Post by title1parent on Sept 20, 2009 7:25:03 GMT -5
www.suburbanchicagonews.com/napervillesun/news/1778580,heroin_Naperville_storyteller1_NA092009.article
Young Naperville man seemed to have it all
September 20, 2009
By BILL BIRD wbird@scn1.com
If he didn't quite have it all, Jonathan "Johnny" Qualtier surely seemed to have much of it.
His IQ measured 130 while in the fifth grade at Naperville's Patterson Elementary School. He excelled as a forward and center during his freshman year on the Neuqua Valley High School ice hockey team. Dark-haired and good-looking, he had bevies of both girlfriends and girl friends. And he had a mother, a stepfather, two brothers, three sisters and other relatives who adored him — at least most of the time.
With so much going for him, how could so much have gone against him? How could the people-pleasing man-child come to so awful and undignified an end at the age of 20, sprawled near a toilet with a needle in one hand and a lethal dose of heroin racing through his veins?
Kim Belehradek doesn't need to hear the verdict from the court of public opinion on that one. She's somewhat less given to beating herself up today over her son's death seven months ago, sadly concluding that not threats, not rehabilitation, not even exile would prove the panacea Johnny so direly needed.
"I did everything that I thought I could," Belehradek said from the living room of her family's home in Woodridge, her husband, Tony Belehradek, seated opposite her. "I taught him values, Christian values ..."
Then she continues: "But there's no chivalry among drug dealers. There's no code of ethics, and when you don't know about something, it can kill you."
Higher expectations
Jonathan Michael Qualtier was born Nov. 3, 1988. A typical child of the Nineties, he immersed himself in baseball, video games, skateboarding and, especially, ice hockey.
"He was very good, but if he got two goals and not the third, he'd be upset," his mother recalled. "He wanted the hat trick."
The Belehradeks' first inkling that not all was right with their son came on the heels of his IQ test. "He actually told his teacher in fifth grade that he didn't care whether he lived or not," Kim Belehradek said.
He was diagnosed shortly thereafter as having attention deficit disorder and emotional troubles. "He had to be constantly busy," Tony Belehradek said, with his wife adding, "He had to be constantly challenged."
Johnny bounced over the next three years from Crone Middle School to a Montessori school to a private, Lutheran Church-affiliated school to a home schooling program prior to enrolling at Neuqua Valley High School. His mother said he began dabbling with alcohol, marijuana and the prescription drug Xanax not long after that.
The Belehradeks have no proof as to how or by whom Johnny was introduced to marijuana, although they suspect a youth who lived behind their former home in Naperville's Ashbury neighborhood.
"I called a lot of the (neighborhood) parents, and most of them thought it was normal," Kim Belehradek said of Johnny's marijuana use. Tony Belehradek said he heard the word "experimentation" from many of those adults.
"But I had much higher expectations (of Johnny), and I was determined to get him off that stuff," Kim Belehradek said. "I quit my job" to devote as much time as possible to Johnny, to the point of monitoring his computer use and e-mail at the start of his freshman year.
"It came down to me just chasing Johnny around. I confronted him, I grounded him, I took out his (video) games from his room. It was just his bare walls."
'Couldn't quit them'
Hoping physical distance might make a difference, Johnny was sent to live for a time in Colorado. He enrolled at Downers Grove South High School in 2005, following that sojourn.
Kim Belehradek believes Johnny may have started using heroin early in 2006. She found him in possession of a hypodermic needle in December 2007 and immediately took him to Edward Hospital in Naperville.
Johnny returned home in June 2008, but his exasperated parents kicked him out by mid-summer. He moved into an apartment in Bolingbrook with a friend and later moved in with a friend in Naperville.
"I tried very hard to work within the system," Kim Belehradek said. When DuPage County sheriff's officers arrested Johnny in late November for trespass to vehicles, resisting police and possession of drug paraphernalia, "we let him sit there" for four or five days in the county jail in Wheaton, she said.
