Cole Nicholls was no angel, and he admitted it freely.
This was, perhaps, why his 17-year-old view from the trenches of the fentanyl crisis added urgency and veracity to the storm last year that followed the deaths of three Kanata teens after opioid overdoses.
“You try the pill. It’s wicked,” he told this newspaper of using the counterfeit Percocet pills known among teens as Percs. “It’s your party drug. Then you want to do it every day.”
At the time, Nicholls said he had weaned himself off fentanyl, a process he described as “the worst” in a front-page story.
It appeared that he had found his way, but it didn’t hold.
Nicholls died Friday of a suspected overdose.
“He was a good kid with a big heart,” said Sean O’Leary, the founder of We The Parents, a group that formed to advocate for access to support resources for youth after the Kanata deaths.
Nicholls packed a lot of hard living into his 18 years. By his own admission, he used drugs in inventive and dangerous combinations and was no stranger to the courthouse. But he also had insight into why this new drug was so dangerous.
“The high is worth the risk. That’s what people think. They think it’s not going to happen to them,” he told this newspaper.
From the archives: Cole Nicholls in February 2017
Last year, O’Leary rang the alarm bell in a poignant open letter on Facebook. Chloe Kotval, 14, was the third Kanata teenager to die of a drug overdose in the past eight weeks, wrote O’Leary, who said then that he feared for the life of his own 16-year-old daughter, Paige.
“I have locked her at home, chased her around, grabbed her off the streets, walked in to people’s homes uninvited to take my daughter out of there, we have had paramedics and police to our home numerous times,” wrote O’Leary in his message, which attracted city-wide attention. “But here we sit not knowing day to day whether our beautiful little girl will be alive tomorrow.”
The true scope of the problem started dawning on O’Leary after he came home on the night of Dec. 31, 2016, and found a teenage boy with blue lips and no apparent heartbeat. O’Leary performed CPR until an ambulance arrived and paramedics administered naloxone. It was the first time he had ever even heard of naloxone, the opioid “antidote” that would soon become a household word.
O’Leary had already known Nicholls for more than two years by then, and Nicholls was at the epicentre of the maelstrom. He filled O’Leary in on what parents didn’t see. “He would come to me and say, ‘It’s getting worse. The 14- and 15-year-olds are starting.'”
Nicholls would become O’Leary’s wingman in his searches to find Paige and bring her home. “I can remember so many times, him riding shotgun with me.”
Friends remember an adventurous boy who loved walking in the woods, camping out and taking apart his pit bike and putting it back together. Once, as a student at St. Michael School in Fitzroy Harbour, he brought an injured bird to school in his backpack, feeding and watering it in secret to the amusement of his classmates, until it was well enough to fly away on its own.
Dylan Yarrington met Nicholls in Grade 9 at West Carleton Secondary School and became a close friend. Nicholls had the uncanny ability to talk to people as though he had known them forever. He had remarkable resilience in the face of adversity.
“Any sh—y position he was in, he would get past it,” said Yarrington. “Cole was one of those guys who was super-hard on the outside. But if you got past it, he was the best guy in the world.”
Nichols left home at 14 and dropped out of school. He hopped from apartment to boarding house and couch surfed. O’Leary first met Nicholls when he found him sleeping on the floor of his garage in the summer of 2015.
“You’d think most kids would run, but he was so polite and apologetic,” said O’Leary. “By the end of the day I said to him, ‘If you need to stay in my garage, text me.'”
Because Paige was struggling with drugs herself, O’Leary said, he was wary about having Nicholls in his house. But he found that the young man wanted the same thing he did, to make sure Paige was safe.
Nicholls made it clear the dangers of fentanyl use went beyond any previous generation’s experience with drugs, said O’Leary, who persuaded him to go public with his story. Nicholls was nervous about it, knowing it would expose him to danger, but said he did it because he thought it would help others.
“He cared about his friends more so than he cared about himself.”
“He cared about his friends more so than he cared about himself.”
Kanata-Carleton MP Karen McCrimmon met with Nicholls shortly after the Kanata fentanyl bombshell hit. She described him as “brilliant, but vulnerable.”
He knew what had to be done to prevent more deaths, said McCrimmon: Nicholls wanted all schools to have naloxone in case of overdoses.
When this newspaper published the interview, Nicholls faced a barrage of criticism on social media, including claims that he was posting photos of himself taking drugs, even as he urged others to stop. He posted a response to one critic in a profanity-laced text, owning up to using cocaine “maybe once a month and drinking beer and smoking weed,” but denying using Percs: “I litterally lost half my friends to this drug and its killing ppl why would u bash me for trying to talk about the crisis thats happening with fetnyl (sic).”
Nicholls wanted to get the word out about the evils of drugs. But he also found them hard to resist, said Yarrington. “He always dabbled in drugs. He always mixed them.”
Nicholls spent time in custody in the past year. It was probably the best thing that could happen to him, said Yarrington. “I kinda wanted him in jail. It was a safe place. He had a place to eat, a place to sleep. He was getting exercise. He looked great.”
Like many of Nicholl’s friends, O’Leary hoped that Nicholls would get off all drugs and stay off them. Fentanyl is cut into so many drugs now and they’re all equally dangerous, he said. “Whether it’s cocaine or Perc, it’s the fenatnyl that’s cut in that causes the death.”
Nicholls just wanted to fit in somewhere, and was thrilled when he got a short-lived job at an office moving company recently, said Yarrington. “He loved working. The smile on his face when he got a paycheque, a real paycheque.”
Karen Reid, Nicholls’ lawyer, said that when word got out of his death this week, she received condolences from two Crown prosecutors and many of her colleagues. Nicholls had been unfailingly pleasant and polite, she said.
“He had a conscience,” she said. “I know it sounds trite, but his death diminishes us all.”
O’Leary last heard from Nicholls in a text he received Thursday. Nicholls was looking for a job. O’Leary made a mental note to call him on the weekend, but it was too late.
“All I can think of is what what could have happened if I had tried one more time.”
Nicholls’ wake is on Sunday from 2-4 p.m. and 7-9 p.m., and his funeral is Monday at 11 a.m. Both are being held at the Kelly Funeral Home at 580 Eagleson Rd.
jlaucius@postmedia.com
