The Superintendent last Friday sent out an email to all of the educators and parents through his newsletter and said it’s time to burst our bubble, and we have to address this as a town. So having said that, one of the things they did proactively is they brought in a man named Rick Calvert last week. He is a US Federal Prosecutor that usually worked with the DEA and FBI on big drug trafficking charges. 

That’s where the hotel that everybody has read about in the article. Early summer last year, there were three deaths to heroin overdose, deaths of young men that were all former Coppell high school students. The Coppell police department got in touch with Mr. Calvert and got the ball rolling on that investigation.”

After Molthan went to break, he returned by asking Michaelis about the story of the motel, which she explained:

“It’s hard to believe kids from Coppell would even go near that place. I had not heard of that hotel until Mr. Calvert came and presented last week. He told about the motel, all the awful things going on in there: firearms, sex traffic, drugs, people being beat up, people being killed. He ties it back to three kids that I talked about earlier that had died of a heroin overdose that had been traced back to that hotel. I could tell that people in the audience were kind of going, ‘whatever, it’s Dallas. That doesn’t affect us here’ until he said, ‘the reason I’m talking to you about this hotel is because the three kids were all former students at Coppell High School. The two kids we found that were actually dealing out of one of the rooms were former students of Coppell High School. 

So you would go in there and if you wanted to be a dealer there, you pay $200 to the owner, and you got to deal whatever you wanted out of your room. If you were a customer, you could go to room 342 and get heroin, you could go two rooms down and get methamphetamine. 

One of the other shocking things Mr. Calvert said at the end of the presentation he gave to the educators was that as they were raiding that place, they ran all the license plates in the parking lot, and 80% of the license plates were registered to Coppell.

Certainly, that’s not the only place like that in Dallas. The story of the hotel is awful, but our community needed to hear it. To have a federal prosecutor come out and take his time to speak to all of the high school age kids and educators is a big deal.”

Michaelis then went on to share a timeline of Tommy’s addiction, the months, weeks, and days leading up to his tragic accident. She shared the story with confidence and poise, which prompted Molthan to ask how she has felt so safe coping with the death of her son. Michaelis responded:

“Speaking about it helps. But realizing I’ve gotten a lot of great feedback from other interviews that I’ve done and a podcast I did and even the Dallas Morning News Article. The feedback I’ve gotten has been thank you so much for doing this. Thank you for bringing awareness. That lifted me knowing that I am bringing awareness and knowing that there are people that have reached out to me who have lost their kids and don’t feel like they have anyone to talk to. I’m really just trying to end the stigma because there is not a person in the United States of America that addiction has not affected in one way or another, so it does affect everybody.

One other thing I just want to mention is that [addiction is] very linked to genetics. We need to talk about that with our kids. My brother got sober at 23, and I remember when he told us that he had a problem with alcohol primarily, my sister and I were like, ‘you’re 23. Everybody drinks.’ And he goes, ‘you guys are going out and having fun. I’m getting a case of beer, going back to my place by myself and drinking it.’ We should have told his story earlier to our kids. My mom stopped drinking at 41 years old. 

So we need to be really open with our kids because Uncle Jimmy looks great now, but we need to open about what that road looked like when he was 19, 20, 21, 22. My brother actually went down to Austin and visit Tommy while he was there and wrote an eight page handwritten letter, which is really special.

I have a running club at my school, 4th and 5th graders, and we run a 5k every month. So I talked to the other coaches and was like, ‘do you think we can run this 5k; it’ll give us a chance to actually address this with them.’ They said sure. So we ended up being the second highest fundraiser in Dallas. Team Tommy raised over $10,000. My school is going to have a Team Tommy day, and it’s given us an opportunity to talk to the kids. The average age in Texas for alcohol and smoking experimentation is 11 years old.”