"My biggest worry with Johnny was not that he didn't have the resolve. In my heart, I know he could've quit," Kim Belehradek said of her son's drug abuse.
"It was the people he was hanging out with. He couldn't quit them."
The Belehradeks allowed Johnny to move back home and, working with his probation officer, found two new glimmers of hope. The young man was to have started an outpatient rehabilitation program through DuPage County and had lined up a job interview the same day with a local restaurant.
The events of Feb. 12 would extinguish those hopes forever.
With all other family members away from home that morning and afternoon, Johnny invited two friends over to watch television and enjoy a pizza lunch. The friends, one male and one female, fell asleep in front of the TV set.
The young woman awoke about 3:30 p.m. and, not finding Johnny with them, went to look for him. She discovered him unconscious on the floor of an upstairs bathroom, clutching a needle.
Kim Behehradek said the woman shouted out for her friend, who went upstairs and attempted to perform CPR on her son. Johnny at that point vomited, and the pair called 911.
"The police called me home," Kim Belehradek said. "I thought Johnny was going to be arrested again."
She instead sped to the emergency room at Edward Hospital, "where they told me he was in critical condition."
Five minutes later, the doctor told her Johnny was dead.
Her son, she said, sincerely knew he had to change his ways. And she believes with "all my heart and soul that he wanted to straighten up and live a normal life — get married, have kids.
"I worry about him every day. I worry, where are you? It's the most awful feeling in the world, and I had no idea how much it hurts."
Channeling her grief in the only way that makes any sense to her. Kim Belehradek hopes to eventually take her family's story to area elementary schools, to offer living proof of the devastating toll of drug abuse.
"It's not to blame anybody. It's to try to wake up this generation of young people," she said.
Adults, too can learn from Johnny's death.
"I never thought this could happen to our family, and it has," said Tony Belehradek.
And Kim is determined this tragedy will not play out in someone else's family. "If I don't do something with this, if I don't try to make a difference or try to make some kind of change, some kind of fight against drugs," she said, "then I've failed."
_______________________
From the storyteller: A mother's plea
I was prepared to dislike Kim Qualtier Belehradek intensely. "Here we go again," I sneered to myself in the days preceding our interview. "Another divorced mother (which she is) who couldn't keep her kid from destroying himself with dope (which, tragically, she could not.)"
Hiding my disdain behind my often useful poker face, I was invited into Belehradek's living room and introduced to her husband, Tony. And instead of two callow, distant, inept excuses for parents, I soon found myself deep in conversation with two successful, articulate, thoroughly sincere people, the kind who look you directly in the eye when speaking to you.
The clincher came in observing their four younger, pajama-clad children and the playful affection they showed one another while padding about the kitchen and scarfing down their pre-bedtime snacks.
Johnny Qualtier must have known evenings like this one while growing up, I thought. True, he was some five years older than the family's middle child, Cristina Qualtier, but he still must have known evenings like this one while growing up.
I came of age in the Seventies — which, truth be told, wasn't much more than an extension of the Sixties — but I never, ever "got" the drug culture. I was on a pharmaceutical regimen from birth until the day I turned 21 which, in hindsight, might well have been what made pills and hypodermic needles anathema to this recovered asthmatic.
And I've never been able to figure out how some people manage to kick their habits while others have their habits kick them. Why, for example, was Rosemary Clooney able to beat her addiction, while John Belushi succumbed to his?
Your guess is as good as mine, and my guess is that just the right wrong combination of environmental factors, DNA and free will ultimately determines who survives a bout with substance abuse and who, unfortunately, does not.
I doubt Kim Belehradek is terribly interested in much of that. She seems far more passionate about bringing her family's story to the pre-high school set. And if, in so doing, she manages to convince even one boy or even one girl to say no to drugs, well, then she probably will have accomplished more than some do in a lifetime.
