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Trey Anderson with his mother, Frances Milstead.
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Photo courtesy of Frances Milstead.
Donnie and Frances Milstead pose for a picture with Trey Anderson as he throw two peace signs up for the camera. Trey died Aug. 14 from an accidental overdose. “I didn’t want anyone to think he committed suicide, but I also didn’t want anyone to think that he was some big drug thug,” Frances Milstead said. “It’s not embarrassing, but I just want people to know that it [addiction] happens in every neighborhood.”
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Photos courtesy of Frances Milstead.
Family and friends at the Birmingham Recovery Walk at Railroad Park on Sept. 23 wear T-shirts made in memory of Trey.
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Photos courtesy of Frances Milstead.
Anderson was a goalkeeper for the OMHS soccer team, which won multiple state championships the years he was there, as well as for his travel team.
At the Birmingham Recovery Walk on Sept. 23, it was hard not to notice the hundred or so people scattered throughout the event with matching tie-dye shirts, all with the same words on the front: #TeamTrey.
On the back of the shirt it read: “Stop the stigma, End the shame.”
The shirts were a tribute to 26-year-old Richard Don “Trey” Anderson, an Oak Mountain High School graduate who died Aug. 14 from an accidental overdose of narcotics.
Just a little over a month before, more than 500 people showed up at his funeral service at Elmwood Chapel, making it one of the biggest services there in the last 20 years.
Trey’s mother, Frances Milstead, who designed the T-shirts for the recovery walk, said she wanted her message to be clear.
“No one starts out trying to be addicted to drugs, you know, it happens, it is a disease. To me, it’s just like diabetes or heart disease or epilepsy,” she said. “I think the solution is very complicated, just like it is for any kind of regular disease. I just don’t think a lot of people realize that, and for a long time it’s been shameful and ‘hush, hush,’ and you don’t really talk about it.”
That’s why, she said, it’s important for people to know Trey’s story.
When Milstead was writing Trey’s obituary, she was careful about the wording. She said she has friends and even a few relatives who have never known anyone struggling with addiction.
“I didn’t want anyone to think he committed suicide, but I also didn’t want anyone to think that he was some big drug thug,” she said. “It’s not embarrassing, but I just want people to know that it [addiction] happens in every neighborhood.”
Dreams shattered
Mike Ciamarra met Trey when he was 10 years old. They grew up playing club soccer together and both went to the University of Alabama, where he said they saw each other almost every day.
“He was the most lovable guy in the world, I kid you not,” Ciamarra said. “To say he’s never met a stranger is cliché, but I swear this guy could talk to a brick wall all day long, and the brick wall became his best friend.”
Ciamarra was a pallbearer in Trey’s Aug. 19 funeral, along with several of Trey’s other close friends.
“He just had this really, really positive look on every situation. He always somehow turned it into a funny situation,” Ciamarra said.
Milstead said Trey has always been close to her, and over the years all of his friends spent a lot of time hanging out at their house.
“For a long time, it was just Trey and I; I can’t even express how close we were, it was ridiculously close,” Milstead said. She and Trey’s dad divorced when their son was 7 years old.
Trey was a goalkeeper for the OMHS soccer team, which won multiple state championships the years he was there, as well as for his travel team. When he started his senior year, he wanted to take a break from soccer, instead choosing to kick for the football team.
Right before football season, however, Trey tore his meniscus, and by the time soccer season was about to start, playing with an injury like that wasn’t possible for him.
“Personally, that was where we saw declines in his participation,” she said. “I think that’s kind of where — I’m not going to say rebelled — but he experimented, like everyone, they all do. I’m not saying he wouldn’t have [experimented] if that hadn’t happened, but I think he was a little more free to [do it], he just didn’t care anymore… his dreams were shattered. [Soccer] is what he thought he would be doing.”
Trey ended up having three knee surgeries in high school and was prescribed drugs to cope with the pain. Then when he left in 2010 for college, he was prescribed Adderall and Xanax, for Attention Deficit Disorder and anxiety, respectively.
At one point, however, he couldn’t get the prescription refilled until he took a drug test.
He knew he wouldn’t pass, Milstead said, because he had marijuana in his system. From that point on, she said, she thinks he started to buy the drugs from other people.
“There was a point after his sophomore year he came home in the summer time and was kind of nervous, he thought he was hooked on or addicted to Xanax,” Milstead said. “We worked it out here, you know, but I guess my point is he always knew he was in trouble, had to back off.”
