How a determined mother helped a community college, devastated by opioids, fight for its students’ lives
By Claire HansenOctober 6, 2018
Asheville, N.C.
Anne Seaman would drive her son to and from classes at his North Carolina college, where he was studying computer security. He was going to Narcotics Anonymous meetings and was in recovery.Mike Belleme for The Chronicle
Stuart Moseley didn’t want an extravagant celebration for his birthday, just a cookout with family and a couple of friends from rehab. His mother, Anne Seaman, ordered him a customized shirt.
“I made it,” the front said. And on the back: “to 30.”
It was a joke they’d earned through pain. Stuart struggled with addiction. He had been on the street. He had recovered, relapsed, recovered again, relapsed again, on and on for nearly 12 years. Anne had watched it all, riding a roller coaster of hope and hopelessness alongside him, Stuart always just out of her reach.
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Anne Seaman would drive her son to and from classes at his North Carolina college, where he was studying computer security. He was going to Narcotics Anonymous meetings and was in recovery.Mike Belleme for The Chronicle
Stuart Moseley didn’t want an extravagant celebration for his birthday, just a cookout with family and a couple of friends from rehab. His mother, Anne Seaman, ordered him a customized shirt.
“I made it,” the front said. And on the back: “to 30.”
It was a joke they’d earned through pain. Stuart struggled with addiction. He had been on the street. He had recovered, relapsed, recovered again, relapsed again, on and on for nearly 12 years. Anne had watched it all, riding a roller coaster of hope and hopelessness alongside him, Stuart always just out of her reach.
Lately, though, Anne had felt closer to her son than she had in years. She would drive him to and from classes at Asheville-Buncombe Technical Community College, known as A-B Tech, where he was studying computer security. He was going to Narcotics Anonymous meetings and was in recovery.
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The birthday came and went uneventfully and Stuart stayed on track, going to class, going to meetings, Anne supporting him as best she could.
The opioid crisis has left few corners of the country untouched. Asheville, an Appalachian hippie town, is no exception. As the region has fallen into the grips of the epidemic, A-B Tech has become a springboard for young adults who are trying to claw their way to a more stable future — people whose needs have tested the college’s drive to serve its community in new and complicated ways. People like Stuart Moseley.
Four months after his birthday, on July 3, 2017, Stuart’s sponsor sat in a parking lot on the campus, waiting for him to finish his afternoon class. They had planned to meet, and the sponsor was growing impatient.
Inside an academic building, a staffer noticed that the door of a single-stall bathroom had been locked from the inside for more than an hour, and called the campus police.
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Stuart’s instructor also called the police, reporting that Stuart had left his backpack in the classroom hours earlier. He had gotten up in the middle of class. Nobody knew where he was.
Then, Anne, who was at home, got a call from the college. It was a routine lost-and-found call: We’ve found Stuart’s backpack, and we’re holding it. But when she got off the phone and texted Stuart, he didn’t respond.
Not long after that, Anne got another call. This time it was Dennis King, the president.
He insisted she come to the campus. He didn’t say why.
Before Stuart enrolled at A-B Tech, his early life was full of sudden disappearances.
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When Stuart was 7, his father, Richard Moseley, died suddenly one day in the living room, right in front of Stuart and his older brother. Moseley had health problems stemming from Type 1 diabetes, but the death was a shock. Anne is sure that Stuart carried that memory with him.
“All I could do was listen to him and say, ‘I love you, and when you want to do something different, I’m here for you.’ ”
Still, she managed to give him and his brother a happy childhood in Florida. She married a churchgoing man, Bill Seaman, and the four would take trips overseas. But in high school, Stuart began to buck against Anne’s rules and the comforts of their upbringing. He became enamored with road novels and romanticized society’s “underbelly.”
After less than a year at Radford University, he set out to find it. He spent the next four years hitchhiking and hopping trains. Anne would go months without hearing from him. Stuart had a modest inheritance, and she worried that he was blowing it on drugs and alcohol, but there wasn’t much she could do about it.
