Financial strong-arming. The preferred technique of megacorporations and mobsters. It took arrogance and balls and lots of cash. What gave Wykell the hubris to pull that stunt?
The Mosier family lived in the Irving Park neighborhood, and I was on my way to see if I could knock loose a few more details. Threats of financial ruin would send even the best of us back to our corners. I knew nothing about the financial situation of this family, but typically the reality of a legal grudge match between private citizens and a corporate entity was a tough one to face. I was also realizing that I knew nothing about the financial structure of the Renacido Center. I had made assumptions that this was a single center run by Dr. Wykell. Was it possible there was more money and therefore more legal firepower behind them?
A man who I guessed to be in his early seventies was in the front yard making good use of his edge trimmer when I pulled up. I double-checked the address I had in my notes, against the house number, then grabbed my bag and got out of the car.
He didn’t notice me at first over the noise of his equipment. Sweat glistened on his forehead and stained patches on his ratty T-shirt. Bits of grass and other plant material stuck to his forearms and collected on the hem of his baggy Wranglers.
I stepped closer, trying to get into his line of sight, and lifted my hand in a wave. He shut off the Weedwacker, laid it on the ground, then lifted his safety goggles to the top of his head.
“Yes? If you’re selling something, just be on your way because I already got everything I need, including the Lord Jesus Christ.”
I smiled. “Are you Mr. Mosier?” He nodded. “I’d like to talk to you about your son.”
His face swung from apprehensive curiosity to get-the-hell-out-of-my-yard in half a second. I handed him my business card.
“And why in the name of Jesus would I want to talk to you? My son has been disparaged enough. The boy is dead. No reporter is going to bring him back. So you can just go on back and find someone else to torment. I don’t have anything to say to you, or any of your kind.”
He reached down and picked up his tool. I could see a woman watching us from inside the house at the front window, her red cardigan glaring through the glass.
“Mr. Mosier, I assure you I have no interest in disparaging you, your son, or your family. When Owen Jr. died, you were concerned about the quality of the medical treatment he had received in the hands of Dr. Wykell at the Renacido Center. I’ve read the initial court filings.” I paused. “There’s been another death.”
I let the statement sink in for a moment, watching his reaction. His face went ashy, and whatever spark of anger had been in his eyes a moment ago was now a flat, soulless gaze. It was as if I’d stabbed him in the heart all over again. My gut clenched with his pain, and guilt gnawed at me. Reopening his wound for the good of a story was hard to swallow, but if it could expose the truth, wasn’t it worth it? Or was that just something I wanted to believe?
“I don’t know if there’s a connection,” I said quietly. “But I’d really like to understand more about your reasons for believing that there was something improper about your son’s treatment. Will you talk to me about that?” I asked, my voice full of emotion.
The woman from the window was now walking hurriedly down the front sidewalk. Concern lined her plump face. “Owen is everything okay?”
He didn’t respond.
“Hello, Mrs. Mosier,” I said. “My name is Andrea Kellner. I’m a reporter with Link-Media. I came out hoping to speak to you and your husband about Owen Jr.”
She shot a steely look at her husband, who simply stared back, seemingly unable to find words.
“We can’t talk to you,” she said, her voice riddled with irritation. “I don’t know what you think you’re doing, coming here, trying to dredge up trouble. Owen, come inside.”
“Someone else has died, Eileen,” he said softly to his wife.
She gasped and covered her mouth, tears welling in her eyes. I could see the debate raging in their minds. The memories and pain of what they had lost now gushing to the surface.
“We’d better go inside,” Mr. Mosier said.
I followed the two, now arm in arm into their living room. It was warm and comforting, a room well lived in. Matching recliners faced the TV, a colorful pieced quilt was draped across the back of the worn sofa, and a stash of magazines was piled on the coffee table, along with a Bible. Two crosses and a Jesus print lined the walls, but not a single family photo graced the room. It struck me as out of character. Perhaps the memories were too painful.
“Please, sit. Can I get you something to drink?” Mrs. Mosier asked, directing me to one of the recliners and showing her Midwestern hospitality.
“No, thank you. Your home is lovely. Did Owen grow up here?” I asked.
“We brought him here right from the hospital when he was born. Top-notch schools are just blocks away,” Mr. Mosier said, pride in his voice. “We knew from the beginning we wanted our boy to have a good start.”
“I can see that you gave him a tremendous amount of love. It must have been heartbreaking for you to watch Owen’s struggles with addiction.” The couple exchanged a glance as they sat on the sofa, hand-in-hand. “I understand that he found treatment challenging. Can you tell me about that?”
“Well, we believe in the power of prayer,” Mr. Mosier said. “That God, and only God, can give or take away a curse. Junior, well, he didn’t always see things that way. He was hurting, and I think he just got desperate. At the end, he was willing to try anything. He had lost faith in God, in himself, and in us.” His eyes were hollow, lost in the pain of having disappointed his son and not fully understanding why. He stared at the floor in front of his feet processing memories, that had ripped his family apart.
“We should have tried harder,” Mrs. Mosier choked out. Her tears were bubbling up again, and she squeezed her husband’s hand.
“I understand that there had been several stints at rehab.” I wanted to try to pull back to more neutral territory but also to understand the lead up. So far the Renacido Center was coming off as the treatment of last resort, but I didn’t know if that status meant anything.
“At first, we got him to a good Christian center,” Mr. Mosier said. “It was a place our pastor put us in touch with in Missouri. Outside of St. Louis, and we’ve got family there. We drove him down. He was there for four weeks.” He cleared his throat before continuing. “I think he came back even angrier than when he’d left. Started using again days later.”
“He was still living with us then,” Mrs. Mosier added, taking a fleeting look at her husband’s stricken face.
