I Watched Wenatchee Police Officers Save A Life This Week

Here's what I learned

Wenatchee Police Chief Steve Crown holding up a package of Narcan, which his officers used to save a woman’s life on Sunday, March 19.

Last Sunday my wife and I went to the grocery store to get vegetables for chicken soup. Then we watched Wenatchee Police Department officers save a woman's life in the parking lot.

Let me back up and set the scene. It was Albertson’s in Wenatchee, about five o’clock. My wife and I, along with our baby daughter, had just exited the store and were walking toward our SUV not long after two Wenatchee Police Department cruisers came speeding up and parked near a four-door car. As officers approached the vehicle, a man who had been in the vehicle jumped out and threw up his hands. My wife buckled our daughter in her car seat as we watched the man, clearly agitated and afraid, speaking rapidly to the officers and without prompting, he got down on his knees. The officers looked at each other and seemed surprised at the man’s behavior. None of them had made a move to unholster their weapons.

The agitated man gestured to the car. By then one of the officers had already opened one of the doors of the vehicle and was focused on a person inside.

About this time an older woman and a girl with a shopping cart full of groceries approached the vehicle, clearly confused. As my wife got in the passenger seat of our vehicle, we watched the confusion rapidly turn to fear (from the child) and anger (from the woman). 

By now multiple officers' attention was on the person in the black car, and the agitated man was back on his feet, pacing and grabbing his head. One of the officers opened a small package, took out its contents and leaned into an open door. 

He was administering Naloxone, also known as Narcan, to an unconscious woman who had overdosed. 

“I think that’s Narcan,” I said to my wife. “I think this is an overdose situation.” 

Naloxone is an opioid antagonist—meaning that it binds to opioid receptors in the brain and can reverse and block the effects of other opioids, such as heroin, morphine, and oxycodone. 

The girl screamed and cried after seeing the woman in the car. It was her mother. The male then approached the child and tried to console her, embracing the her awkwardly, but he was soon shooed off by the older woman, who I can only assume was grandma. The officer administered a second dose. 

It was a heart-wrenching scene. The girl attends the same school as my daughter. It was hard to watch a child experiencing such fear and powerlessness like that.  

“There’s nothing we can do,” I said. “We should go. If they got Narcan in her system she’ll be ok as long as they get her to the hospital soon, which they will.” 

As we pulled out of the parking lot onto Miller Street, we and others made way for a Lifeline Ambulance coming to pick her up. 

My knowledge of naloxone, until that point, had been entirely theoretical. I’ve worked on public health projects aimed at increasing the knowledge of and educating the public on how the life-saving drug works. I’ve interviewed folks who had their lives saved by naloxone. 

But until that day I had not seen it actually save a life. 

It was all hitting close to home, figuratively and literally. As we made the short drive back home, we talked about what we had just witnessed. 

“I think they just saved that woman’s life,” my wife said. “If those cops wouldn’t have given her that Narcan, that little girl might be without a mother right now.” 

I nodded, numbly, not knowing what to say. But I continued to think about the situation all week. I reached out to a local recovery coach, Victor Estrada, about the woman to see if he knew her and if she was ok. He does know her, and said she was ok. He said she was back at work this week. 

Relieved, I decided to write about it in the hopes that sharing this story might make people think. 

The fact is, harm reduction tools like naloxone and drug test strips are considered controversial by some and thus carry a certain unearned stigma. Because of this fact not all police departments carry naloxone. The fact is, in another town in another state at another Albertsons, that lady might have died. 

But let’s consider a few other facts. 

Fact: the opioid crisis exists, and it’s not going anywhere anytime soon. 

Fact: this is a public health crisis, not a war. 

Fact: everyone has dignity, and addicts don’t deserve to needlessly suffer and die because of their addictions.

Fact: evidence-based treatment programs are more effective and save more lives than ignoring the problem or simply throwing money at law enforcement and hoping we can arrest our way out of this problem. 

I’ve interviewed enough folks in recovery, or "former addicts" to the lay person, to know that harm reduction tools like naloxone work.

So do recovery programs where folks can connect and form lifelong bonds with others who understand the path they're walking. 

These programs worked for folks like Joseph Hunter, who once walked the streets of Moses Lake trying to score anything that would get him high and causing trouble along the way. Now he’s a homeowner, a committed father and husband, a recovery coach, a recovery advocate and a member of the Chelan-Douglas Health District board of directors. 

These programs worked for folks like Jess Poulos, who also used to be homeless and addicted on the streets of Moses Lake. Now she’s clean, has full-time employment and just had a baby, whom she dotes on. 

And they worked for people like Victor Estrada, who went from “drug dealer to hope dealer” as he says. From a gang member to a recovery coach and leader in the NCW recovery movement that seeks to break the stigma and remind people that recovery is possible and recovering addicts do exist, even in small communities like Wenatchee, Moses Lake, Omak and Okanogan. 

Nearly every recovering addict I’ve interviewed tells stories of childhood trauma. The path to addiction is so much more complicated than the commonly-accepted myth of it’s purely a choice made by a fully-informed conscious adult who should have known better. 

I once interviewed a woman whose mother was a meth cook who gave her her first hit off a meth pipe when she was 12. Where is the element of choice in that situation? 

I was right when I said there was nothing we could do for that woman in that parking lot last Sunday. But there is something I can do for her, and anyone else struggling with opioid addiction, right now. 

I can use my voice. And so can you. 

We can listen to and tell stories that challenge our assumptions about this issue. Together we can spark the flame of empathy inside all of us. 

On a macro-level, it’s funding evidence-based public health policies that represents our best bet to giving addicts a viable path back to normal life. On an individual level though it’s empathy, education and self-reflection that are the tools we must seize to break the stigma that comes with addiction and mental health issues. Then we can engage in meaningful and productive conversations and establish (or perhaps reestablish) relationships with folks we might have written off due to their addictions.

On a very practical individual level, we can familiarize ourselves with naloxone and have it on hand should, God-forbid, the need for it ever arise. 

Locally, the Wenatchee and Moses Lake Alano Clubs have free Narcan vending machines where folks can stop in and get up to two doses at a time no questions asked. And Washingtonians across the state can find where to find Naloxone in their areas and inform themselves about the life-saving drug as well as how to administer it at stopoverdose.org.

If you or someone you know is dealing with active addiction, there are resources, including recovery coaches in our region. Finding and following the Central Washington Recovery Coalition on Facebook or connecting with your local Alano Club is a great place to start.

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Author’s Note, And An Announcement

This piece originally ran as a column for Source ONE News on Friday, March 24.

I recently agreed to write a weekly column for Source ONE that will be published most Fridays. I’ll also be providing additional content for them from time to time. It’s an exciting new opportunity for me, and I look forward to telling overlooked and under-covered stories in the North Central Washington region.

I’m not going to republish everything I write for them in this space, but from time to time I may highlight what I’ve been covering for them.