Most of us, I think, move through life in the hope of ultimately finding some kind of everlasting peace. I, for one, pray Johnny Qualtier has found his.
Young Naperville man seemed to have it all
September 20, 2009
By BILL BIRD wbird@scn1.com
If he didn't quite have it all, Jonathan "Johnny" Qualtier surely seemed to have much of it.
His IQ measured 130 while in the fifth grade at Naperville's Patterson Elementary School. He excelled as a forward and center during his freshman year on the Neuqua Valley High School ice hockey team. Dark-haired and good-looking, he had bevies of both girlfriends and girl friends. And he had a mother, a stepfather, two brothers, three sisters and other relatives who adored him — at least most of the time.
With so much going for him, how could so much have gone against him? How could the people-pleasing man-child come to so awful and undignified an end at the age of 20, sprawled near a toilet with a needle in one hand and a lethal dose of heroin racing through his veins?
Kim Belehradek doesn't need to hear the verdict from the court of public opinion on that one. She's somewhat less given to beating herself up today over her son's death seven months ago, sadly concluding that not threats, not rehabilitation, not even exile would prove the panacea Johnny so direly needed.
"I did everything that I thought I could," Belehradek said from the living room of her family's home in Woodridge, her husband, Tony Belehradek, seated opposite her. "I taught him values, Christian values ..."
Then she continues: "But there's no chivalry among drug dealers. There's no code of ethics, and when you don't know about something, it can kill you."
Higher expectations
Jonathan Michael Qualtier was born Nov. 3, 1988. A typical child of the Nineties, he immersed himself in baseball, video games, skateboarding and, especially, ice hockey.
"He was very good, but if he got two goals and not the third, he'd be upset," his mother recalled. "He wanted the hat trick."
The Belehradeks' first inkling that not all was right with their son came on the heels of his IQ test. "He actually told his teacher in fifth grade that he didn't care whether he lived or not," Kim Belehradek said.
He was diagnosed shortly thereafter as having attention deficit disorder and emotional troubles. "He had to be constantly busy," Tony Belehradek said, with his wife adding, "He had to be constantly challenged."
Johnny bounced over the next three years from Crone Middle School to a Montessori school to a private, Lutheran Church-affiliated school to a home schooling program prior to enrolling at Neuqua Valley High School. His mother said he began dabbling with alcohol, marijuana and the prescription drug Xanax not long after that.
The Belehradeks have no proof as to how or by whom Johnny was introduced to marijuana, although they suspect a youth who lived behind their former home in Naperville's Ashbury neighborhood.
"I called a lot of the (neighborhood) parents, and most of them thought it was normal," Kim Belehradek said of Johnny's marijuana use. Tony Belehradek said he heard the word "experimentation" from many of those adults.
"But I had much higher expectations (of Johnny), and I was determined to get him off that stuff," Kim Belehradek said. "I quit my job" to devote as much time as possible to Johnny, to the point of monitoring his computer use and e-mail at the start of his freshman year.
"It came down to me just chasing Johnny around. I confronted him, I grounded him, I took out his (video) games from his room. It was just his bare walls."
'Couldn't quit them'
Hoping physical distance might make a difference, Johnny was sent to live for a time in Colorado. He enrolled at Downers Grove South High School in 2005, following that sojourn.
Kim Belehradek believes Johnny may have started using heroin early in 2006. She found him in possession of a hypodermic needle in December 2007 and immediately took him to Edward Hospital in Naperville.
Johnny returned home in June 2008, but his exasperated parents kicked him out by mid-summer. He moved into an apartment in Bolingbrook with a friend and later moved in with a friend in Naperville.
"I tried very hard to work within the system," Kim Belehradek said. When DuPage County sheriff's officers arrested Johnny in late November for trespass to vehicles, resisting police and possession of drug paraphernalia, "we let him sit there" for four or five days in the county jail in Wheaton, she said.
