A life spent in addiction's shadow, cut short

WAUSAU — Jeff Campo was caulking to help paint a friend's home on the morning of July 20 when the call came. He missed it, and didn't check his messages for another two hours, when he drove to get more paint from the Hallman Lindsay store in Wausau. He was about halfway there in his black Jeep when he noticed a squad car was following him.

As soon as Campo arrived at the store and stepped out of his Jeep, the deputy approached and told him: "You're not in trouble."

Soon a detective pulled into the parking lot. He started to fire questions at a confused Campo — when had you last spoken to your daughter, Gabrielle? When was the last time you had seen her? The detective did not answer Campo's only question: "Is my daughter OK?"

Campo followed the squad cars back to the Wausau police station and was taken to a small, bleak interview room with bare walls. A female secretary with the department greeted him and quickly left to bring him water. Campo still had not received an answer to his question as he sat with the detective in silence. When the woman walked back into the room with a cup of water, she said to Campo, "I'm so sorry for your loss."

In 2013, heroin was blamed for 8,257 deaths across the nation. The death rate from heroin overdose doubled between 2010 and 2012, according to a study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Already this year, at least six people have died in Marathon County in heroin-related cases. On July 20, under the cold light of a police interview room, Jeff Campo learned that his daughter was one of them.

Gabrielle Campo died at 23 after a battle with addiction that began in middle school. She had spent time in jail; she often lived a semi-homeless life, crashing with friends or at the houses of active drug users and dealers.

Jeff Campo's personal experiences, the rejection he faced, and all of the progress he'd made in giving his daughter a better life helped him come to the view that drug addicts are people suffering from a disease, rather than what society deems as people who should be locked in jail.

She was an addict. But her addiction did not define who she was.

In August, her father came to the offices of the Wausau Daily Herald with the goal of sharing Gabrielle's story — her whole story, a fuller, more human portrait than shows up in police reports. This is that story.

Jeff Campo is a tall, powerfully built man with work-worn hands — he's a painter by trade and is well-known in central Wisconsin for his efforts to restore the Rothschild Pavilion and Wausau's Athletic Park. Although he looks strong, he broke down in tears as he tried to share Gabrielle's life, to spotlight the holes in the criminal justice system that caused it to treat her like state property, not someone battling the disease of addiction. There are many people like Gabrielle, Campo said, and he wanted to do something to try to reach them.

This account is drawn from multiple interviews with Campo; with Gabrielle's siblings and friends; police sources and reports; and a cache of letters Gabrielle wrote from jail to her father and friends that were shared with Daily Herald Media. The portrait these sources paint of Gabrielle is complicated: As a young woman in her early 20s, she expressed pride in her independence and yearning for her family. At times she grappled with her addiction, and at other times appeared to make excuses for her circumstance. She communicated regret and also criticized the father who had taken responsibility for raising her only son. She was a troubled young woman, in other words, but she also was someone who had deep and lasting relationships and who seemed, at least some of the time, to really want to change her life.

A path marked by tragedy

Gabrielle Campo — known to her family as Gigi and by others as Gabby — was an adventurous, bright little girl who marched to the beat of her own drum, her father said. Gabrielle and her younger brother, Jordan, now 22, were close growing up. The two were a year apart in age, and they lived in Wausau with their dad and their mom, Susan.

In family photographs from her childhood, Gabrielle stands smiling, about 6 years old, holding a prize catch while ice fishing with her father. In another she is resting her glasses on her dog's face. In more recent pictures she is seen with her son and plucking petals off a bouquet of yellow flowers.

Gabrielle was 7 years old in September 1999 when Susan died of breast cancer after a long and hard illness; her death took a toll on the kids, Jeff Campo said, but Gabrielle struggled openly with it even into adulthood. The pain is reflected in letters she sent to her family and her best friend, Tina Howard. Gabrielle was very close to her mother, Campo said, and could not come to terms with what happened.

In 2001, Jeff Campo remarried and moved the family to a two-acre hobby farm in Mosinee. Things were great there, Jordan Campo said. He and Gabrielle would ride bikes and wander in the woods. Gabrielle would always lead their adventures.

Jordan noticed something change in his sister around fifth grade: She seemed confused, troubled, and he could tell she was beginning down the wrong path. She became close with kids who often got in trouble, kids who also had experienced trauma in their own lives and who carried their pain much as Gabrielle herself did. She had a way of connecting with the kids who didn't fit in, Jeff Campo said.

At home, adjusting to a stepmom proved difficult for both Jordan and his sister. Their father often worked late.

"Both of us were coping," Jordan Campo said. "We've never had a real, good relationship with our parents."

