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Tragedy leads to change
By Kevin Dayton
Advertiser Big Island Bureau
HILO, Hawai'i — Tony Carrisal insists he was once withdrawn and quiet, but now the words spill out of him like an evangelistic preacher. Two of his children died while he and his wife Peggy fed their crystal methamphetamine addiction, and he blames himself.
Tim Wright photos
He is wound up, urgently telling the story, rapping his hand on the black cover of a Bible on the dining table in his neatly kept Hilo home.
Tony and Peggy, with Ezekiel, 3, and Kristina, 16 months. While Tony and Peggy were hooked on drugs, their first daughter, and Peggy's son from a past relationship, died.
A poster-size photograph of Elissa, who died at age 2 in a house fire, hangs in the master bedroom of her parents, Tony and Peggy Carrisal.
Carrisal, 40, believes God guided him to Hilo to help him to start over, and to help fight the war on ice. He also believes God intervened on behalf of his dead children.
"God rescued our children from us," he said.
Carrisal began using meth after he returned to San Bernardino, Calif., from a military tour in the late 1980s and discovered that almost everyone he knew in his old neighborhood was using meth. He was introduced to the drug by a friend, and began snorting and smoking it.
Peggy was also using meth when she met Tony. She was fleeing from an abusive relationship with a biker boyfriend in Los Angeles, and Tony helped her with her troubles.
By then Tony was dealing, and Peggy and her 2-year-old son moved in with him. The couple later had a daughter named Elissa.
After he became addicted to methamphetamine, Tony would sometimes wonder about the worst that could happen to him, and he was unimpressed with the answers: He was not afraid of dying, he said; he was not afraid of prison.
Then one night in 1995, while Tony was away in jail, Peggy awoke to discover that her long hair was on fire, ignited by a candle she was using because the electricity had been cut off when the bill wasn't paid.
Standing in her living room in Hilo, holding and comforting her new baby girl, Peggy wept as she described how she used a pole to shatter a bedroom window to get to Elissa, and how Elissa died in the chaos of the fire.
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| Yesterday
While the state increasingly focuses on the thefts, burglaries and violent crime associated with methamphetamine addiction, experts say the harm to children of addicts is often overlooked. |
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| • | Drug's youngest victims see families torn apart |
| • | Trauma of ice both physical, emotional |
| • | Crystal meth Q&A |
| • | Chart: The crystal methamphetamine crisis |
| • | Chart: Indicators of a worsening ice problem in Hawai'i |
| • | Chart: How methamphetamine works in the body |
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Today When state Child Protective Service removes children from a home because of drug use, it becomes a powerful tool to pressure the parents into treatment. |
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| Tomorrow
Doctors desperately need information about babies born each year with ice in their systems, but drug-addicted mothers who take part in such research could have their children taken away. |
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"The horror. I can't even explain the horror I felt. That was worse than death," Tony said. "When I found out about it in jail, I passed out, boom. It hit me and I just fell on the floor and started screaming."
The child's death stripped the "glamour" out of the drug use, Tony said, but it changed little else. Tony got out of jail after serving six months, and both parents continued to use.
The shame of the addiction made them want to hide, staying inside until nightfall so people wouldn't see what they looked like.
Peggy's son was Anthony, known to the family by the nickname "Niner," and Tony raised Niner as his own child. Two years after Elissa's death, with both Tony and Peggy still addicted to ice, Peggy's father asked for permission to take Niner to American Samoa for a fresh start. Tony said he agreed, thinking it would be best for the boy.
A month later, just after his 15th birthday, Niner died accidentally when a powerful ocean current swept him out to sea.
The Carrisals traveled to Samoa for Niner's funeral, and found themselves in a strange place, without their children, and without their drugs. Tony's shoulders shake as he describes his desperation, his need for ice. But the couple clung together, and decided they were never going back to drugs.
Through a series of almost freakish events that the Carrisals believe signal divine intervention, they located an old friend in Hilo in 1997. The friend put them up for a time and got them started, and they have stayed clean since then, rebuilding their lives.
They were afraid to become parents again, but "I wanted it so bad," Peggy said. "God looked in my heart and he knew."
They now have a boy and a girl, 3-year-old Ezekiel and Kristina, who is 16 months old. As for the two they lost, "I know my children are in heaven and I'll see them again, I do know that," Tony said.
After 10 years as an ice addict, Tony has founded a group of Christian ex-dealers and addicts and their families called JC Posse, and is determined that his children will grow up watching him fight the war on ice.
"I'm not willing to give up two more children," he said.
Reach Kevin Dayton at kdayton@honoluluadvertiser.com or (808) 935-3916.