“He was an adult,” she says, “so all I could do was listen to him and say, ‘I love you, and when you want to do something different, I’m here for you.’ "
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One day, Stuart called Anne from New York City, terrified, and told her that “street kids” were after him. By this point, Anne and Bill had moved to Montreat, N.C., a small town nestled in the mountains near Asheville. She bought him an overnight bus ticket home. She hoped that, this time, he would stay.
The next eight years unfolded in short cycles: Stuart would get treatment, get a job, stay sober. Then he’d relapse. There was a period of calm, from about 2012 to 2015, when he had a job, a supportive girlfriend, and was on Suboxone treatment. But then he convinced himself that he didn’t need his opioid-replacement drugs, says Anne, and started giving them to friends. He and his girlfriend broke up.
Last year Stuart Moseley overdosed in this single-stall bathroom at A-B Tech. Since then, the college has added new keyholes that allow police officers to unlock the doors from the outside. Mike Belleme for The Chronicle
Since moving home, Stuart had been alternately diagnosed with bipolar disorder and borderline personality disorder. The second diagnosis made the most sense to Anne. The condition, which usually shows up in early adulthood, can make it hard for some people to regulate impulses, including the impulse to use or abuse drugs.
Anne also came to understand Stuart’s addiction as a disease. It made him unpredictable, which meant she always needed to have a contingency plan. When she and Bill would travel, she’d leave itineraries and blank checks with friends in case Stuart had a crisis.
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The contingency plans came in handy. In 2015, while Anne and Bill were on a European vacation, the ex-girlfriend called. Stuart had become suicidal and was using more heavily. From Italy, Anne contacted friends and had them check him into the hospital. When she returned home, she got two vials of naloxone, the overdose-reversal drug, and some syringes. She put one kit in her house and one in her car.
Anne replayed her conversation with King over and over in her head as she drove from her Montreat home to A-B Tech’s campus. Why was it the president who called? she wondered.
The drive was only about 25 minutes, almost a straight shot on the interstate. Anne had done the drive many times for Stuart over the years — picking him up from the street, taking him to treatment, dropping him off at school.
It wasn’t easy to navigate the patchwork of addiction services in Asheville. The resource centers would move locations, change numbers, disappear entirely. One time, when Stuart was drunk, she had taken him to a detox facility. The people there had told her he wasn’t drunk enough to be admitted. Anne couldn’t imagine how any person whose brain had been altered by opioids could maneuver through the network of treatment facilities on his own.
Over the past nine months or so, though, life had been more mundane. Stuart was taking classes, holding a job, staying sober. He had started hanging out with other people in recovery, including another A-B Tech student named Kim Treadaway. They would sometimes get coffee, and afterward Anne would pick Stuart up.
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Why was it the president who called?
A terrifying thought crept into Anne’s periphery but she forced it away, willing herself to focus on the road.
When Anne pulled into the parking lot near Stuart’s classroom, King was waiting for her. There were emergency vehicles near the back of the building. She got out of the car.
“I am sorry, Anne, he’s gone,” Anne remembers King saying to her.
She turned away from King and leaned on the car. She knew what he meant; it was what she had started to suspect as she drove.
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When the police had responded to the call about the locked bathroom, they couldn’t get the door open. They called in members of the Asheville Fire Department, who came and pried the door off its hinges with a crowbar. When they did, they found Stuart lying facedown on the gray tile floor. There was white powder and a hypodermic needle on the sink. There were injection marks on his forearm. He was dead.
“I’m pissed off. I’m mad. Just sitting with it is not who I am. I see a problem, I want to fix it.”
Stuart’s was the first overdose death on campus. It was jarring in its abruptness: His mother had dropped him off. He had gone to class. He had taken a bathroom break and never come back.
Community colleges have long been places open to everyone seeking a better future and willing to put in the work. The colleges cater largely to younger adults, some who have jobs and kids and who, always, have rich and complicated lives outside of campus buildings.
At A-B Tech, Stuart’s death led to a reckoning: An increasing number of those lives were filled with struggles of addiction and attempts at recovery, and the opioid epidemic was making those struggles only more common. College officials couldn’t ignore it any longer; like an active shooter, the epidemic was killing students on their campus, on their watch.