"My biggest worry with Johnny was not that he didn't have the resolve. In my heart, I know he could've quit," Kim Belehradek said of her son's drug abuse.
"It was the people he was hanging out with. He couldn't quit them."
The Belehradeks allowed Johnny to move back home and, working with his probation officer, found two new glimmers of hope. The young man was to have started an outpatient rehabilitation program through DuPage County and had lined up a job interview the same day with a local restaurant.
The events of Feb. 12 would extinguish those hopes forever.
With all other family members away from home that morning and afternoon, Johnny invited two friends over to watch television and enjoy a pizza lunch. The friends, one male and one female, fell asleep in front of the TV set.
The young woman awoke about 3:30 p.m. and, not finding Johnny with them, went to look for him. She discovered him unconscious on the floor of an upstairs bathroom, clutching a needle.
Kim Behehradek said the woman shouted out for her friend, who went upstairs and attempted to perform CPR on her son. Johnny at that point vomited, and the pair called 911.
"The police called me home," Kim Belehradek said. "I thought Johnny was going to be arrested again."
She instead sped to the emergency room at Edward Hospital, "where they told me he was in critical condition."
Five minutes later, the doctor told her Johnny was dead.
Her son, she said, sincerely knew he had to change his ways. And she believes with "all my heart and soul that he wanted to straighten up and live a normal life — get married, have kids.
"I worry about him every day. I worry, where are you? It's the most awful feeling in the world, and I had no idea how much it hurts."
Channeling her grief in the only way that makes any sense to her. Kim Belehradek hopes to eventually take her family's story to area elementary schools, to offer living proof of the devastating toll of drug abuse.
"It's not to blame anybody. It's to try to wake up this generation of young people," she said.
Adults, too can learn from Johnny's death.
"I never thought this could happen to our family, and it has," said Tony Belehradek.
And Kim is determined this tragedy will not play out in someone else's family. "If I don't do something with this, if I don't try to make a difference or try to make some kind of change, some kind of fight against drugs," she said, "then I've failed."
_______________________
From the storyteller: A mother's plea
I was prepared to dislike Kim Qualtier Belehradek intensely. "Here we go again," I sneered to myself in the days preceding our interview. "Another divorced mother (which she is) who couldn't keep her kid from destroying himself with dope (which, tragically, she could not.)"
Hiding my disdain behind my often useful poker face, I was invited into Belehradek's living room and introduced to her husband, Tony. And instead of two callow, distant, inept excuses for parents, I soon found myself deep in conversation with two successful, articulate, thoroughly sincere people, the kind who look you directly in the eye when speaking to you.
The clincher came in observing their four younger, pajama-clad children and the playful affection they showed one another while padding about the kitchen and scarfing down their pre-bedtime snacks.
Johnny Qualtier must have known evenings like this one while growing up, I thought. True, he was some five years older than the family's middle child, Cristina Qualtier, but he still must have known evenings like this one while growing up.
I came of age in the Seventies — which, truth be told, wasn't much more than an extension of the Sixties — but I never, ever "got" the drug culture. I was on a pharmaceutical regimen from birth until the day I turned 21 which, in hindsight, might well have been what made pills and hypodermic needles anathema to this recovered asthmatic.
And I've never been able to figure out how some people manage to kick their habits while others have their habits kick them. Why, for example, was Rosemary Clooney able to beat her addiction, while John Belushi succumbed to his?
Your guess is as good as mine, and my guess is that just the right wrong combination of environmental factors, DNA and free will ultimately determines who survives a bout with substance abuse and who, unfortunately, does not.
I doubt Kim Belehradek is terribly interested in much of that. She seems far more passionate about bringing her family's story to the pre-high school set. And if, in so doing, she manages to convince even one boy or even one girl to say no to drugs, well, then she probably will have accomplished more than some do in a lifetime.
Most of us, I think, move through life in the hope of ultimately finding some kind of everlasting peace. I, for one, pray Johnny Qualtier has found his.