In 2005, when Gabrielle was 13, she was sexually assaulted while spending the night with a group of girls at a friend's house. She first told her grandmother, who then told Jeff, and he reported it to Mosinee police. After kids at school heard what happened, they harassed Gabrielle by calling her names and accusing her of lying. It crushed her, Jeff Campo said. Neither expected such a reaction from the girls at school.

The incident was investigated by Social Services and police, and the assailant — an older brother of one of the girls — went to prison for six years. Gabrielle was taken to counselors, social workers and psychologists after the assault.

"Gabrielle always told the truth, no matter how tough it was," Jeff Campo said. "She did an amazing, brave thing."

Gabrielle began smoking cigarettes shortly after, her brother said. She turned to drinking and experimented with marijuana.

In eighth grade, Gabrielle was kicked out of junior high when she was caught with drug paraphernalia in one of the school bathrooms. Jeff Campo had to make an appeal to the Mosinee School Board before the district would allow her back in.

On occasion, Jordan would join his sister and friends when they went out late. Gabrielle's friends would pick them up in their cars, and they would drink or get high together.

Gabrielle's teen years were troubled and unhappy. She acted out, and trouble followed her on all fronts. Her relationships at home were rough, so Jeff Campo moved his children out of their hobby farm and into a duplex in Stevens Point. Gabrielle was kicked out of high school at 18 after a shouting match with the vice principal.

In one interview, Jeff Campo shared an envelope of family photos with a Daily Herald reporter. He paused before sharing the last photo, which he stuck out of the envelope slightly. In the picture, Gabrielle and a friend, in their late teens or early 20s, are seated on a step, with cigarettes in hand and a cloud of smoke around them. Gabrielle is wearing a white and black jacket and glancing up at the camera. Her eyes look heavy and very tired, as if she had been partying all night. It was a side of Gabrielle Jeff did not often see.

'She wanted a happy family and a clean life'

As best her father, her brother and her friends can tell, Gabrielle's hard drug use did not begin until after high school.

In the summer of 2010, Gabrielle found a job making $10 an hour as an in-home caretaker for a paraplegic woman. Gabrielle's then-boyfriend, Russell Garcia, worked at a tree farm. Gabrielle was 18 years old when she had her first brush with the adult criminal system in June of that year, when she was charged with disorderly conduct after a fight with Garcia.

On Dec. 12, 2010, Gabrielle gave birth to her son, Nathaniel Garcia, at Ministry Good Samaritan Health Center in Merrill. Without cars or licenses, the new parents could not drive themselves home from the delivery room; Jeff Campo loaded Nathaniel in his Jeep. He drove Gabrielle, Russell and Nathaniel back to their small apartment in Merrill.

Within a year after Nathaniel was born, the apartment was gone. Russell eventually left, and Gabrielle became a single mom. In November 2011, one of Gabrielle's friends called Jeff Campo, saying Gabrielle was passed out from drugs, and Jeff needed to take Nathaniel. Jeff ran to his Jeep and sped from Mosinee to Merrill; when he got there, Gabrielle's friend ran out with the infant Nathaniel and Campo called 911 to report his unconscious daughter.

"I wanted her to get better," Campo said.

Gabrielle was devastated. In many letters, she wrote that she did not understand why her son was taken from her. Her father told her to clean up and start taking care of herself so she could be a mother to her son. He told her he was trying to help her. But privately he wondered whether his choice to take Nathaniel from Gabrielle enabled her vagrant, drug-using lifestyle. After Nathaniel was taken from her in 2011, Jeff Campo kept him. In February 2013 he would be awarded full legal custody of the child.

In an interview, friend Tina Howard, now 23, said Gabrielle never thought it was fair that she no longer had custody of her son, and the two of them discussed it through letters.

"She wanted a happy family and a clean life," Howard said.

When Gabrielle was in jail, she kept in close communication with her father, who scheduled appointments and handled errands for her. She shared updates on things, like scores on courses she took while at the Lincoln County Jail, court appearances and her life plans once she got out of jail. She wrote that she loved him and that she was angry with him. She wrote about how much she loved Nathaniel. She thanked her dad for not giving up on her and wrote about missing her mother.

"When I was little I used to pretend Mom was in the room with me or at night she was in bed holding me. I'm just going to pretend that again and I won't need anybody," Gabrielle wrote.

Gabrielle tried to get her father to accept her fiancé of two years, James Howard, also Tina's brother. She wrote to her father about him, and Gabrielle and James exchanged letters in jail through Tina, who would reroute letters between the two.

