Surrounded by friends, family, teen loses lonely battle with drugs

Editor's note: This story originally ran on Jan. 21, 2002 as part of the Daily Herald's "Hidden Scourge: Heroin in the Suburbs" series.

They go to proms and concerts, ball games and classes.

They shouldn't go to funerals.

Not for a 17-year-old friend.

But on Wednesday, instead of heading for Rolling Meadows High School, fellow students gathered to bury a boy they loved.

They sat solemnly in pews, arms around each other, crying and staring at Andy Davidson's casket.

They shouldn't have been here. They didn't want to be here.

In the front rows sat the other people in Andy Davidson's life - his mom, older brother and two younger sisters. This close-knit group had been here only a year and a half earlier, to say goodbye to Andy's father, a victim of cancer.

They didn't want to be here again. They didn't expect to be here again. Andy, his mother said, was "one of the good ones."

For an hour, family and friends were linked by a horrible void. Andy's laughter was missing. His jokes were silent. His trademark smile had been taken away.

Andy had been a cheerful, sometimes goofy kid with a passion for cars and friendship.

"He always had a smile on his face," said longtime friend Ryan Bartholomae, also a senior at Rolling Meadows. "He always had a way of making people smile."

But the easygoing kid's grin masked a terrible battle he was fighting mostly on his own.

When it was over, he was dead.

Police found him Jan. 12, the victim of an apparent drug overdose, alone in a parked car. It was the end of a short but storied history of drug use.

He'd told people, including his mother, that he'd tried marijuana and cocaine. Friends talked of him using heroin. The police knew him.

He had struggled to get clean.

Andy wasn't a loner, the kid from the broken home or the boy whose life had become a downhill spiral of drugs.

His decision to use may have been influenced by the death of his father, a weakness for peer pressure or his failure to talk about his troubles.

"He just wasn't a bad guy," his mother, Kathy Davidson, said. "He was one of the good ones. But he made a few mistakes."

The bright side

The throng of teen visitors to Andy's house in the wake of his death vouches for his character.

He loved everyone, and they loved him.

Andy grew up in a quiet and tidy subdivision in Arlington Heights, living in the same house for 16 years. He was the second oldest of Kathy and Roger Davidson's kids.

He was close to his siblings - two younger sisters, whom he'd always stick up for, and an older brother a year ahead of him in school. Dad worked in customer service for Delta Airlines. Mom stayed at home, raising the kids.

Andy loved exploring as a boy, and the family often went camping together.

The family was active at the Arlington Heights Evangelical Free Church, often attending activities more than once a week.

Andy joined area youth leagues to play baseball and basketball.

His dad never missed a game.

"My husband was a very involved father," Kathy Davidson said. "We're a very, very close family."

At South Middle School, Andy posted honor roll grades.

His start at Rolling Meadows High School could have been tough, as he was forced to part with most of his middle school friends, separated by high school boundary lines. But he had no trouble making new friends.

"He had friends all over the place," said friend Ryan Deringer, who met Andy during their junior year. "Everybody loved him."

Andy excelled in auto lab and loved tinkering with cars. He worked an after school job at Turtle Wax, an auto center, and had been offered a job after graduation working on expensive automobiles.

He wasn't sure he was going to take it. He also had considered attending a technical college or, perhaps, joining the military.

Kids at school and at work considered Andy the greatest guy they knew. He was a "free spirit," they said, who loved to have fun.

"I truly think he affected the whole senior class," said Nancy Karras, a Rolling Meadows High School counselor. "He was always making other kids laugh. I don't think I've ever heard anything negative or bad come out of his mouth."

At home, he was close to his mother. He told her about his escapades -"He'd get a guilty conscience," she acknowledges - and admitted experimenting with pot. He later told her he tried cocaine.

And he told her he loved her when he left the house the night he died.

Andy's mother believed he wasn't a junkie who needed drugs. He'd promised her he couldn't be like that; he said it would hurt her too much.

He wanted so badly to make his mother proud. When she enrolled him in drug counseling, he went, and put himself in again later.

Friends say they knew Andy used drugs, but only a few say they knew the extent of his experimentation.

"I never thought he would die. I never really thought it could lead to that," Deringer said. "He was your normal kid. Extremely normal. Not someone you'd think would die from a drug overdose."

At Rolling Meadows High School, dozens of students and some staff members sought grief counseling. Kids pinned notes on his locker. Some designed a banner that hung at his wake, scribbled with notes saying "We'll Miss You."

"This wasn't supposed to happen. It really wasn't; not to him," said senior Chris Lee, who knew Andy as a great guy from class.

His last night

On Friday night, Jan. 11, Andy partied hard.

He stopped by a friend's house; some teens noticed he already was high. They assumed that he'd done several drugs, including heroin.

He left the group with a friend from Chicago, in search of more drugs, sources said.

When the two finally scored heroin, they got into Andy's beloved car - a red Mitsubishi Eclipse he'd bought last year - and drove to a place where they could get high comfortably, sources said. They fell asleep.

Between midnight and 2 a.m., Andy's friend woke up.

Andy never did.

Realizing Andy was dead, his friend panicked and drove the car to a Rolling Meadows condominium complex, the sources said, leaving Andy in the car there.

