MATTHEW TULLY

Tully: From Carmel High, to heroin, to prison

Matthew Tully

The pictures in the Carmel High School yearbooks from a decade ago tell a distant part of David Ward's story. In one, he is working on an English paper in the computer lab. In another, he is sitting in the fifth row of the bleachers, sixth player from the left, in the 2004 varsity football squad's official photograph.

Ward talked about those days last week, about how much he loved playing sports back then, and how much fun it was to suit up on Friday nights and play defensive tackle on a good football team. And then he talked even more about another chapter of his life. In this part of his story, he was married, living in a comfortable rented house, and collecting a decent paycheck.

"I even had a dog," he told me. "It was great. I wasn't living the fancy life or anything. But I was living a good life and I had everything you'd want. I couldn't ask for more."

That was only three years ago but it seems much deeper in the past. Like another life. It was interrupted by what was supposed to be just a dip into the world of heroin. That dip turned, as so often happens, into an addiction. An addiction that ruined David Ward's once comfortable life. It's a story that's playing out time and again in Central Indiana and beyond.

"People tell you how great it is, how much you need to try it, and that there's nothing else like it," Ward said last Friday, sitting in prison tans inside the Putnamville Correctional Facility. "The one thing they don't tell you is that once you do it you're hooked and you won't want to do anything else, and no matter how hard you try to get off it, you won't be able to."

I made the 55-mile drive from Indianapolis to the medium-security state prison in Putnamville a few weeks after Hamilton County Judge Steven Nation told me about Ward's story. Three months earlier, Nation had sentenced the 2005 Carmel High grad to 10 years for a series of residential burglaries. The judge still finds himself thinking about the lost potential at the core of Ward's story, and about the tearful statement and apologetic letter the 28-year-old had offered at sentencing.

In the letter, Ward talks about caring more about heroin than "my wife and family," about the drug's deadly grip, and about the havoc he brought to the lives of both strangers and loved ones. In court testimony, Nation said, Ward cried "as he faced the reality that he'd lost everything to drugs." Those tears were a glimpse into a story playing out on a broader scale, a story centered on a heroin epidemic that has hit cities, towns and suburbs without discrimination.

As Ward talked in one of the prison's administrative offices last week, he told me about growing up in Chicago with his single mom before moving to Indiana with his father in 2001. He said he'd been in a bit of trouble in Chicago and didn't fit in right away in the upscale suburb of Carmel. But he made friends before too long, and he smiled as he told me that the Ds on his report cards eventually turned into mostly Cs. He played sports and made the high school football team.

"He had a big heart," said former Carmel High School teacher Doug Bird, now the principal at Center Grove High School. "He had one of those friendly faces and, as a teacher, you really thought you had type of connection with him that you hoped to make with students. He was always happy to see you."

But cracks were developing in Ward's life. Two paths were in front of him, he said, telling me about drug addictions in his family, and about the teenage promise he made to make sure his own drug use didn't get out of control.

Not long after graduation, though, police found marijuana and other drugs in Ward's apartment, and he admitted he'd been dealing. He was sentenced to a few months in prison before he'd even turned 21. It was a hard fall and a wake-up call, he said.

Out of prison, he got a job making mud flaps and says things were going well. But he drank too much and used plenty of drugs; he rattled off a list of them but says they didn't stop him from working, functioning or being a decent guy. By 2012, he was married and had moved on from making mud flaps to helping run a Carmel pizza place. He and his wife started looking at homes to buy. They talked about having a kid.

Then one afternoon, as Ward tells it, he made a decision that local health and public safety officials warn is being made more and more often of late. Sitting in his car, attracted by the particularly intense high he'd heard so much about, he jabbed a needle into his arm and pushed heroin into his bloodstream for the first time. Years of gateway drugs had given way to this moment.

Game over.

"After that first time there was nothing else that could compare to it," he said. "I'd said it was a one-time deal. But it turned into an everyday habit."

His story is so common it sounds like a cliché. That first high was soon hard to match and what started as a $10-a-day jolt grew more expensive in a hurry as his body's tolerance grew. The job at the pizza place had been enough to cover his part of the bills and a few extras, but it wasn't enough to support an addiction to heroin. So he sold and pawned some of his things, and then some more of them, and then some of his wife's belongings. She caught on when her jewelry went missing. Meantime, he lost his job, and then another one.

With his wife's help, Ward got clean. But 19 days later he was shooting up again. This time, as the addiction hardened, he and a fellow user decided to feed their habits on the backs of others.

So there he was one day in 2013, standing in the sunlight on the patio of a home in Fishers, breaking out the glass next to an entry door and then rushing in, desperately looking for anything he could sell. This would become his life. Every day's goal was to find enough to first and foremost feed his habit. He was lying to his wife, falling behind on his bills and feeling ill half the time. Even he could tell, though lost in a drug haze, that things were spiraling out of control.

"Every day after I'd get high I'd tell myself I was going to get sober the next day," he said. "I'd tell myself, 'I can't do this any more. I have to find a way out. I have to confess to my wife.' But she said she would leave me if I kept doing it. I didn't know what to do. I didn't know how to get clean."

He ended up getting clean in a hurry, but only because police tied some of the stolen items he'd pawned to one of the burglaries. Then another. And then another. He was arrested in the summer of 2013.

A year and a half has since passed and it hasn't been pretty. He went through a nasty heroin withdrawal while in the county jail. He had divorce papers served to him while locked up. He stood before Judge Nation as a 10-year sentence was tossed at him. He's been in Putnamville since October and hasn't had a visitor. And, so, he spends his days looking for ways to fill the monotony of prison life. The good news is he is taking part in a clean-living program that, if completed, could lead to a modification of his sentence.

He dreams about the simple things: Getting a job on the outside, coming home after a long day and just watching some TV and grabbing a bite to eat. Maybe having someone to love again. And, he said, hopefully never again shooting heroin into his veins.

"I want to prove to everybody else that I can do it, yes, but I want to prove to myself that I can do this," he said. "I don't want to go down that path again."

That's the kind of thing just about everyone in prison says, of course. It's the kind of statement betrayed by high recidivism rates and the revolving door in prisons like the one in Putnamville. Judge Nation said it's a cold reality that "the odds are not in his favor."

But hopefully Ward at least means what he says. And while I can't possibly know what's going on in another person's mind, it seems clear that Ward is bright, friendly and willing to take full responsibility for his mistakes. He appears to be taking his recovery seriously and when he laughs at a story, apologizes for a mistake, or talks about his ex-wife it's easy to imagine how much better things could have turned out for him.

"I've asked," he said, "How come when things were going well for me, when I was married and had a good job, why would somebody turn to drugs? That's what we're working on in here. That's what I'm trying to figure out."

A few hours later, I was at the library in Downtown Carmel looking through old high school yearbooks. In one, I found a photograph of Ward standing on the sidelines during a 2004 football game. In another, he was smiling in his senior class photo. I came across a list of 2005 graduates and there he was, one of hundreds emerging from one of the state's top high schools, ready to take that first big step into adulthood.

A decade later, the story of the young man in those photos is a sad example of the many lives that have crumbled under the weight of heroin addiction in recent years. It's an addiction with consequences that Ward told me he wants to warn others about, particularly teenagers on the verge of making decisions that can shape their futures. Whatever choices Ward will make in his own future, it would indeed be nice if others could learn from his past.

"You don't want to go down the same path I did," he said. "You're playing Russian Roulette with your life. There's no good way out. It's either death or prison — those are the paths."