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The officials grappled with how to go forward, but what they didn’t seem to grapple with, what seemed to be a swift and collective decision, was that the college’s mission to provide the community with a path to a more fulfilling future now meant helping students like Stuart.
Anne, too, was grappling with how to go forward. She asked herself what more she could have done to stop this from happening, and what she could do now to make sure it didn’t happen to anyone else. Answering those questions would be part of her own recovery.
The opioid crisis has hit North Carolina hard. Opioid overdoses and deaths exploded in 2016 and 2017, ticking up as time passed. The state saw over 500 opioid-overdose-related visits to emergency departments in July 2017 alone, the month Stuart died. Asheville was among the cities where the visits were most concentrated.
Still, King never imagined that the opioid crisis would come so close to the campus. “I wasn’t paying attention,” he says. “It was Stuart’s death that really brought this home to me.”
For those paying attention, a death on campus seemed not only predictable but inevitable. Heather Pack, the college’s director of student-support services, and her fellow counselors saw the warning signs.
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Family photos show Anne Seaman (top right) with her son Stuart Moseley, who struggled with drug addiction for more than a decade.Mike Belleme for The Chronicle
By Pack’s count, 17 of the 71 off-campus student deaths since 2013 were from drug overdoses. Though she can’t prove it, Pack also suspects that overdoses were behind 20 more of those deaths.
Then there were the on-campus overdoses that weren’t fatal: A student slumped over a table in fall of 2016; another collapsed on the floor of a multistall bathroom four months before Stuart died. Both students were revived.
The bathroom where Stuart died is on the ground floor of a quiet academic building, next to a couple of computer labs and a seating area. It was a single stall. There was no chance of anyone finding him before it was too late.
Outside, there are still marks on the door frame where firefighters pried the door off. On the door handle, a white plastic cap covers a keyhole.
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The cap and the keyhole are new. After Stuart’s death, the college installed outside-facing locks on every bathroom door on campus and made sure that all on-duty police officers had keys. It was one of the steps A-B Tech took almost immediately.
Anne gave the college her unused naloxone kits, and A-B Tech began applying for grants to buy injectors for the overdose-reversing drug. They look like rectangular EpiPens, and campus police officers now carry them at all times. Some people on campus worried about liability if the officers didn’t use the injectors right, said King, the president, but he overruled them: “I just said, We’re going to do this.”
Much of the heroin on the streets in Asheville, and in the nation, is laced with fentanyl, a synthetic drug significantly more potent than heroin. It’s one of the reasons the epidemic has been so deadly. (It was fentanyl-laced heroin that killed Stuart.) There is some concern that fentanyl can be absorbed through the skin, so college officials put gloves in every classroom. Before the fall term began, experts from a local rehab facility gave A-B Tech faculty members training in the physiology of addiction and how to spot warning signs.
The efforts taken by the college immediately after Stuart’s death were simple, if not obvious, solutions to some of the problems Stuart’s death exposed. There would be no more taking doors off the hinges, no more waiting for paramedics.
But a thornier issue remained. It’s one thing to carry overdose-reversing drugs, but it’s another to help students find their way out of addiction entirely. And for that there was no easy preparedness checklist, no playbook from the county’s opioid task force or from other educational institutions.
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Led by Pack and her team, ideas emerged. The plans might not have added up to a slick, cohesive strategy, but the administration supported them.
First, the college introduced its students to Anne.
Just weeks after Stuart died, Anne was back at A-B Tech, standing in front of a camera, recording a video.
Anne, slender with thick, gray hair, the ends neatly curled into a long bob, talked about Stuart’s life: his addiction, his recoveries, his relapses, his death.
She was matter-of-fact: This is what happened. This is how it happened.
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“He was working so hard to resist it, but he couldn’t,” she said. She closed her eyes as she spoke, measuring her sentences carefully. “I’m afraid he had a little bit of stress in class, and that’s where his brain went.”
The college played the video in every first-year classroom at the beginning of the fall semester. (It did so this year as well.)
