(As originally published on June 8, 2018)
Her daughter is with God now, Lilly Harvey smiles, so she knows she's in good hands.
That allows her to tell her youngest child's story, as well as her own, to anyone who might listen.
Harvey's daughter, Lillie Camille Harvey, died Feb. 12, 2017, from an overdose of what likely was fentanyl. She and a male companion had been found unconscious in an Alexandria park two days before.
She was one of 23 deaths last year in Rapides Parish related to opioids, said Coroner Dr. Jonathan Hunter. Overall, there were 38 drug-related deaths in 2017.
She shakes her head when asked why the 28-year-old, who went by her middle name but was known as Millie, might have taken what she thought was heroin that day.
“I don’t know why. She hated that I did what I did. She hated it … I don’t really know the reason why she did it. Even her closest friends don’t know why,” said Harvey over lunch at The Cottage Restaurant recently. “It will always be a mystery on the reason why.
"I can’t sit and ponder on that. I have to do what God has told me to do, to use her name to get people out of bondage. I have to trust that he has her, and she’s fine, and I do. We move on from there.”
Offering forgiveness
The man who sold the drugs to the pair, Kendrick Treman Davis, was charged in connection with her death. Before Davis was sentenced last month, the mother asked the court to include rehabilitation for the 38-year-old Alexandria man.
It’s a journey she knows all too well.
Sitting outside the restaurant, Harvey recounted how the unexpected breakup of her second marriage in 2009 sent her spiraling into addiction. At the end of raising a blended family of seven children, her husband told her he loved her, but wasn’t in love with her. He’d been having an affair.
"I just … lost my mind,” she said.
Prescription pills soon escalated to intravenous heroin use. It didn’t take long for the Jonesville native — a woman who left an abusive first marriage with her three kids and became a licensed practical nurse before moving to Baton Rouge to work — to lose it all.
Even worse, she wasn’t alone.
“My son came with me and, before we knew it, we were homeless. I had lost my house, my car, my job and almost my life. I was on the streets of Houma, Louisiana, homeless, with my son.”
The pair were caught stealing boat batteries to fund their addictions. Harvey spent five months in jail. When she was released, she violated her probation. She spent another three months in jail.
2011, she says, was a wasted year.
But, after that, she stayed clean for two years — until she woke up one morning to find her head essentially locked in a downward position. Five doctors couldn’t help her, but she did get medication for the pain.
“Pain pills took me back to heroin,” she said. “I ended up about 105 pounds, and I didn’t even want to live.”
When she drove into a flagpole at the U.S. Post Office in Harrisonburg, it caught the attention of deputies right across the street at the Catahoula Parish Sheriff’s Office. And back to jail she went.
A fresh start
This time, though, she said she learned how God can answer prayers in ways you don’t imagine. Harvey said she had prayed during her struggles with addiction for God to either take her or change her.
The change was obvious to her the first time, but not the second.
“This time, after I prayed that prayer, I got arrested. And I’m thinking, Lord, he’s mad at me. He’s done left me. He did for a reason because, from there, that’s when I went to Fresh Start.”
Fresh Start Ministry is a seven-month, faith-based rehabilitation program in Winnsboro that was started in 2006 by the River of Life Church. It has 48 rooms that can house 82 men and a women’s center. Its website touts a 70 percent success rate.
Faced with a choice of rehab or more jail time, Harvey took the offer to go to Fresh Start. But seeing how happy the other women in the program were made her suspicious, and she vowed to keep to herself while finishing the stay.
That attitude didn’t last long, though.
“God just changed my heart and my life and my soul. I went from feeling dead to being alive again,” she said. “I found out he wasn’t mad at me, and he loved me just like I love my kids.”
Then, during a group presentation, a woman put her hands on Harvey’s neck. “My neck started quivering, and my head released. And for the first time in three years, I was able to lift my head. Now tell me that wasn’t God.”
The problem isn’t completely gone, and one side of her neck seems to be better than the other. But Harvey said she can drive again and be active.
Rehab also allowed her to heal her relationships with her children. To focus on her recovery, she hadn’t had much contact with them for that seven months, and Harvey says the three were upset about her relapse.
Once she joined Fresh Start's intern program, she got a cellphone of her own again.
“So we were able to talk a lot during that time," said Harvey of Millie. "That had been the longest we’d ever not talked, during those seven months, and she was really disappointed in me because I had failed her again. I wasn’t the strong mother that I should have been.”
But she doesn't regret what she did. Harvey says she became a different person, a stronger one. “It took God to transform me. It really did.”
A slippery slope
It's a lot easier to develop an addiction than people might want to admit. Harvey recalls the day she knew, the day she didn't have any pain pills to take. She knew she had a problem, but she also knew she needed those pills.
