MUNCIE — Chuck Martin, a 28-year-old heroin user from Albany, was pushed out of a small green car (security camera footage showed) onto a sidewalk outside St. Vincent Randolph Hospital in Winchester last month.
"The hospital called and told me they found my son dead on the sidewalk, but they revived him," says Martin's father, John, an electrician based in Muncie. "When he was signing himself out of the hospital, they found heroin in his shoe, arrested him and took him to jail. The sheriff didn't want to be liable if he died in jail so they turned him loose."
No sheriff in Indiana would jail a person who was highly intoxicated on heroin — for fear that he would die, says Ken Hendrickson, sheriff of Randolph County. Martin had signed himself out of the hospital against medical advice and was taken to the jail by city police just two or three hours "after he was literally dead," the sheriff said. "I'm not a rehab facility. I don't have a medical facility here. I understand the father's frustration, but did he tell you he and his wife had kicked their son out of the house because of his addiction? John is trying to put the burden on me."
In Delaware County, seven men and one woman have died from heroin overdoses since June, according to Coroner Scott Hahn. Three of the victims were in their 20s, two were in their 30s, and three were in their 40s, including Gary McCowan, a veteran of the Iraq War who had just turned 40. Twenty-five others have died in Delaware County this year from overdoses of heroin's fellow opioids — prescription pain killers like Vicodin, morphine and OxyContin.
Thanks to first responders and emergency rooms, many other East Central Indiana residents have survived such overdoses.
Indiana Attorney General Greg Zoeller, who has been battling the state's pain killer/heroin epidemic for six years now, is enlisting help anywhere he can find it. That's why he spoke on the subject in Muncie recently to nearly 200 mostly retired homemakers.
After the sheriff declined to incarcerate him, Martin was found, later that same day, passed out in Winchester — once next to a trash can at a McDonald's restaurant, and once on the street. "He wouldn't take a ride from us, and the cops said their hands was tied because the sheriff didn't want him at his jail," John Martin said. "Somebody dropped him off at our house (in Albany) that night."
Before the incident in Randolph County, Martin had his son arrested for stealing checks from his own household. He was first hospitalized at IU Health Ball Memorial Hospital, then transported to the Delaware County Jail, then released because of overcrowding.
After the incident in Randolph County, while Chuck was living again with his parents, they acted like they were going to work one day recently but only drove about a block away and watched as he stole a television from their home and loaded it into the same green car that had dumped him out at the hospital. Martin called the police and Chuck was arrested in Muncie at a pawn shop and jailed again.
"It's a damn shame parents have to resort to filing charges against their own child just to try to keep them alive," Martin said. "But there was nothing else I could do. I don't want to see him in prison but I want to see him alive. If I hadn't had him arrested, he'd probably be dead now. He's better off in jail than in a box in the ground."