Timothy arrived at Beacon House in June 2024 with a swollen eye and bruises covering his body. A few days earlier, he’d been badly “kicked and stomped” on the street, treated at the hospital, then released. Prevention Point outreach workers had helped him in the past, and he’d utilized the organization’s food and clothing distributions, but he couldn’t see any other path for himself.
“I didn’t want to stop using. I wanted help,” Timothy says. “I was going to get high until I died because I didn’t know any other way forward.”
But something changed after that injury. Pulled from his hospital bed and again facing another night sleeping on the sidewalk, Timothy was sore and sick and tired. Beacon House outreach workers had approached him for years with offers of shelter, but he’d always refused. On that June day, Timothy finally said yes.
He was high when he arrived at Beacon House, he says. For four days, all he did was eat and sleep. When he was finally ready to leave his bed, he was dope sick, but a shot of Brixadi—one of the medications for opioid use disorder offered at Prevention Point—took that itch away.
“I haven’t had a craving or a drug since,” Timothy said during an emotional interview in late August. “Without Prevention Point, I wouldn’t be here. I’d still be on the streets getting high.”
Timothy grew up on a farm in New Jersey, working alongside his family to provide vegetables to the Campbell Soup Company. He later worked in construction and painting houses. “I love work,” he says.
“My relationship with everyone at Prevention Point is like I’ve known them forever."
Then a back injury made it impossible. “I couldn’t stand or sit for a period of time. I could barely walk. I used a cane and a walker,” he says. Doctors treated him with Percocet and cortisone shots. When Timothy became dependent on Percocet, he went to rehab. When he came out, he stayed sober for two years with the help of Suboxone strips.
But when his prescribing doctor discontinued his practice and Timothy couldn’t find another physician, he turned to street drugs. By 2018, he was addicted to fentanyl and sleeping in a tent in Kensington. It was impossible for him to see a way to another life.
“The power of fentanyl was so great, I couldn’t do it,” Timothy says. “But, I thought about my sons, and how if I passed away the last thought of me they’d have was that I died from an overdose on Kensington Avenue. That’s not the legacy I wanted to leave.”
That’s all changed. Timothy says Beacon House marks a new chapter in his life.
“My relationship with everyone at Prevention Point is like I’ve known them forever,” he says.
Timothy has no drug cravings, a feeling he never thought possible. He’d like to go back to work, and Prevention Point has connected him with back specialists so that can happen. He’s considered returning to construction and remodeling because “to take something and make it more attractive gives you such a sense of pride and a worth to you that’s immeasurable.”
Timothy gets choked up while telling his story, explaining that, “Living on the street, getting high, you get numb to most feelings. Now that I’m sober, everything has an emotional level to it, being happy, being sad. I’m thankful that today I have that choice to feel instead of not having a choice to feel.”
But he’ll keep sharing even if it hurts. “My story might change somebody’s life.”