Heroin's Wrath: A Father Has To Keep Painful Promise

EASTLAKE, OH — Police texted Tim Sherman on Christmas Eve, they wanted to know if he could call dispatch and speak with an Eastlake detective. Tim wondered what kind of trouble he'd been up to in Eastlake recently, he thought the call had to be about him and his penchant for mischief. The first sign that something was seriously wrong was the detective asking to meet Tim personally at his home.

The detective asked Tim if he could speak privately. "That's when my stomach drops," he said. Soon after, Tim fell to his knees, his pants getting wet from the snow, and started whimpering. His 23-year-old daughter, Karisten, a 2012 graduate of Willoughby High School, was dead. She had overdosed on heroin on Dec. 24.

Karisten had been clean for 13 months. Her father thought she had "kicked the dragon."

"I didn’t think she was ever gonna look back for it," he said in an emotional social media post he shared after Christmas.

Their history together flashed through his mind.

Tim had taken her to her first Narcan meeting, her first Alcoholics Aanonymous meeting and he went with her to her first Narcotics Anonymous meeting. He would pop in to a meeting with her occasionally after that, checking in on her progress.

Tim spoke with his daughter about the "hocus pocus" that surrounds some of the meetings she attended, but she promised him she enjoyed the meetings, thought they were helping her along. She had met people that understood her and were going to help her, Tim said.

She then promised her father that she'd never go back to heroin again.

"She even said “Daddy, I don’t want to go back to that stuff ever again”. I remind her what I told her at the Narcan meeting “if you can’t kick the dragon for good I will be the one to zip you up, but I will be with you every step of the way when you need me," Tim wrote in a social media post.

"I don’t know why she didn’t call me like she promised. It hurts so bad that she didn’t call," he said in his social media post. "She just wasn’t strong enough to fight temptation and for some reason she didn’t call me to talk her out of a bad decision," he added when talking with Patch.

He went on to say that he thought the love they shared would keep her from going back to heroin. "Well, that didn't happen," he said.

Tim was taken to see Karisten, her body still in the bed she overdosed in.

She was propped up in her bed, her arms straight out, a slight bend at the elbows, her fists clenched with the thumbs inside her fingers, Tim said. Her skin was blue and there was blood leaking from her nose. Her mouth was sealed shut. Her toes were curled.

She looked like she was trying to hold on to the life that was fleeing her.

"I was told I couldn’t touch my daughter in case there was any lethal powder still on her. I ask for gloves and glove up cause I’ll be damned if I’m not going to help my daughter one last time or hug her and let her know I love her," he said in a social media post.

Tim then kept his word. He zipped his daughter into her body bag, just the way he promised.

He then took to social media to share his daughter's story. He said he hopes it reaches one other person battling "the dragon" and helps them through their addiction.

"See my daughter had such a beautiful caring soul that even with her battle, she always looked for the positive angle to make another person happy or offer help to them as I know she would want others to not end up like her," he said in a message to Patch.

Eastlake Police confirmed Tim's story and shared their condolences with the family.

Photo from Tim Sherman