Waiting takes a toll in East Palestine: ‘I’m so overwhelmed with stress. I feel like I’m going to have a heart attack …’

This is one of a continuing series of stories about people dealing with the aftermath of the February 2023 toxic train derailment and burn-off in East Palestine, Ohio. 

It’s a few minutes before noon and Morgan Parker once again slumps onto a couch near her dog, Yeti, and settles with the realization that the letter isn’t coming in the mail today. This depressing daily routine has been going on for months.

The letter will tell her how much money she’ll receive as compensation for all of the health problems she’s had, or may have in the future, as a result of toxic chemicals spilled and burned along a railroad track half a mile from her home in East Palestine, Ohio. Morgan is like a lot of people in the area. She’s worried those chemicals may be lurking deep in her body, creating damage that will surface sometime in the future as abdominal pain, or dizziness, or brain fog, or perhaps a shortness of breath, a gasping for air, and then there will be doctors, tests, the discovery of a tumor, perhaps, or some other illness. Morgan is especially worried about the effects of toxic chemicals on her two children.

If sickness does arrive, it’ll cost Morgan a fortune in pain and money, but she won’t be able to sue in the future. That’s part of the deal. You accept a settlement now and forfeit the right to seek health-related damages in the future. You take your chances.

Morgan took the offer because she desperately needs the money. Two decades of addiction left her owing thousands of dollars in fines. She expects her personal injury payment will total about $25,000, which is enough to clean up at least some of the debris of her past. Then she can move on with her life.

Back in the fall, Morgan heard reports that the people who signed onto the agreement would get their money by Christmas. That didn’t happen. Now spring is here, and Morgan doesn’t even have her letter yet. Later on, she’ll once again check the post office website. Sometimes it indicates which items will be delivered the next day. “That way,” Morgan says, “I can get an early start on being devastated tomorrow.”

Morgan often thinks about rich people. They seem to be able to do whatever they want, sometimes cause enormous damage and suffer no consequences. 

“I wonder what kind of life that might be,” she muses, “to not have to worry about literally anything.”

Then she pauses.

“I’m so overwhelmed with stress. I feel like I’m going to have a heart attack, like, all the time.”

* * *

It’s tempting to say that, in her 38 years of life, Morgan Parker has been pinballed from one devastating experience to another, but pinballs are made of steel. They don’t bruise and become unsteady after taking hits. The damage Morgan has sustained becomes evident when she reveals the low points of her life, as she did during several conversations over the past month. She’ll sometimes pause midsentence to gather herself. “Oh God,” she says during one such moment. Then she covers her face with her hands and weeps.

The lowest of those points occurred in June 2021. While some of us crawled out of the COVID-19 mess, Morgan fell into a dark, dark hole and landed on a cold jail floor. She was hallucinating and sick. It took her months to find dim hope, and then she stabilized her life, found a full-time job and a purpose. She moved into an East Palestine duplex she shared with her mother and sister and two children. She became the type of person who’d go to bed early on a Friday night because she had to leave for work at the crack of dawn the next morning.

That’s where she was shortly before 9 p.m. on Feb. 3, 2023, when a loud booming noise jarred her from sleep. The house shook. Windows rattled. It’s an earthquake, Morgan thought. She rose from bed and looked out the window of her second-story bedroom and saw flames lighting up the sky on the east side of town.

Her sister, Megan, checked Facebook. Residents were posting that a train had derailed near the Ohio-Pennsylvania border, about eight blocks away. The flames unnerved Megan. They were insanely large and menacing. She wanted to leave. Morgan, desperate to hang on to a sense of normalcy, said no. She had to go to work the next morning and needed sleep. She went back to bed.

Hours later, Morgan awoke, nauseous and covered in sweat. This is weird, she thought. Fires still burned in those damaged rail cars down the road. Soon, everyone in town would learn of their contents, but at this moment Morgan had no idea. She was being treated for hepatitis C, a remnant of her addiction days, and thought that’s what was making her sick.

* * *

If you ask Morgan about her childhood, she’ll say she doesn’t remember much. She does have a picture from that time. Sometimes she’ll pull the photo out of the display case where she keeps it, along with her father’s black leather boots and a few other items from her past. “This is one of the only memories I have,” she says.

The picture shows her at age 3. She’s wearing a light blue dress with an image of Big Bird on the front, and she’s standing on a toilet lid and reaching up so she can help her father, Bucky Parker, shave. He is bending over, facing her, his hand guiding his daughter’s as it pulls a razor over his cheek, which is partially covered with shaving cream.

Morgan has studied the picture so often she now wonders whether her memory of the moment is real or whether she built it in her imagination. So much of the past is gone. What remains can be brutal to recall.

There was that time when she was 11 years old and having a good time with her friends at the East Palestine swimming pool, and then Morgan heard someone announce her name over the pool’s speaker system. She was summoned to the front desk. She toweled herself dry and walked to the desk, and there were her parents, their faces expressing a mix of shock and rage. Her mother had found Morgan’s diary and read passages indicating a man in town was sexually abusing her. Today Morgan still remembers the abuse. She was wearing Winnie the Pooh underwear, she says.

At the police station, Morgan felt she was the one in trouble, that the abuse was somehow her fault. The man denied the allegations. Of course, the news quickly traveled through town. Morgan says some people blamed her, an 11-year-old. She was bullied. Her fellow students spit on her, knocked her books from her hands. Morgan grew to hate school.