James Howard, 25, spoke with a Daily Herald reporter by phone from the Wisconsin Resource Center in Winnebago. It's a Department of Corrections facility for convicted felons referred there for mental health or behavioral treatment. Howard was quiet on the phone, and spoke slowly, in clipped sentences, choosing his words carefully.

James Howard said he found out about Gabrielle's death through a friend with whom he was serving time. He still has more than 100 letters from Gabrielle. The letters are hard for him to look at, but now and again he does. He doesn't get as emotional now as he used to.

"In her letters she expresses so much that I don't even know how to begin to express," he said.

In some of Gabrielle's letters, she describes in vivid detail near-death experiences she had with drugs — for example, in a letter to her father, she talks about a day she woke up at Aspirus Wausau Hospital in a hospital bed. She didn't remember how she got there, only that she was out doing drugs with the friends the night before. Her friends hit her with Narcan, a life-saving heroin-overdose antidote that reverses the depressive effects of the drug, and dropped her off at the hospital because she wasn't breathing.

Tina Howard said Gabrielle was a risk-taker with her heroin use and pushed the limits, enough to make her need Narcan on more than one occasion. Gabrielle used, Tina Howard said, because she felt like she had nowhere to go, no support system that was helping her.

When Tina's son, Leon, was born, Gabrielle called often, wanting to babysit; Tina, now 15 months clean after using since she was 17 years old, said she did not let Gabrielle watch Leon because she didn't want drugs to make her backpedal from her progress.

"I didn't have any options and she felt like she didn't have any options," Tina Howard said.

Gabrielle was arrested on drug possession charges while driving with friends in Waupaca County and was released from jail on May 13, 2013. With no place of her own, she went back to Jeff Campo's farm to be with her father and her growing son, now 4 years old.

"You never saw a little boy so happy," Campo said. "I bet the first day she was back Nathaniel called her Mommy at least 100 times."

A 'never-ending cycle'

Campo often asks himself what he could have done differently in his daughter's life.

When he fights to hold back his tears, he holds his eyes wide open while biting his lip and focuses on a steady object nearby. He can't dwell too much on Gabrielle's death for his own good, but instead tries to fill his thoughts with happy memories of her.

He never realized the amount of danger associated with drug addiction and the type of lifestyle Gabrielle lived. Campo didn't see his daughter as a coping drug addict, despite the fact he worked with inmates who he knew were stuck in a catch-22 of incarceration and drug addiction, similar to Gabrielle. It was only after Gabrielle's death that he considered his daughter was struggling with the disease of heroin addiction. There's something about keeping a person's hands busy that keeps them out of trouble, Campo said, but Gabrielle had no interest in work projects. Even though she kept journals for most of her life, she refused to confide in counselors and social workers she met with regularly. Campo did not understand why Gabrielle rejected the resources and opportunities he placed before her.

He doesn't doubt he made mistakes in handling Gabrielle's situation. She was fragile and misunderstood, and was quick to deny what help she thought would prove fruitless. She wanted change but became frustrated when things weren't working for her. It was exhausting for Campo, especially when he attended court hearings with Gabrielle while she was in custody. Jail might be what she needed, he told himself — a rationalization, he believes now, given the lack of strong and consistent treatment .

Gabrielle's brother, Jordan Campo, a tall young man with a calm, quiet demeanor who studied to be a pastor at Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, offered his sister what he said was the only thing he could: the word of God. Three years before her death, Gabrielle sought religion as a way to help her get off the path she was on, Jordan said.

The two talked through letters, and he suggested in spring 2014 that she take part in the Teen Challenge, a one-year, faith-based Christian discipleship for men and women with "life controlling issues." Gabrielle was adamantly against it, noting on one of the Teen Challenge informational sheets that none of the classes included any sort of drug treatment.

Gabrielle wanted change, and she made it clear she would not spend time doing things that failed to address the core of her physical dependency on heroin. Gabrielle knew she needed some sort of medicine or drug to interrupt the cravings that made her want to shoot up. Not only was she fighting the mental addiction, she was fighting a physical addiction, too.

Sherry Ellis, a family friend since Gabrielle was 17, had herself been using drugs since she was a teen. Now 33 and clean since March, Ellis said from experience that heroin is misunderstood, and that people get stuck in a "never-ending cycle" of not wanting to feel.

The lifestyle is also hard to get out of, Ellis said. Even when you're clean, you still keep some of the behaviors that come with using. She compared it to being in the military, where the addiction is the drill sergeant, controlling your life and every move.

"To break and change that is constant work," Ellis said.

Everybody becomes connected with the same people, too. Though heroin isn't considered a social drug, the subculture around it is, in the way connections form and people come to know each other, Ellis said. This may be especially true in a relatively small community such as Wausau.