After Anne finished her story, students started sharing theirs with one another. In one classroom, a student announced that he was a recovering opioid addict. He’d been sober for two years and said he was there to help if anyone in the class needed his support.
Before the video, “there wasn’t any talk about it on a schoolwide level,” says Kim Treadaway, Stuart’s friend, except for the discreet nods exchanged between students who knew each other from support groups.
A door had been unlocked. Stuart Moseley had died alone, but while he was alive, he was surrounded by others like him, students trying to make college a part of their recovery, hoping someone would be there to catch them when they slipped. Now, thanks to Anne, they were finally talking about it.
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The Anne that students saw on screen was calm and composed, but her grief also includes anger — not just at losing a son, but also at the all the things that kept him from surviving, all the things that could have been done.
“I’m pissed off. I’m mad,” she says a year later. “Just sitting with it is not who I am. I see a problem, I want to fix it. I’m a fix-it person. Stuart would’ve told you that.”
On an August afternoon, Anne stands in a small, rectangular room in a building on campus and digs around in a toolbox. It is three days before the fall term begins and just over a year since Stuart’s death.
The toolbox was Stuart’s. Using his screwdriver, she replaces the worn handles on a row of cabinets. Heather Pack is there, too, working on a cabinet at the other end of the row. In the room there are a pair of couches and a table, and a coffee maker donated from a local rehab facility. Computers were about to be installed, too.
Anne moves efficiently, nimble fingers deftly prying screws from the cabinet doors. Later, sitting on a couch, she talks more about Stuart and addiction, gently clasping and unclasping her hands as she speaks.
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The college has named the room the Reset, envisioned as a gathering place for students who are in recovery or who want to be. Above all, it’s meant to ease the isolation felt by students struggling to get out from under addiction. There will be a volunteer or faculty member in the room at all times.
Anne Seaman (left) and Heather Pack, director of student support services at A-B Tech, prepare a special room on campus that will be available to students recovering from drug addiction and looking for a place to relax or someone to talk to.Mike Belleme for The Chronicle
The room is Anne and Heather’s brainchild. Stuart wanted to get better, and Anne wonders how things might have been different if, on that July afternoon, there had been a place where he could have gone to sit and feel, even for just that moment, a little less alone.
Anne and Heather went and picked out furniture for the room, paid for with seed money donated by Anne and her husband. They were planning to open the room to students at the beginning of this year’s fall semester.
Heather Pack knows that the students whom the college is likeliest to reach are those already trying to get away, or stay away, from their addictions. The students who are in “active addiction” are still hiding.
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Kim Treadaway, Stuart’s friend, knows, too. She has endured her own share of trauma because of addiction: Years ago, she woke up to find that her boyfriend, lying next to her, was dead. In 2012 she briefly took classes while addicted to drugs and alcohol, and she knows that students who are in full-blown addiction don’t come to campus much. They simply disappear. “That’s the scary part,” she says.
Anne Seaman wonders how things might have been different if there had been a place where her son could have gone to sit and feel a little less alone.Mike Belleme for The Chronicle
The Reset room will also anchor the college’s still-forming collegiate recovery group, which Pack started planning in the months after Stuart’s death. Pack says that she’s been given funding and support by the administration, and that, if anything, officials want her to move faster. But she is trying to be deliberate about the creation of the group and the space.
Recovery programs aren’t uncommon at four-year colleges, and Pack sought guidance from those involved with groups at other North Carolina universities. But many of those groups involve a residential experience, and A-B Tech is, like most community colleges, a commuter school. One group’s advisers told Pack his cohort hosted tailgates. A-B Tech doesn’t even have athletics. Pack knew that her program would need to be different.
That’s why this room, this space, feels crucial, Treadaway says. Instead of making students search for phone numbers or come to campus at inconvenient times, “there’s actually just a room on campus where you can go and immediately get plugged in, immediately get connected, immediately talk to somebody,” she says.