Addicts reach a point where getting high isn't the goal, she said. Without their drug of choice, addicts will get sick. She said she had to break that cycle, and the six-week jail stint before she joined Fresh Start detoxed her.
“I went through some rough days in that jail,” said Harvey.
As patrons in the packed restaurant chatted and ate, Harvey said everyone is or has gone through something — a divorce, sexual assault, a loved one's death — and that people have different ways of coping. For some, drugs provide their escape.
Harvey described addiction as a root that digs deeper, so an addict must learn how to root out the source of it. She sees others come into Fresh Start showing the same resistance she felt when she entered the program.
“Little did I know, God showed me my roots," she said. "From my roots, I was able to get rid of the pain. The real pain, not the physical pain.”
As she completed the plan, she was invited to join the intern program. That led to a full-time job that she works today, supervising women in the graduate program.
Millie had planned to attend her graduation in October 2016, but couldn't make it. That upset her, said Harvey.
So she later came to spend a week with her mom and her grandmother. It was a happy time, said Harvey.
"We made all kinds of plans," she laughed.
They talked of going to Las Vegas and returning to the Grand Canyon. They also talked about plans to get blue butterfly tattoos with a friend of Harvey's, a woman who was like Millie's second mother.
None of that happened. Millie died five months later. Harvey's friend also died. Now, Harvey sports a blue butterfly tattoo on her left wrist.
"For them," she says, as she shows it off. It's right above a silver bracelet that sports "Love you Mama" in Millie's handwriting.
After Millie's death, she was cremated. Harvey spread her daughter's ashes in the Grand Canyon.
"So she's there."
Peas in a pod
During lunch, a server stops at the table to check on orders. She compliments Harvey's bright sundress that's topped off with a sweater.
"I love your dress. That's so pretty," she says.
"Oh, thank you," she replies before the server leaves.
The dress belonged to Millie.
In her victim impact statement, Harvey talked about how close she was to her daughter. She said it's probably because she was the youngest, and she had more time to spend with her as she grew up.
She laughs about how her other two children have teased her, telling her they knew Millie was her favorite. She admits Millie was closest to her.
“She was my baby. We were a lot alike," she said. "Out of my children, she was a lot like me. We had a lot in common.”
The two loved to travel, shop, dress up and go to restaurants, including The Cottage.
“That was our thing.”
She gushes that Millie never tired of holding her hand, no matter how old she was. She talked about a Disney World trip they took in 2007. "She always held my hand,” said Harvey.
It was one of the last things she did with Millie, too. She held her daughter's hand after she died, while she still was in her hospital bed. In court, she recalled how perfect her daughter's body remained even then.
Aftermath
Millie's organs were donated, said Harvey. Her heart didn't make it, though. A storm blew through on the night of her death, making conditions too rough for a medical helicopter to take off.
Harvey was able to direct one of Millie's kidneys to a Monroe man she had heard about through a co-worker. The man's wife and Harvey have talked, and now are Facebook friends, but they haven't met yet.
As the weeks after Millie's death dragged by, she began staying up late at night. She'd log onto Facebook to look at photos of Millie.
"I just wanted to see her picture," she said.
And she began to ask herself how she could reach others, to help battle their addictions, and she wondered how her family was going to deal with the loss. She began to write.
When she finished, she handed the lyrics to a husband and wife in the River of Life praise band. She's paired the resulting song with photos and videos for one of the slideshows she uses when she speaks to groups.
"Mama, there are butterflies in heaven, I can chase them through the fields where lillies grow; Today, I sat on Paw-Paw's lap, we hugged and talked for hours; Don't be sad I had to go, I'll be all right. Jesus told me so."
Harvey speaks monthly at River of Life and has events lined up around Central Louisiana through July. She'll be speaking in Oklahoma City this month, too.
“I want to take it beyond this," she says, saying that she'd eventually like to lobby for laws that would make rehabilitation part of some criminal sentences.
She believes there needs to be a push for more rehabilitation, but acknowledges paying for that will be problematic. Long-term rehabilitation is needed, she insists, not programs that last 30 days or less.
Harvey also has considered starting a scholarship program in her daughter's name.
She does agree with the prosecution of Davis. Drug dealers do need to do time, "“but I also know that most people who deal are drug addicts themselves.
"Some people are just flipping it enough to use some themselves; some people, yes, are in it much deeper for the dollar.”
She agreed to the reduced charge of negligent homicide to which Davis pleaded because she didn't think a murder charge would stick. She still wants to see him get help, noting that he asked for it in a statement to the court.
“I want to give him that opportunity," she said. "Just call Fresh Start Ministries in Winnsboro, Louisiana, and I promise you they’ll help him find God and they’ll help him find that root.”
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