Ellis said addicts who live together more often than not use together. In some cases, they get busted together, too.

On Jan. 9, 2015, detectives from the Marathon County Sheriff's Department Special Investigations Unit searched the house in which Gabrielle was staying in the 3000 block of Northwestern Avenue. Police were investigating a burglary but instead found a meth lab in the basement of the house.

Gabrielle and James Howard were in the room she was staying in when she pressured James Howard into jumping out of a second-story window to escape police; he was found and taken into custody. Gabrielle told officers she had nothing to do with any meth lab in the basement and wanted to make sure her name was not associated with it. She showed officers injection sites on her feet, and officers found a scale dirty with traces of heroin and meth. She had a scoop made out of a $10 bill for shoveling drugs into clear and pink baggies in her bedroom.

Four people, including Gabrielle, were arrested that night. Days later, Gabrielle sent a copy of the criminal complaint to Jeff Campo while she was in jail, with notes written throughout it for him to explain her version of what happened that night. She wanted to console her father, and tell him things weren't as bad as they seemed.

A few months after the raid, the tone in Gabrielle's letters changed. For the first time, she started talking about treatments, rehab and medication to keep her sober. In one letter, she made clear she wanted her father to advocate for her to be put on medicine to help with her addiction.

In this same letter she wrote an excerpt from a book called "Scar Tissue" by the musician Anthony Kiedis, about the disease model of addiction, which "views addiction primarily as an individual medical problem rather than a social or moral problem."

"It is not the lack of will power or moral character that separates addicts from non-addicts. Addiction is a pathological state. Addicts abuse drugs because they are ill. They are biologically different from non-addicts," she wrote.

Jordan Campo said he saw his sister in May during monthly visits to the jail, where he held monthly worship with inmates. Sometimes Gabrielle was in jail and could watch the services, and she said in letters she loved when Jordan preached, and Jordan thought she looked happy. Gabrielle told Jordan she wanted to change. Jordan prayed with her, and the two read the Bible together.

Jordan remembered driving to the house of one of Gabrielle's friends during his visit in May because she wanted him to pray for her friends. She trusted him, he said. The house he went to was rough, he said, and all of Gabrielle's friends there were drug users. Dressed in suit and tie, he stood before her friends that night and prayed for them. When he began to pray, he said her friends began weeping, and Gabrielle spent two hours crying on his arm. He didn't know why they were crying, he said, but he knew Gabrielle felt peace in that moment. He wept for the full trip back to Chicago that night.

A month passed before Gabrielle saw her brother again.

Jordan made the trek to Wausau from Chicago as often as he could, usually once a month. At the time of his June visit, the two met up while she was staying with a guy who gave her a room of her own because she had no other place to stay.

In June, Gabrielle didn't look so well, Jordan said; he saw holes in her arms from shooting up.

Around the same time, Jeff Campo was working in a garden on Third Street when he saw Gabrielle walking by on a rainy June morning, on her way to charge her cell phone at The Glass Hat tavern in Wausau. Gabrielle looked tired to Jeff, as if she had a rough couple of days. Her hair was messy and she had on day-old makeup. She stayed at a place that had no electricity, Jeff said. He gave her a ride, food and $30. He remembers she told him not to worry, and that everything would be OK.

The last time Gabrielle talked to her father was a few days later, when he asked her over the phone to sign the lease for an apartment. Jeff Campo said he could hear people talking and commotion in the background. Gabrielle said she had to leave, and the call was over.

Jeff Campo was told by police that on the day she died, the people with her performed CPR for an hour before calling police. When she got a pulse, they called 911; when police arrived, everyone in the house fled.

In 'Gabby's Garden,' a legacy

Five weeks after her death, friends and family gathered at the same garden next to The Glass Hat where Jeff Campo and Gabrielle crossed paths in June. The flowers were in full bloom and the green leaves of vegetables grew from the soft soil, and the gardens were decorated with freshly painted ladders of different colors for the night of her memorial. Mourners lingered outside a large, white tent pitched for the memorial.

The memorial came together through community donations, including the food, tent and sound system.

"We couldn't be more blessed," Jeff Campo said.

The sun set as Gabrielle's loved ones remembered her and listened to how her life was shaped and eventually taken by addiction.

The service was led by Bob MacRae, a professor at the Moody Bible Institute where Jordan Campo studies.

The garden, called "Gabby's Garden" in her name, is a part of a program, Mending One's Self and Inspiring Change, or MOSAIC, which was launched this year by The Neighbors' Place, a Wausau food pantry and social services nonprofit. MOSAIC is a place where inmates can work during their sentences, similar to work projects Jeff Campo has had with inmates in the past.

