Timmy Solomon, whose drug treatment odyssey was profiled in Southern California News Group’s law-changing Rehab Riviera series, died in early September.
The 31-year-old overdosed at a house in Buena Park the morning of Sept. 2 and was rushed to La Palma Intercommunity Hospital where he was pronounced dead.
SCNG profiled Solomon in 2017 while he was living on the streets of Orange County, part of the wave of young people dipping in and out of addiction treatment facilities and sober living homes in Southern California.
His mother, Patty Solomon, said at the time that being unable to save her son was an emotional rollercoaster, an ongoing nightmare.
“You are out of your mind with worry,” she had said in a phone call from her home in Boston. “And you don’t know where it ends. Well, you do. It ends with death.”
Patty Solomon is a special education teacher and was at school when she got the news. A doctor was on the phone telling her all the things that he had done to save her son.
She had been here before, on the phone with hospitals aiding her son, and in her mind he had been saved and she was already plotting the next step: Getting him out of the hospital and back in rehab.
And then she heard the doctor say: We did everything we could. But it didn’t work.
“I’m devastated,” she said.
She thought her son was finally sober. He had gotten clean shortly after the Rehab Riviera newspaper series blew up, exposing a multi-billion industry that is often more interested in cashing in on addicts than helping them. Orange County alone had 404 licensed addiction treatment facilities at the time, many of them flying addicts in from around the country to suck dry their insurance money.
Solomon became a sherpa for the story, guiding journalists as he checked in and out of sober living homes, rehabs and hospitals over the course of several months. When the series came out, though, it threw him into the spotlight – and he didn’t like it. He vowed to get clean and stay clean.
Patty Solomon said her son moved in with his girlfriend, got a job as a busboy and started bicycling.
“He had pulled it together,” she said. “He wanted to get married and have a profession. He was paying off his debts, trying to rebuild himself. But it was his inability to cope with things that he had no control over…”
She thought maybe he started using drugs again this summer after he lost a custody battle over his 4-year-old daughter.
Her son’s ashes were expected to be flown home to Boston for a memorial service after an autopsy. Toxicology tests will take a couple months to come back so it is unknown what drug or drugs killed him.
Patty Solomon doesn’t really care what drug it was, though.
“All I know is he’s never coming home,” she said.
And neither are hundreds of other Orange Countians.
As of Aug. 31, the Orange County Sheriff’s Department had recorded 250 overdose deaths. There were 297 overdose deaths by that same date in 2019. But the coroner’s office is backed up; it has 400 deaths pending review. Assuming at least some of those deaths are overdoses, the 2020 overdose toll is likely higher.
“The number could drastically change, considering we have quite a few cases that have not been concluded,” said Orange County Sheriff’s Sgt. Dennis Breckner.
The total number of overdose deaths in Orange County in all of 2019 was 449.
Patty Solomon spoke with her son the night before his overdose. They both said I love you.
“And I said, ‘Timmy, if you make the right choices, it might be difficult, but the right things will happen.’”
She takes comfort knowing she tried to help him, never gave up on him.
“In my heart we know we did everything we could for him,” she said.
She also finds some comfort in phone calls from her son’s friends who tell her he will be missed.
“I just loved the kid,” said David Williams, who ran a Lake Forest sober living house Solomon once lived in.
Solomon was funny and friendly, but he also had a sad side, a dark cloud passenger.
“I’m that clown,” he said in a 2017 interview. “Remember that clown that’s crying and then he’s happy? I’m that clown.”
One day, after shooting a mix of heroin and meth into his arm behind a Dana Point shopping center, he cataloged all the ways his life had gone bad.
He had attended college, he sobbed, and now here he was collecting cans and bottles for money. He had a toddler daughter living nearby whose life he wanted desperately to be part of. And back home in Boston, he had seven brothers and a mother who he loved and had let down.
Patty Solomon hopes that if anyone takes anything away from her son’s story it’s to not be so quick to judge.
“I don’t think people understand,” she said. “Nobody chooses to be a drug addict. Nobody chooses to be homeless. It’s just awful.”
Earlier this summer Solomon had told his daughter that if she ever missed him she could just look up at the moon and say hello.
The night Solomon died, his mother said she looked up in the sky and saw a full moon.
“I said, ‘Hi Tim. How are ‘ya?’”
