basically became a passenger at that point, there was no control of it.
His 18-wheeler was like careening out of control down the turnpike, and it was like skidding across the wet pavement.
And the truck lunged to the right.
There was a concrete wall there that had guardrail attached to it, it nosed into the guardrail.
Came flying back across both lanes.
Back toward the center divider and the truck hit it.
Plowed through the center divider.
And began to, like, roll over.
And came down and struck a vehicle that was traveling the other direction.
Scotty says he doesn't remember much of what happened next, other than his truck finally coming to a stop.
After that, the next thing I remember was standing on the frame of the truck, watching diesel fuel run underneath of me, and I could hear the truck burning.
Somehow, he managed to get out of the cab and he's standing on this tail of the cab and the truck is on fire. And while he's standing there, other people who were driving down the highway have stopped and they've started to yell at him.
I got off the truck and I looked up the road and I saw the other vehicle, and I knew then that it wasn't good.
What did it look like?
It was a very destroyed vehicle.
What happens next?
There was a lady who had a minivan, I have no idea where she came from. She opened the side door on her minivan and had me sit on the floor board. Until the ambulance got there, I was looking down at my left hand.
And the back of my left hand, all the skin was probably hanging down 8, 10, 12 inches where it had melted the skin.
Like, your skin is just dangling off your body.
Yeah, I can remember when the ambulance was getting there and there was a female paramedic. And when she walked up and looked at me, I remember her going, Oh my god, this ain't good, is it?
No, she didn't lie to me, she said. No, it's not good.
You got rushed to a hospital, you had five broken ribs, massive skin burns.
I do remember them telling me, you're going to lose your left hand, and I told them, I said, that's not an option, I'm left-handed.
Surgeons immediately started doing skin grafts.
Took skin off my legs and put on my arms and my back. As you can see, I've still got my left hand.
Still left-handed.
I'm still left-handed.
And you said it was a couple days after the accident when they told you about the other car. How did that conversation unfold?
It was an attorney that was representing. The trucking company that I was driving for was the one that actually told me about the fatalities that had been involved with the accident. That was how I found out.
Do you remember what exactly happened?
I just remember him walking into the hospital room and he's like, Hi, my name is yeah, and my name's so-and-so. And I'm an attorney representing the company that you drive for.
We don't know if you've been informed of this or not, but there was three fatalities involved.
No, I hadn't been informed, but I guess I have been now. When we started into court proceedings, that was when I found out names and where they were from. Where were they from? They were from Connecticut. They had been on vacation in North Carolina.
The hurricane coming in, they were evacuated out of North Carolina. So they had decided that they were going to travel up into Pennsylvania and try to find a place to finish their vacation in Pennsylvania.
And that's what put them there if I'd have traveled two miles an hour faster, or two miles an hour slower.
We wouldn't have been at the same place at the same time.
Scotty eventually went back to long-haul trucking. But he says that he kept thinking about that day, about that accident, the people who were killed.
Never forgot, still haven't forgotten.
But the other thing that really struck him about that day was that everybody who showed up to that scene, the fire department, the EMS.
Everybody there was volunteering.
And that's something he couldn't really shake.
That people volunteered to come to me and they didn't know who I was, they didn't care who I was, they didn't pass judgment on me. That, yeah, I was in a horrific accident and I may have been the cause of that accident. They didn't care, they viewed me as someone that needed help.
And that was all they viewed me as.
And Scotty said, the more he thought about it, the more he felt like he had this sort of debt to pay back for the lives that were lost that day.
For the ones that he extinguished and the way that he's going to do that is become a volunteer, he's going to become one of these people.
Who help those in need?
That comes to your aid, no matter what.
And as they say, you know, the rest is history. Here. I am an EMT.
So we spent a few days with Scotty, following him around on some of his runs. And as an EMT, his main responsibility is to drive the ambulance, but also to assist his partner.
Who's often Jay?
