Daniel Roy came agonizingly close to reaching the end of his rope.
With one end tied around his neck and the other anchored to the John Hart Bridge over the Nechako River, he was all set to jump.
Addicted to heroin and methamphetamine, he had fallen into a deep depression when his girlfriend, also a drug addict, was moved by her parents to Kelowna to escape her desperate existence living alongside Roy on the streets of Prince George. Lonely and heartbroken, he'd spent weeks trying to end his life by overdosing on heroin but it didn't work.
A passing motorist saw what was happening on the bridge and called the police.
RCMP Cst. Shawn Ingham convinced Roy to reconsider and sat with him while he was recovering in hospital.
"My rock-bottom had a cellar... I was tired of what I had become," Roy told a packed city council chamber gathered last week to hear health and social workers, business owners, police officers and politicians trying to find solutions to the growing problems of crime, poverty, homelessness, mental health and substance abuse concentrated in the downtown core.
"Had it been any other officer that day on the bridge, my life would be a lot different," he said. "I'd either be dead or I would have gone into the psych ward and it would have been just a vicious cycle. (Ingham) told me straight up, 'If you're dead, how are you going to change the things in your life?' He was absolutely right."
That day, in early June 2017, Roy made the choice to get help and go for treatment and was taken in by the Hope for Freedom Society's lodge in Maple Ridge. He returned clean of all his addictions and hasn't used drugs or alcohol in two-and-a-half years.
That also ended 15 years of being homeless in his hometown. It was a life of sleeping in tents or behind buildings under a makeshift shelter he made each day out of wood pallets, carpet underlay and a tarp. Among his possessions on his bike and trailer was an electric space heater, which kept him alive through the winter months. To feed his addictions, Roy would steal what he had to, just to get his daily fix.
"I was one of the worst prolific offenders in the city," he said. "I had 235 run-ins with the RCMP in my last year of addiction. I was addicted to meth and heroin, two of the most addictive drugs that are out there and the thing is I didn't want to be homeless, but addiction took hold. I came from a great family."
A few minutes before Roy spoke to city council last week, Salvation Army Maj. Neil Wilkinson was given his turn at the mic and told the success story of Bob and Betty, a homeless, drug-addicted couple he got to know through his work at the Curt Garland Community Support Centre thrift shop compound at 3500 18th Ave. Wilkinson spoke about how they used to steal from the centre but had since made abrupt changes to their lifestyles and are both now working full-time jobs, leading productive lives.
"I'm Bob," said Roy, which drew a round of applause from the audience in city council chambers.
On more than one occasion, he got caught stealing from the compound, cutting holes in the fence to gain access to the building. He was trying to steal food one day and was taken into the office where Roy Law, the ministry's community services director, was standing with two police officers. Caught red-handed, Roy didn't deny his true intentions.
"In the heart of my addiction, he sent the officers away and dealt with me with grace and compassion," said Roy. "A little bit of compassion goes a long way. I can understand the business owners in this town are frustrated. These people downtown need people to love them and need people to reach out to them."
The "Betty" in Roy's life was his girlfriend of 18 years and they're no longer together as a couple. They got into the homeless habit by choice because they wanted to be able to stay together rather than sleep in shelters that keep men and women separate.
"Addiction and relationships don't go hand-in-hand," he said. "At the end, we were so toxically codependent on each other. We weren't always addicts, we just kind of fell into it."
After he kicked drugs, Roy volunteered for seven months at the Salvation Arm centre until they offered him a full-time job and he now works on the loading dock where people bring their donations to the store. The job pays minimum wage but he has enough to take care of the bills and keep food on his table. He commended a previous speaker at the Dec. 2 meeting, Jordan Tucker, for her efforts to collect toques, socks and gloves in boxes set up in local businesses and encouraged others to support her initiative. He uses some of his own money to buy jackets, hoodies and sweaters to give to people in need. He knows as well as anybody how much that means to them.
Roy, 43, reminded councilors that while the city has a treatment centre at Baldy Hughes for males with substance abuse addictions, there's nothing comparable for females. They can get temporary respite at detox centres but once the effect of whatever substance they've injected, drank, smoked, or inhaled wears off, they're back on the streets.
"I can understand the business owners' frustrations with the downtown core," he said. "If we can come with a viable solution to a natural recovery centre for men and women, I would be part of that. There's a lot of great, viable ideas but we need to come together as a community to address these issues.
"I want to help clean up the problem, I'm tired of being anonymous. The stigma of addiction needs to be broken. We do heal. Recovery is possible and these people just need a little bit of compassion."
Roy is convinced drug and alcohol addictions are the root cause of 95 per cent of the problems with downtown.
"The addiction rate in this town is quite high and the people downtown are going to be under fire," said Roy. "Nobody's going to get clean until they want to.
"For me it took a suicide attempt and the grace of one good officer to help me make that choice. He's a good man. He's got a really big heart and we talk still to this day. I call him my hero, but he's like, 'You're the one who saved your life, I just pushed you in the right direction.'"