His mother began to worry early Saturday morning, when, at 4 a.m., Andy hadn't come home. That wasn't like him.

She tried calling his cell phone, but got no answer.

Residents at the complex remember seeing the car running at 7 a.m., but thought nothing of it.

Assuming he may have fallen asleep at a friend's house, his mother didn't panic until early Saturday afternoon. She phoned his friends, asking them to search for Andy.

Eventually, someone at the complex called police.

Shortly before 6 p.m., Andy's mother said a prayer, begging to know, within the hour, what had happened to her son.

A half-hour later, police arrived to tell her Andy was dead.

It was after she heard of Andy's death that she received a phone call from the friend who'd been with him that night, telling her he was sure she hated him.

She said no.

"It was Andy's choice," she said. "If that (drugs) is what it was."

But she won't blame Andy for anything until autopsy results are official, she said.

Until then, she said "I'm at a loss."

Official autopsy results are pending toxicology reports.

The dark side

Days before his death, Andy told a friend he wanted to come clean.

He was sick of living a life of lies. Sick of the possibility that he was hurting his family or his mother.

"I really think he was planning on having a last time," said Andrea Pigeon, a close friend who'd known Andy since kindergarten. "I always thought people who overdosed on heroin are just miserable and want their life to end. Andy didn't. Andy loved his life."

As a freshman, Andy had begun toying with drugs - mostly pot. Eventually, he graduated to harder things. LSD. Cocaine. Heroin.

He had friends who'd overdosed, but told others he had never come close to that himself.

He had his first run-in with Rolling Meadows police two years ago, after a drug incident at the high school. Soon after that, friends said, he was clean for a while.

His mother put him in drug counseling when he was a junior.

He went back about six months ago, going three times a week until his counselor, impressed with his progress, trimmed that to twice a week. Counselors told his mother he was doing well enough that he could go just once a week and be OK.

"He must have had a lot of people fooled," Kathy Davidson said.

He seemed so much better. If she'd had any inkling he was having problems again, she said, she'd have put him into rehabilitation.

And had she ever suspected he was driving to the city to get drugs - something she says she doesn't think he did routinely - she would have taken away his car.

The trigger

In the summer before Andy's freshman year, his father was diagnosed with colon cancer.

It was a difficult illness - and the time when Andy first began using drugs.

Roger Davidson's body gave out in May 2000.

Some point the finger for Andy's struggles, at least in part, on the death of the father who'd played such a big part in his life.

"I think a lot of it stemmed from his dad passing away," said Karras, his school counselor. "I think that was a huge impact on him."

Some who knew Andy say that's when they noticed his drug use.

Others say Andy was clean for a while after his father's death, and they noticed no outward change in his behavior.

"Of course he was sad inside, but there were no outside changes," Deringer said. "I didn't see any."

Andy still spent time with his family and confided in his mother.

He held the role of man of the house when his brother graduated and left home for college.

He didn't seem angry or withdrawn. His mom says she would have noticed if he had been troubled.

But it's a troubling portrait that is painted of him after death - one of a boy who had a hard time talking to others about his deepest issues, and one who'd be the first to listen to a friend's problems but who wouldn't speak of his own.

"Andy had a thing about himself where he always made it look like he had stuff under control," Bartholomae said. "I wish he didn't."

Looking back, friends say, maybe they should have prodded him more about his feelings.

After his father's death, Pigeon said, she knew Andy must have been upset. But he didn't say so.

"Sometimes I wish someone would have brought it up, because we didn't know if he was hurting inside," she said.

When he talked about himself, it was about the simple things: his car, his classes, his friends.

"I don't think Andy liked talking much about himself. He was the kind to try and help everyone else," Karras said. "He was very good at masking his emotions. I think he was a real proud person."

The teen years are tough ones even without the death of a parent.

The death of a mother or father, especially if the teen was close to them as Andy was, can make life horribly stressful, experts say, and can trigger a variety of emotions.

"If he didn't share his feelings, then that's what it's all about," said Fred B. Bryant, a psychology professor at Loyola University in Chicago. "That would lead to the feelings coming out in other ways that can be destructive," like drug use.

But those who knew Andy well say it was his social ability - the same thing that made him so loved - that may have cost him his life.

Andy had a weakness for peer pressure. It was hard for him to say "no."

"He's very social," his mother said. "I think he just went along with what his friends did. If they did it, he did it."

He had, she said, the thought process that "nothing will happen to me."

His friends really can't think like that anymore.

Making promises

At Andy's wake, Pigeon stared Andy in the face and promised she'd never touch drugs.

Since the funeral, she says, some kids have thrown away the bowls they'd used to smoke pot.

"I don't want him to die in vain," said Pigeon, who wears a small pin with the word "Bunny," her nickname for Andy. "I don't think Andy wants anyone to visit him soon."

At his funeral, she sang along with one of Andy's favorite praise tunes, "I Will Call Upon the Lord," and listened to stories about him.

As for her, she'll always remember the night in eighth grade that she snuck out of the house to sit with him under the stars and giggle. It was their first kiss.

"He was, to me, a tragic hero," she said. "He could come in and save the day, but he had these flaws that were, in the end, the tragedy."

- Daily Herald staff writer Cass Cliatt contributed to this report.