And out in rural Kentucky, they get all sorts of calls.
Come here, honey, they just want to look at you, it's okay, you're okay.
How long has he been acting like that, huh, since last night?
Okay, like a three-year-old who's having trouble breathing, just breathe.
Look, look, look at me.
You want to go for a ride? Ma'am? come on, we go.
A lot of calls from nursing homes. Deep breath. Does that hurt?
Got him on six on Maine.
Where a call can be for something that feels like so small, like a cough or low blood sugar.
Ready to go?
Portable over to Maine.
One night, 920 at night, got a call. Older woman fell off a porch. They helped pick up an elderly woman.
Oh, good job.
Good job.
Sometimes they just get called to give people their meds.
You're going to feel a big poke, okay, count of three. here we go, one, two, three, big poke.
These are kind of like the everyday, innocuous calls, and then, of course, there are overdoses.
By the way, I'm Matt.
I'm Earl, Earl, nice to meet you, Peter.
Because we were like these out-of-town reporters, everybody kept saying that we should go down to the old jail.
You're the jailer.
Yeah.
Which is where we met the county jailer. Earl How's it going, Sir? How you doing there, Bud? I'm Matt and his friend Mitchell.
Nice to meet you.
Alrighty.
And so Earl led us into the jail. It's abandoned now.
Paint peeling off the walls.
He walked us into this front room.
Nice to see you, I'd like to ask you more of this job.
It's full of weed whackers, lawnmowers.
Earl oversees the work release program, so the people that are in jail are sort of on this temporary work release program. They do lawn maintenance along the highway.
Where'd they got them at? Mitch Oh, it's over there, I see it, yeah, over in the corner.
And then Earl grabbed this red bucket, which he set down. It's like a knee-high bucket.
Pretty nasty.
Oh my god.
That's from this year, but you can see, that's just this year.
That's so many syringes, how many do you think you got in there?
I'd say, there's a thousand, wouldn't you, Mitch? Close to it? Yeah, close to it. That was like, all last year, all last year.
People on Work Release have been picking these up for, like, the past year. This is just the litter on the highway.
Yeah, it's just it's been awful. They used to have the kids, you know, would clean up, like boy scouts and stuff, clean up lawn rows, but it just got too bad with the needles now.
You just can't do it anymore with the way the needles and stuff are. Mm-mm-mm. Yeah, that's all kinds of murder in that big bottle, ain't it? Yeah, I forgot about that, yeah.
There ought to be another bottle full, there's probably 20 30 in there. Yeah, here's another one.
Mm-mm.
We got a problem here, there's no doubt about that. There's definitely a problem with heroin use. Some of them's got it in, still got the stuff in there.
Still got the drugs in there.
Blood, too. Yeah, huh? That first year we really had them, didn't we? We threw a bunch of them away, too, before we started saving them.
Yeah.
Did it surprise you to find this many?
Really, yeah, well, it just all. The heroin problem just started, just like overnight here, I mean, it was pills forever, and then just all at once.
I mean, nobody even ever seen a needle, did you? Mitch? No. And then, just all at once, they were everywhere.
When did you start seeing them?
About.
A year ago, wasn't it? It's been longer than that, about two and a half, two, two and a half years ago, and it just....
And once it started, you started finding them, they were everywhere then.
So what do you think when you see all these needles?
I just think it's a bad thing, it's destroying families and we have somebody dying here just all the time. I mean, it's really bad, sad. I had a very good friend that I lost.
What was it, Mitch, back last August? Yeah, somewhere along there. I had took him to rehab and he was in there for a couple months and he got out and done good. And then that happened to him.
And that was sort of the incredible thing.
There's something for everyone here, so have your pick.
All right, well, I'll take a look around, okay? It was that, like everybody knew somebody who had been caught up in using opioids.
I mean, nice families and somebody in their family end up on the bed.
Like, I went to a yard sale because I love yard sales and.