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In the meantime, Anne wants to make sure that anyone who ends up there arrives at a place with a mother’s touch. She rejects the vocabulary typically used to talk about those with addiction: No one is “clean,” because that means you can be dirty. You can’t be either; you are just a person. She doesn’t use the word “overdose”; she uses “poisoning” because that is, she says, what it is, really. The people who will come here aren’t “addicts,” they are sons and daughters.
She finishes replacing the cabinet handles and remarks on how nice they look. She wants the room to send the same message she always tried to tell Stuart during his years on the road:
I love you, and when you want to do something different, I’m here for you.
The last time Anne touched her son, he was zipped in a body bag. She had to wear a glove, but she was able to touch his hand.
“He was cold,” Anne said. “I was able to tell him I loved him and always would. My baby. You try so hard to keep him alive, and we couldn’t. We couldn’t.”
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She didn’t touch Stuart again until 10 months later, when she picked up his ashes from the crematorium. Stuart’s family and friends scattered them not far from Anne’s mountain home, in the community’s memorial garden. Other dead are there, too. Anne knows some of them. She says Stuart is in good company.
That is where Anne shared one last joke with Stuart. She chose to scatter his ashes by a bench, just next to a lazy creek. There, she says, she can “sit and have a talking with that boy.” On top of his ashes, she sprinkled his favorite hot sauce, Tapatío, which he put on everything. He would have approved, she says — that was his kind of humor.
Kim Treadaway, a friend of Stuart Moseley’s from A-B Tech, has struggled with addiction herself. Most addicts won’t show up to classes, she says; instead, they simply disappear. “That’s the scary part.” Mike Belleme for The Chronicle
Anne has long understood the severity of the opioid epidemic, but the aftermath of Stuart’s death made it even more clear. The day of Stuart’s memorial service, his best friend overdosed and died. It was one of the friends who had come to Stuart’s birthday party; Anne said it was “just exponential grief.”
Grief isn’t the same as addiction, but it, too, is a constant struggle. Anne has taken the energy she used to spend on keeping Stuart alive and poured it into the Reset, into op-eds about addiction for local newspapers, into retelling her story — Stuart’s story — over and over again at events about the crisis, some hosted by A-B Tech.
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Since Stuart died, Anne has learned a lot about the science of addiction and how to treat it. She’s a staunch advocate for medication-assisted therapy, which she thinks could have saved her son’s life. She is now wary of sharing her personal story; it’s time to move beyond awareness, she says. It’s time for real action. It’s how she grieves, but it’s exhausting. Sometimes she needs to take days, even weeks off, retreating home to Bill, trying to save pieces of herself for him and her other son, Stuart’s brother, who has a family of his own.
She’s met people who know what it’s like to live inside addiction. And she’s learned about who Stuart was during the times when he was furthest away from her.
Anne and Kim Treadaway barely knew each other while Stuart was alive. But last winter, Kim recognized Anne at an A-B Tech event about the opioid crisis and approached her. They started going to talks together.
When Kim graduated in May, with a 4.0 GPA, an acceptance to the University of North Carolina at Asheville, and her sobriety, her parents couldn’t make it to the ceremony. So Anne went. “She offered just to come and be my stand-in mom for the day,” says Kim.
That’s what Anne does now: look after other people’s children. But amid an epidemic in which people face their direst moments behind locked doors, it’s so often beyond the power of mothers, counselors, college officials, or recovering addicts to stave off tragedy.
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Back in the Reset, Anne tells a story.
After Stuart’s death, a woman contacted her. The woman’s son was with a friend several years ago when her son overdosed. Instead of running, the friend called 911 and performed CPR until paramedics arrived.
It was Stuart.
“He saved my son’s life,” Anne remembers her saying.
It’s time for Anne to go. In just a few days, Anne and her husband will leave the United States for an extended vacation. For the first time in 12 years, she will not leave a blank check. She will not have a contingency plan.
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When Anne gets back, Heather Pack says, they will dedicate the room to Anne and Stuart. Anne insists that it’s still “up for discussion,” but it’s not.
She gathers her things. She gives Heather a hug. And then, Stuart’s toolbox in hand, Anne walks down the hallway and opens the door.