To her family and friends, Gabrielle is seen as the victim of an untreated disease and a victim of a criminal system which failed to treat her addiction as such.

On the day Gabrielle died, a Wausau police detective told Jeff Campo that heroin has become an epidemic for the area. It came in 2010 and hasn't gone away since; when Campo asked the detective what can be done, the detective didn't have an answer.

Some addicts are sent to day reporting after they are caught using drugs, where they perform daily checks through urinalysis or breathalyzer to test if they are still using. But Sherry Ellis, a long-time user who is now clean, said addicts find ways of cheating these tests if they aren't interested in quitting. The Wausau Comprehensive Treatment Center on Washington Street issues methadone to reduce withdrawal symptoms in heroin users without causing the "high" of using, but Ellis said most people who are regularly issued methadone don't want to be clean, and are only reporting to keep themselves out of jail in a way that allows them to continue using.

Susan Belanger, a clinical supervisor at the treatment center, said there is no question that heroin users need long-term medical treatment to develop a clean habit in ways other than taking drugs out of a person's life. It's the severe withdrawal symptoms — vomiting, diarrhea, sweating and the inability to sleep — that keep a person coming back. Belanger said the craving alone is so powerful that most patients that go through their non-medical detox program in two to four days end up using within the same day. All they think about is using, finding relief from their withdrawal symptoms.

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Ellis said without any help curbing her addiction — similar to the way addicts are put into jail to have forced withdrawals — she would have killed herself. The withdrawals are horrible, and the mental and emotional withdrawals are just as bad as the physical.

And once you're in the system, you're treated like state property, Ellis said. When you're on probation, the probation officer is in control of your life. Ellis said a probation officer will send an active user to jail rather than arrange resources to find the user help.

"Users who don't want to get in trouble are afraid of help," Ellis said.

Most users are on probation if they are in the system, she said. Most also have untreated deeper issues that keep them in this never-ending cycle.

Ten years ago, Belanger saw 125 patients at her clinic. Today, the clinic treats 414 patients with a waiting list over a month out, she said.

Belanger said the issue with addressing users' needs comes from two places: the community's lack of understanding toward heroin and the scope of the problem, along with medical professionals who continue to use a "one size fits all" approach to addiction. Without medically assisted treatment and an approach that breaks a user's habits and lifestyle, these problems are going nowhere, Belanger said.

Jeff Campo has thought deeply about major events in Gabrielle's life, and has exhausted the "what-ifs." He's a forward-thinking man of 56 who tries to maintain positivity; since Gabrielle's death, he is on a mission to make changes in access and treatment for drug offenders.

Campo wants a complete rework of the criminal justice system — to give criminal addicts like Gabrielle access to resources that might have been able to steer her down the right path. He wants people to look at drug users not as criminals or as people who won't help themselves, but as people who are in need of serious help.

"Her story will do a lot of good for the community," Campo said.

Gabrielle's story has already touched the community. Not only was Gabrielle's memorial made possible through community donations, but Jeff Campo also has received thousands of online condolences from people across the world, all touched by her story. Drug users and non-users, Wausau natives and people from halfway across the world have all reached out to him to let him know they are praying or thinking of Gabrielle.

"There are a lot of people like my daughter," he said.

Reporter Raina Beutel can be reached at raina.beutel@gannettwisconsin.com or 715-845-0658. Find her on Twitter as @rainabeutel.

Make a donation in Gabrielle's memory

If you'd like to donate to MOSAIC, a program that employs offenders part-time to develop work and performance patterns to help them find success and more opportunities, please send a check, with "Mosaic Program" written in the memo, to:

The Neighbors' Place
745 Scott Street
Wausau, WI 54403

Resources for anyone struggling with addiction:

• Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) National Helpline: 1-800-622-HELP (4357).

• Wausau Comprehensive Treatment Center (Methadone & Suboxone Clinic), 209 Washington Street, Wausau. Phone: 715-845-3637.

• AIDS Resource Center of Wisconsin, Wausau Office (needle exchange), 1105 Grand Avenue, Schofield, WI 54476. Offers Narcan training, clean supplies, HIV/Hepatitis C testing, referrals to programs in the area.

• Family Counseling Services, 903 North Second Street, Wausau. Phone: 715-842-3346.

• North Central Healthcare Facilities, 1100 Lakeview Drive, Wausau. Phone: 715-848-4600. Offers individual and group therapy.

• Dix and Gillette Counseling Services, 1720 Merrill Avenue, Wausau. Phone: 715-675-3888.

• Lincoln Healthcare Center Merrill Office, 607 North Sales Street, Merrill. Phone: 715-536-9482.