Things ‘going downhill’
After four years, most of Trey’s friends and classmates started to graduate and move away from the University of Alabama. Trey struggled to finish his classes to graduate. Ciamarra said that his friendship with Trey was still close, but they got more distant because Ciamarra got a job with the government in Montgomery, then in D.C. They would call each other every month and catch up, but it became harder to keep up; Trey started hanging out with new people.
“I knew he was doing things we probably shouldn’t be doing, but I didn’t know the extent of it, I didn’t know what exactly he was doing,” Ciamarra said.
Looking back, Ciamarra said it was weird that Trey was going through something, and Ciamarra and many of his friends didn’t even know about it.
“He really was [private about it], he knew probably to keep it that way, because if me or some of our other good friends found out about it, we would probably convince him to stop,” he said.
Milstead said that around that time, when everyone was graduating, she started to see Trey exhibit symptoms similar to depression.
“Things started going downhill, and we think that’s when bigger drugs started getting picked up. His drugs of choice were prescription drugs, opioids and Xanax,” she said.
When the summer of 2016 came around, he still lacked about five classes that he needed to graduate, and he moved back home and planned to work on them one at a time. Milstead said that about six months passed where she and her husband, Donnie Milstead, started to figure out what was happening to him.
“It wasn’t good, he just — We knew what he was doing and tried to work with him,” she said. “In February, we gave him an ultimatum — you go to rehab, or you’re on the street.”
Trey had just been evicted from his apartment, and he left in February 2017 for a rehab facility in California. He stayed there until June.
“As far as we still believe, everything was good from June until the weekend before he passed. We even talked about relapse, and he was just saying, ‘I can’t imagine anyone ever relapsing,’” she said.
He told her about how at the facility, they talked about death and how death due to relapse is common because your body is not used to a high amount of drug usage.
The Thursday before he died, Trey went out with an old girlfriend, who he dated about a year before he went to rehab. Milstead got a call from the coroner the next morning. The coworker Trey was staying with had found him dead in their bathroom.
Addiction is a disease
When Ciamarra got the call that Trey had died, he said he thought it was a joke, that it couldn’t be real.
“I think one of the biggest things, is with this happening to Trey, [is to know] it can literally happen to anyone without you even knowing about it,” he said.
Just being cognizant of that, he said, is the first positive step people can take to help stop addiction.
The second step, Milstead said, is seeking to understand addiction as a disease.
Even before Trey got back from rehab, Milstead was attending SMART Recovery, which holds addiction support group meetings, and trying to learn what Trey was going through and how to help.
Going to the groups was helpful to her, she said, and there was a difference in sitting and talking to people that have struggled with addiction, as opposed to having someone without the experience tell her what it’s like. She began to understand the reasons behind why some people use drugs and why it becomes an addiction.
When Trey returned from rehab, they attended meetings together, and Milstead said it became a priority for her to help voice the importance of addressing the shame and stigma associated with the disease of addiction.
Part of the agreement for Trey to go to rehab, she said, was that the family didn’t tell anyone about him going. She said he was insistent on the fact. He didn’t want anyone to know, she said — he was embarrassed. The shame that comes with addiction, she said, is part of the problem.
Even though it hasn’t been easy talking to people about Trey, she said focusing on the stigma is important to her right now, and that’s been the one of the goals accomplished from the Birmingham Recovery Walk.
“I’m humble for all the love and support I’ve received. I feel like he wouldn’t want me to cave, so I feel like I have to do this for him, to raise awareness,” she said.
Right now, she said she would like to see events like the Birmingham Recovery Walk happen closer to where they live in Pelham, near the Oak Mountain and Spain Park high schools.
Over the last month, Trey’s friends have been stopping by the house, many of his guy friends one by one, all promising to stay close. She said the girls Trey was friends with, who she was “momma hen” to for so many years, have been constantly texting her and sending pictures with Trey in them.
Milstead said she’s glad to see recovery and addiction becoming a topic of conversation among her friends and family, even with the reality of Trey so close to heart.
Milstead said she doesn’t intend to stop reaching out to people in need and openly addressing addiction, and hopes to participate in upcoming recovery walks.
“I don’t know if he would have gotten more help if he weren’t so embarrassed. I can’t say that, but I just know there’s a huge epidemic out there,” she said. “The more I read, the more I realize what’s going on out there in the real world and right outside our homes that people don’t realize.”
For more information on SMART Recovery meetings and other recovery resources in the area, go to mooreinstitute.info.