When I told the women who were sitting there on the driveway what we were reporting on, they said they had lost neighbors, friends.
Well, let's put it like this in 2000...
You know, one day when we were down there, we had to take a lift.
No, in 1990, I had a motorcycle accident which destroyed my left femur. I've got a 12-inch plate, 10 screws and two pins that hold my left femur together.
And the driver told us how he'd started using pills.
And really came by quite innocently.
I went to the thrift store who told me she lost a cousin to an overdose. Actually, Jay told us about a friend of his.
He actually relapsed, he was in therapy, his sponsor in narcotics, Anonymous, overdosed, and he had nobody to go to. So he relapsed and was found two days later in his car. So it was pretty bad.
And I would assume that DMS, Scotty and Jay would have seen this shift happen.
Yeah, Scotty told us around 2017. Overdose calls.
Went from one or two a week to.
Five, six, one day.
There was 11.
And that was just unheard of in this county, just to have that many overdoses.
They told us they would treat the same person like five times over a few months, like this is just their job.
Right, they're there to save people's lives.
Despite this overdose problem and the sort of like moral calculus that any EMS person makes when they show up to help a person who is OD'd. It started to shift when reports started emerging about this new drug, this drug that made it. So. Simply coming into contact with a person, like just simply touching them, could put an EMS worker in danger.
Wasn't a lot known about it.
We talked to this guy, Jason York, about it.
He's the emergency management director for the county. When it first came out, the reports that we were getting was literally airborne. Have you ever seen it? No.
What do you think like just hearing about it? I mean, what's going through your mind when you hear about it? World War Z?
Walking dead.
The drug is called fentanyl.
What is fentanyl like? I know that it's an opioid, but is it like...?
So so fentanyl.
Didn't you talk to a guy about this a while back?
Can you tell me again, like, who you are? Yeah, I'm an emergency physician here at Hennepin County Medical Center, which is a level one trauma center in Minneapolis. He's also the director of the Minnesota Poison Control. So fentanyl, so fentanyl has been around for decades, and we use it almost every day in my hospital in some capacity.
So fentanyl is an opioid, it's fully synthetic, it's manufactured in a laboratory, and it often comes in powder form. But drug companies reformulated it into all sorts of things, like fentanyl. Lollipops, and these lollipops are given to soldiers on the battlefield.
There's also fentanyl patches that people wear to get fentanyl into their body through their skin.
Oh, so, you can do fentanyl through the skin.
Yeah, it's an easy way to put something on. For people with really bad chronic pain, people with cancer, for instance, use them, it's just this really, really effective painkiller.
I mean, a lot of people refer to fentanyl as sort of the third wave of the opioid crisis.
Just for context, I mean, what are the first two waves?
Yeah, well, so if you go back to the beginning of the crisis. The first wave was pills when in the early 2000s, drug manufacturers began flooding communities with pharmaceutical-grade opioids. And the second wave was around 2011, when there was a crackdown on pills. And so a lot of people that were using pharmaceuticals began to migrate to heroin, and the Mexican cartels got very good at delivering that heroin.
And then?
Around 2013, the third wave hits.
America's worst drug crisis ever?
Drug dealers, people that were selling heroin. Start looking to fentanyl, because fentanyl is so much cheaper to either make or obtain than normal heroin, and, most importantly, fentanyl is way more potent.
And so, basically, to maximize their profit, drug dealers start cutting fentanyl into heroin. The problem is that the people who are using, they really have no idea what they're getting, they think they're just getting heroin. And certainly, by 2014, we started to see patients in our emergency department who were overdosed with what they thought was heroin that probably turned out to be fentanyl.
Fentanyl dang a powerful synthetic opioid.
There were all these news stories about.
A powerful opioid, this fentanyl.
Powerful, ultra-potent synthetic opioid.
30 to 50 times as powerful as heroin itself.
