Kalispell woman speaks out about son's heroin overdose

Jodie Barwiler’s last conversation with her son Coty Piasecki was a brief one: a few words spoken in the kitchen as he made a grilled-cheese sandwich after a night at a local bar.

She had climbed out of bed to touch base with him as he arrived home. It was obvious he’d been drinking heavily.

The last thing she told him was “I love you” before she headed back to bed. He promised to go to church with her in the morning. 

It was 1:15 a.m. on Sunday, Nov. 2, 2014.

The coroner later would determine that Coty, 20, died of an accidental heroin overdose about 1:30 a.m., just 15 minutes after his mother had bid him goodnight.

When Barwiler found her unresponsive son several hours later, the grilled-cheese sandwich was still in his hand.

At Coty’s funeral, one of his best friends sang his favorite song, Chris Young’s “The Man I Want to Be.”

“He wanted so much more from life,” Barwiler said.

She spent several years trying to help her son rise above his drug addiction, choosing to help him through detoxification two times. The struggle to save her son was agonizing.

A year ago Barwiler’s life also had unraveled to a point of despair.

“My life was plummeting. I was falling into a dark, dark hole,” she recalled.

She tried to commit suicide by taking 65 Xanax pills.

“Coty came home and found me on the bathroom floor,” she said. “He called 911, and they revived me. I was on a ventilator for a few days.”

Ironically, she said, the person she was trying desperately to save had saved her.

Barwiler is sharing her son’s story at an outreach program on Feb. 25 aimed at helping other parents recognize and deal with drug abuse.

“My biggest focus is that we can’t handle this on our own,” she said. “We don’t do them any favors by keeping it private.”

And, she added, “it can happen to anybody.”

Coty loved everything Montana had to offer when the family moved to the Flathead Valley from Ohio in 2007. He had a passion for the outdoors — camping, hunting, fishing, climbing and hiking.

He met a few neighbor kids right away and was off and running in his new life here.

“Right out of the gate he had great friends,” Barwiler said.

The Piasecki family had chosen the Kalispell area as their home because of the Montana lifestyle and also because of Flathead High School’s outstanding wrestling program. Barwiler went so far as to interview wrestling coach Jeff Thompson before the family relocated to Kalispell.

Wrestling was big in Ohio, she said, and big with the Piasecki family. Coty’s older brother Caleb placed four times at the state level.

As Barwiler mulls the last five years in her mind, she believes Coty’s use of marijuana — she caught him smoking pot his freshman year — set the stage for greater drug use later on.

“I believe marijuana is a gateway drug,” she said.

With a “zero tolerance” policy of drug use in their home, Coty was grounded and had privileges revoked, but Barwiler said she worked hard to keep an open line of communication with both of her sons.

“I felt I had a strong relationship with them, that they could come to me about anything,” she said.

Coty’s pot smoking continued, though, and soon led to an addiction to prescription pain medication. Since the family had no such pills in their home, Barwiler can only surmise he got them from friends or other sources.

“I found a cigarette pack in his dresser, along with a razor blade and some residue,” she recalled. “I took it to the sheriff’s department and they said it looked like cut-up prescription pills ... I brow-beat him until he confessed.”

When Coty turned 18 at the end of his junior year, his grades had slipped and he had quit high-school sports. At his mother’s insistence, he graduated a year early from Flathead in 2012.

Barwiler and her husband, Bryce Piasecki, had divorced, and he returned to Ohio. Coty spent the summer after graduation with his father, working odd jobs, but returned to the Flathead after a couple of months.

In hindsight, the breakup of the Piaseckis’ marriage may have been a factor that contributed to Coty’s drug use, but Barwiler said her son had what she calls an “addictive personality” that played into his drug habit.

“By December 2012 I knew Coty was in bad shape,” Barwiler said. “I told him he needed to get out of my life if that [drugs] was the choice he was making. It was tearing us apart.”

Coty’s reply to his mother was a plea for help: “If you give up on me, I’m done.”

Barwiler stripped her son’s room, took away his keys and proceeded to help him through two weeks of detox — by herself.

“The first five days were terrible, but the first focus was getting him clean,” she said.

He began seeing a counselor and got a job as a ski-lift operator at Blacktail Mountain.

Things were OK for a while.

Coty bounced around in 2013. He spent a short time with his father in Ohio, then returned home and worked at a couple of jobs here.

“At first things were OK, but slowly I started seeing him slip away again,” she recalled.

Sometime in 2013 Coty, switched from using prescription medication to using heroin.

“I kept finding pieces of burned foil and I did some research and found kids using [the foil] to smoke Oxycontin and heroin,” she said.

“I’d given up. This is a devil drug,” Barwiler said about heroin.

After Barwiler tried to commit suicide, she spent time getting her own life back on track. She got help through Pathways Treatment Center, which gave her the resources and coping skills she needed.

“I focused on fixing the things I could fix,” she said. “I couldn’t fix Coty, and when I stopped trying, I got stronger.”

His mother’s brush with death jolted Coty enough to make him want to try to get clean again. So for a second time Barwiler detoxed her son, not leaving him alone for a month.

Again, things got better. Coty got a job with Montana Helical Piers and was out of town much of the time. The company had a strict drug policy that kept him clean.

“He was learning a trade and he loved traveling all over the place,” Barwiler said.

Coty had some time off work in late October and was home for a visit. On Halloween night the entire family gathered at Scotty’s for dinner and had such a nice time, his mother remembered.

The following day, on Saturday, Coty got his hair cut and visited friends around town. He helped one of his friends cut firewood.

Somewhere during that final day of his life, Coty scored some heroin. He also started drinking heavily at some point during the day.

Barwiler found her son dead Sunday morning, his body already cold to the touch, several hours after he had overdosed.

“Over the last two years I had said a million times I’ll find Coty dead,” she grimly recalled.

She remembers Coty telling her at one point he wished he’d never started smoking pot.

More than 200 friends and family members attended his funeral. The outpouring of support comforted Barwiler.

“Coty was very loved and he loved everybody,” she said. “He was an amazing, amazing son.”

Despite the tragic outcome, Barwiler believes she was a very good parent. “I was so dialed in and so intuitive,” she said.

As Barwiler worked through the grief, she realized she needed to shed light on drug abuse in a public way. Now her goal is to help other parents who may be going through the same agony she experienced. She hopes the event she’s planned in February will be a springboard to create local support groups for addicts and their families.

Other parents have reached out to Barwiler since Coty’s death, some expressing the same fear she had. One parent confided she had the same “gut feeling” her son, too, will die of an overdose.

“If I can save even one mother or family from having to go through this, then it’s worth speaking out,” Barwiler said.

Features editor Lynnette Hintze may be reached at 758-4421 or by email at lhintze@dailyinterlake.com.