“I think it was about a year after that when he lost his job. He was a mechanic,” Mr. Mosier continued. “Came in to work high one too many times. They just couldn’t put up with that anymore. Can’t blame his employer. They had tried hard, gave him a lot of leeway to find his way back to God, but eventually our boy had used up his chances. That’s when he said he was ready to try rehab again, but not if he had to go back to the church.”
“The church treatment center?” I asked.
“Wouldn’t go back at all. Not to any church,” Mrs. Mosier said. “He said no God would give a man this kind of burden. He didn’t want the Christian treatment center. He didn’t want to attend services. He didn’t want anything to do with our beliefs.”
The pain in her face was as fresh as if his rejection of God had happened yesterday. In renouncing his religion, he had renounced his parents.
“He said he wanted to make another try at rehab, but only if he could pick the center,” Mr. Mosier said. “Since he didn’t have a job, that meant he didn’t have health insurance. We were desperate. We would have done anything to help him, so we agreed to pay out-of-pocket. Cost us almost thirty grand. That’s a lot of money to us. It took everything we had. But we loved our son, so we figured it out. Sent him out to this fancy place in California that time.”
“And was the California center any more successful?” I asked.
“He was clean a little longer.” Mr. Mosier shrugged. “As far as we know, it was a couple of months before he was using again. At that point, we just didn’t know how to help him anymore. We weren’t sure he wanted help, at least not from us. I told him we couldn’t have that evil in our home any longer. He moved out. We aren’t quite sure who he was living with. Friends, I guess. Sleeping on somebody’s couch. Or maybe on the streets.”
Mrs. Mosier cried softly as her husband spoke, every word a piece of gravel in the wound. He squeezed her hand tighter and sniffed back his own tears.
“He didn’t involve us when he made the decision to go to that Renacido place,” he said. “Owen just stopped by the house unexpectedly the day before to let us know. We hadn’t seen him in over four months by then.”
“He seemed at peace,” Mrs. Mosier added. “As if he felt really good about this decision. He said this center was different, that they had some special treatment. Some experimental procedures that showed promise. But we don’t know if that was just his hopes and dreams talking or if he was trying to convince us.”
“And did you speak to him while he was at the center?”
I knew I was getting into delicate territory and had to be careful about how I phrased my questions. Parental guilt found a way to rear its ugly head, regardless of the reality of the circumstances, but the last thing I wanted to do was sound accusatory.
“Only once,” Mrs. Mosier said. “He called us about three weeks later. I put him on speaker phone so we could both hear his voice. He said he felt really good. That the treatment was working. He could feel something was different this time.”
“But he just wasn’t himself,” her husband jumped in. “He sounded a little spacey, maybe slow is a better word, and kind of wheezy. Like he was having a hard time breathing or couldn’t catch his breath. I asked him about it. And he said there was some medication he’d been given as part of his treatment that made him feel a little ‘floaty.’ That was his word. Said it slowed everything down. But it only lasted a day or two, so he wasn’t worried.”
“You don’t think this was an ongoing medication, then?” I asked.
“No, I think it was something that he took once a week. He said they monitored him. Hooked him up to an IV while the drug was being administered,” Mr. Mosier answered.
The image of the rooms in the carriage house came back to my mind. The drug could have been something administered intravenously, or the IV could have been part of a backup protection. It could even have been straight saline just to get a line into his arm as a safety measure. However, that ruled out methadone.
“Did he tell you what the drug was?”
“No, his speech was getting pretty slurred by that point in the conversation. It was something that started with an I but I couldn’t make it out. It sounded more like it was a cocktail of drugs.”
“A week later he was dead.” Mrs. Mosier was trembling now, her eyes locked on me.
“And you filed suit a month later. Correct?” I asked.
Again the couple exchanged a glance. “At the time it seemed like the right thing to do,” he said. “They wouldn’t tell us anything at the center. Like what drugs he’d been given. They said he was an adult and we weren’t entitled to his records. That the information was confidential.”
“The way he sounded on the phone and the fact that he died just days later, well, we got scared,” Mrs. Mosier said. “Our boy was dead, and they wouldn’t tell us anything. When we couldn’t get any information from them, that’s when we decided we needed a lawyer.”
“I know this is difficult, but can you tell me why you dropped the lawsuit?”
The couple looked at each other, the unspoken language of a long-term marriage. Mrs. Mosier nodded to her husband.
“This attorney paid us a visit. A guy named Reda,” he said. “Out of the blue. No phone call. Just knocked on our door one night. Said he was the attorney for the center. He told us flat out that if we continued with legal action, he personally guaranteed he would bankrupt us. Said there was a lot of money behind them, that they had a big announcement coming, and our choices were to benefit when that happened or lose everything we had.” He lowered his head. “This lawyer also said they would accuse Owen of all kinds of depravities—engaging with other men and such—and that they’d do it publicly if we went to court.”
Humiliation and financial ruin. Scum lawyering at its worst.
“That’s a disgusting legal approach. You used the word ‘benefit.’ Did you interpret his comments as basically offering you a bribe to stay quiet? A cut of the center’s future financial windfall?” I asked, my mind jumping to ramifications. “I’m not passing judgment, I’m just wanting to clarify,” I added quickly, realizing my tone might be misinterpreted.
“We didn’t take any bribe,” Mr. Mosier shot back, anger in his voice. “Good Christian folks don’t make money off other people’s sorrow. And I sure as hell wasn’t going to make money off my dead son. I told him never to contact us again. That’s when we dropped the suit. I didn’t want their blood money, but they would have crushed us financially and denigrated our son in the process. So we let it go and moved on. And I don’t have a minute of regret.”