And there are versions of it where, you know, the molecules changed a little bit and it makes it more potent. And by 2016...
An even more dangerous drug is now hitting the street.
It's called carfentanil. It's a new synthetic opioid usually used to tranquilize elephants. Now this deadly drug is popping up in our backyards.
And carfentanil is extremely potent.
The same size as just seven grains of salt could kill you.
John says it was right around this time 2016.
There started to be reports of....
I fall backwards.
Law enforcement.
I'm trying to hold on to anything I can grasp.
Emergency medical services.
My face started burning.
And even nurses in hospitals.
Describing getting ill when they were exposed to powder that turned out later to be fentanyl or some other type of fentanyl.
How did you first hear about it?
How did I hear about it, you guys, the media?
Oh, I forget, I'm a representative of the media. Scotty said. He actually first heard about Carfentanil on Good Morning America.
I started reading articles on it.
Jay saw other people in EMs tweeting about it.
You know, what is this drug? What is going on?
But that's in the big city, it's not going to happen here.
And then one of our local law enforcement officers, Bud Lyons.
So you read about fentanyl, I mean, I read about it, but I didn't think it would come to a small city like this.
So that's bud lyons.
He's a police officer, he's a canine officer here.
So what happened? Basically? I was dispatched to the funeral home, so it was the summer of 2017. Bud got called out to the parking lot of the funeral home. A female had passed out.
In her car, when I got on scene, woke her up, got her out of the vehicle. I noticed she had some brown stuff on her face, like a powder substance, around her nostrils. He searched the car and took into evidence $1,000 in cash.
And several little baggies of brown powder, substance that turned out to be heroin.
And that same night as he was back in the evidence room, going through the money.
I didn't have no gloves on when I was counting the money, started feeling funny, started feeling real dizzy, couldn't think straight, dropped the money.
And drove his cruiser up here into the parking lot of the EMS station, and when he pulled in, he went down.
A couple of EMs were there, gave him this Lazarus drug, Narcan.
Rushed me to the hospital.
Had that ever happened to you before?
No, it's the first time it's ever happened. And, you know, just that little touch, basically, almost killed me. Just a grain of fentanyl got on his skin and he's saying, that's all it took. Yeah, like that was the story that was starting to emerge, really, across the country.
That like a tiny grain, if you came into contact with a tiny grain of this drug, it could take you down.
So as soon as that happened, Scotty, we made it a pact between us to carry extra narcan in the truck for us in case we ever got exposed. Because I knew it was here in the county and in the city, then, about a month after that, sure enough.
Chewing on steel put the truck in park.
My partner got exposed.
I can remember coming to and being in another ambulance.
Jade had given Scotty their narcan they had stashed away.
His dose of Narcan and mine, because he wouldn't wake up after the first dose.
We got him to the hospital.
Scotty was kept under evaluation for about four hours.
And then eventually discharged.
That was when it hit on the fact of, you know what, I almost died doing my job.
And that's essentially when what began as a call for help became a crime scene.
What do you mean? I will tell you in a minute.
Jad Robert Radiolab.
Back to Peter and Matt in Kentucky.
Starts right now at Cartel Kitchen. Let's get on with it.
It was on the show years back.
Look at it.
Something that I kept thinking about when we were down there in Kentucky driving around, was that there is like, no duty to render aid. Even though there are some exceptions and statutes in some states, like, for the most part, there's just no obligation. We live in a society where you can sort of watch a person drown and you won't be held liable.
You can do that.
And that's legal.
I just kept thinking about that.
We've mostly just been here.
So when we were down there with Earl, the jailer.
Yeah, in the jail, the Old Bath County Jail.
We had just seen the needles and we were coming out to the parking lot.
I go to Wisconsin every day.
And we had spent probably like two or three days trying to find the people who were actually in the apartment, like the person who overdosed and the other two people who were actually in the apartment, we learned, lived in that apartment.
I had a phone number, but nobody was picking up. But we're with Earl.
And I just asked him if he knew this guy, Scotty Hatton.
This is a different Scotty.
This is a different Scotty.
Right, because Scotty Whiteman's, the EMT who responded to the call, had this seemingly like overdose exposure. Scotty Hatton lived in the apartment.
Yeah, he was there the day that Scotty and Jay showed up.
Yeah, I know him.
We got the Scotty Whiteman side of the story and we were just curious.
What do you want to talk to him about what went on that night?
Just get his side of the story, I know that.
I don't think that he could right now because his case ain't final. I just about guarantee you won't.
But then he was like, I can tell you where he is, though. Because it turns out that Scotty Hatton had on an ankle monitor. And Earl, you know, he's the jailer, so he just like, pulls up his phone and looks up Scotty's GPS location.
And so the little dot for the GPS showed exactly where he was at this old cemetery.
And Earl said, We could go down there and maybe he would talk to us.
So we get there pretty big and sprawling cemetery, that was like 25 minutes out of town, something like that.
Yeah, lots of big trees, cicadas.
Anyway, Scotty was actually out on this riding lawnmower.
And they're talking to his supervisor, and then Scotty himself gets off the lawnmower and comes over to us. What did he look like? Sunken eyes, big eyes?
Pretty skinny guy.
He was wearing like a blue Duke ball cap.
Blue jeans.
So Scotty came over, his supervisor just went on the lawnmower and started riding around, and Scotty immediately started talking.
It seemed like he wanted to tell his side of the story.
He said He got sick. I'm looking online, sometimes it can take one to four hours.
And he was standing under this big oak tree, kind of like on a steep slope.
You're saying that you think it's doubtful?
I think it's very doubtful.
And he immediately started telling us that he was suspicious of Scotty Whiteman's story. This whole overdose by touch thing.
Because he only touched my other co-defendant.
I didn't know you're not supposed to wash them when it's overdosing off, but I did. And this guy's trying to say he got infected by carfentanil. They didn't even find any drugs on the scene, they found very little paraphernalia.
But I know I'm done. It's just one of those things I'm going to church now. As soon as I get this ankle monitor off, I'm going to get saved, I can't get saved with the ankle monitor.
You can't submerge it.
Where are you going to get baptized?
I go to Freedom Church in Mount Sterling. Probably going to ask them. Being in front of a bunch of people will make me kind of nervous.
We decided to meet up with him later because of the lawnmower or cicadas, so we went to his aunt's house.
He was living there he'd gotten evicted from his apartment after the OD.
I'm going love you, love you too, you're going to Santa Ruby, ain't you? yeah.
It was nice to meet you guys.
Nice to meet you too.
I don't know she really wants Chris by itself.
You're Jessica's girlfriend.
Yeah, oh, okay.
So apparently he's got his girlfriend, Jessica. She was the other person in the apartment for this overdose. She was also now living with Scotty at his aunt's, but she didn't want to talk to us.
So then the three of us sat down on the couch in the living room and Scotty just started telling us about his own story. And I think his story definitely has is a very like sort of common trajectory.
Where, like, where'd you grow up? Was it around here?
Yeah, I grew up in Bath County, I've been here my whole life, pretty much.
So Scotty grew up in government housing, in a small apartment with his sister, his mom.
She had another husband by then, not my dad, he's my stepdad.
His stepdad is this guy named Ricky.
Who figures pretty prominently in this story?
He drank a lot, wasn't that good, a wasn't all that good a home. Then I was like 15, 16. I moved in with my grandma and lived with my dad and my grandma, and I was into sports.
Now I don't even hardly go see my dad. He caught him a case, I guess he's got several charges pending.
So when was the first time you you used?
Um, the first time I ever took narcotics, I was 19.
According to Scotty, what happened was he got kidney stones.
Never had a pain worse than that. hurt so bad I was crying.
He mentioned it to his dad.
He had a motorcycle wreck, kind of messed him up, you know, he just said, Here, you know, you can take one of my pain pills.
It was a lortab, which is hydrocodone and acetaminophen.
Yeah, he said when he took it.
Euphoria.
Felt just total relief.
I just liked the feeling, you know, makes you feel really, really good.
Not long after that.
Getting this medicine, I ain't gonna lie, and I'd take it, you know, take two or three a year, and then it just, you know, got to experiment more and more.
Started using PERC 30s, which are definitely flooding into places like Kentucky in the early 2000s. So this is like the sort of first wave of the opioid crisis.
So Scotty said at first he would get pills from friends, people at work.
And then it just, you know, got to, well, you know, I started buying pills.
When do you feel like it crossed over from?
Um, probably my mid-20s.
He started taking Oxycontin and he said he was working at the time, stocking bread.
Right, he was stocking bread, he was also working in a factory.
Because I'd be like, well, I'd rather work because I'd steal off somebody, and I've always been that way.
So you're like, I can work and make enough money to.
It was really hard. I mean, I made five, six hundred dollars a week and, you know, I wouldn't have any left.
Because he had spent all of it on on pills.
And he was doing that for years and probably, um, it was about like, 2011 or 12..
You know, heroin came around, that's when I started doing it.
Because it was cheaper, or.
Because it was cheaper, because I was spending 80 to 100 dollars on two pills.
80 to 100 for just two pills.
Just two pills.
You know, for 80 or 100 dollars of heroin, you can get a lot more, and it's a lot more powerful. So it just made sense.
Scotty told us he did heroin for like five or six years, He didn't inject it, but he would snort it. And he says he tried to quit a couple of times, but just didn't.
Which was probably just an excuse for I couldn't, I had to hit rock, complete rock bottom.
For Scotty, he says, that was the day of the overdoses in that apartment. Yeah, so what's your life at some point? Where does it start?
Um, you're probably going to have to ask me questions on this because I may shy back from some of it a little bit. So ask me again what you want to know. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So you're living down there with Jessica and your son, Gabriel?
So Jessica Scotty's girlfriend? The two of them have a son together, Gabriel.
And it's her apartment, and at some point, Ricky is with you guys.
Ricky is his stepdad.
They're like, Why is he over there that day?
Well, I mean, he's burned all his bridges.
From what we learned, it sounds like he was last living with friends and like they had a falling out.
Yeah, it seemed like everybody else had sort of given up on him.
We felt sorry for him, he didn't know where to go. So, you know, you can stay here a couple of days. I mean, that was it.
And then, um, like, I don't know where would you start with that day?
Um, really don't know where to go with this.
I'm trying to not, you know, say very much.
I think, I think last time we spoke, it was like, Uh, at some point you notice Ricky.
I can go from there probably a little bit, you know, I was.
So Scotty explained to us that he and Jessica were in the living room of the apartment, sitting on the couch. And that at some point, Ricky had gotten up and gone into the kitchen. And after a little while, Scotty realized that the kitchen sink, the water in the kitchen sink had been running for a while.
And I'm like, why is the water running?
You know, so I go in there, goes into the kitchen and sees Ricky standing over the kitchen sink.
And he said he looked locked up, frozen, like like his arms were really stiff. His fists were sort of like clenched bracing, grabbing the countertop with his tongue flopping.
Back and forth in his mouth, you can, kind of his mouth barely open, you can see it. I kind of knew what it probably was.
He's oding.
I get a chair and I get him, I struggle to get him in it, I get him in the chair and he's out. We have one of those, not only a faucet, we got one of those spray things I was spraying.
Oh, like sprays for the dishes.
Yeah, I was spraying with cold water. I was thinking, well, you know, it might wake him up. I washed him in the face and I did smack him in the face a few times. He just he wouldn't wake up.
So then I knew we had to make the decision to call the ambulance service.
What happens next?
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