She rebelled. She’d always liked hanging out with Megan, who is eight years older than she is. Megan was the coolest person on earth, Morgan thought. Morgan tagged along with her older sister, went to parties, learned to smoke Marlboro cigarettes and became accustomed to hanging out with older guys.

It was fun. Besides, Morgan hated being alone. Her mom worked long hours as a steelworker; her father was busy doing his own thing – working and riding his Harley with friends. With no one else around, why not hang out with Megan? Megan, though, had her own ideas. She didn’t want her sister tagging along all the time. One day she said no, and as she prepared to drive away, Morgan ran after her and tried to get into Megan’s car. Megan slammed the door. Morgan’s hand was in the jamb.

“Yeah, she broke my finger,” Morgan says, holding up a crooked digit. “My wedding ring finger, at that. Now it takes a size 9 ring to fit over it.”

Morgan attended classes at a career center but disagreed with her mother over the profession she should pursue. Morgan yearned to be a cosmetologist; her mother wanted her to become a nurse. Morgan’s life was taking a turn. She’d not make it past the ninth grade.

At age 15, Morgan met a man she liked. He was 21. She moved in with him. They bought a puppy. Morgan thought it was forever love. Nine months into the relationship, Morgan went to a hospital to have her tonsils removed. After recovering at her parents’ home, she returned to her boyfriend’s place. Another woman answered the door. She wore Morgan’s clothes. The betrayal devastated Morgan. She had no idea what love or commitment was supposed to mean.

A short time later, Morgan met another man. He was 24; she was still 15. He was cute and charismatic, and he had money. She fell hard for the man. “I was so in love with him,” she said.

Morgan quickly became drawn into his world. It was exciting. He already had a girlfriend, so Morgan couldn’t really be his girlfriend, but the two spent a lot of time together.

One beautiful summer day, she and the man and one of his friends drove to Youngstown. Morgan sat in the backseat of a black Toyota Celica with the windows down, the breeze on her face. Somewhere on the south side of the city, they stopped to buy heroin from a street dealer. During the drive back back to Columbiana, Morgan nearly shook with anticipation. She couldn’t wait to try the drug, to experience the high. Heroin was what all of the “big dogs” were doing. In Columbiana, they parked in the driveway of the man’s parents’ home, and each snorted the drug.

Morgan quickly became a regular user.  She and one of her teenage friends drove to a neighborhood on Youngstown’s east side every day to buy and get high. Her friend usually had money, but one day the two were broke. They drove to Youngstown anyway, not really thinking about what they’d do when they got there. Unable to buy dope, they both began feeling ill. Holy shit, Morgan thought, we’re in withdrawal. Addiction had set it.

Sometimes she and the man who introduced her to heroin would use a syringe to inject the drug, but Morgan could never inject herself. Her veins were lousy, she says. She depended on the man to find a vein and insert the needle. Morgan now sees this as a way in which he asserted power over her. There were times when she begged him for help. Still, the thought of leaving him never occurred to her.

“I was so sick,” she says. “I used to say to him that if the only way that I could be with him was to be a junkie, then I would do it every day of the week.”

The relationship lasted for years. The man eventually broke up with his girlfriend and he and Morgan lived together. They had two children and maintained a household at the duplex, at least for a while. That ended when Morgan’s mother found a box containing needles and crack pipes and other drug paraphernalia. 

Mostly, Morgan remembers the ugliness.

“It was just a vicious cycle of horribleness,” she says. “Just horribleness.”

The horribleness included robbing drug dealers and arrests. Morgan made the news. A local newspaper wrote about a botched robbery in Columbiana. The article mentioned Morgan by name. “It was horrible,” she says. “Humiliating. I have been ostracized in this town pretty much my whole life, you know? At least that’s how it felt. I was one of the only girls from East Palestine that was touched by addiction with heroin and was always getting in trouble in the news.”

Through it all, she adored her father, who, she says, struggled with his own addiction to alcohol. Bucky was a Harley Davidson guy. He had a nickname for Morgan – he called her “Skunk” – and signed his notes to her with a smiley face with eyelashes. “He was the greatest man I ever met,” Morgan says. “He was my best friend in the whole world.”

In the late 2000s, Bucky Parker developed throat cancer that eventually spread to his lungs and brain. Morgan has a picture of the two of them, shot on his last birthday, a few weeks before his death in the summer of 2010. They’re both leaning back on Bucky’s Harley. He looks gaunt in loose-fitting clothes – jeans, a black T-shirt, a denim vest. Her belly bulges – she’s nine months pregnant with her daughter. Bucky died before having a chance to meet the baby.

“He was my best friend, and I’m really sad that he didn’t get to meet my kids,” she says.

Three hundred motorcyclists joined Bucky’s funeral procession. The local newspaper devoted an entire page of coverage to the event.

* * *

By summer 2021, Morgan had begun to separate herself from her boyfriend and was living with her niece in Youngstown. Before dusk on Thursday, June 10, of that year, Morgan climbed into her green 1999 Buick and headed out to secure enough dope for that evening and for the next morning. Heroin dealers, she says, are notorious for not answering the phone when desperate users call before noon. After making the buy and using, Morgan got disoriented. She couldn’t figure out how to get home. She drove through a wooded suburb north of Youngstown.

She turned onto Sampson Road and pulled up to a stop sign. That’s the last thing she remembered until she awoke with paramedics staring down at her. Sunlight was fading. Blue and red emergency lights flashed. Morgan could see police officers standing outside the car. 

Morgan had overdosed while driving, and not for the first time. She was still high but alert and knew this was trouble. Someone had injected Morgan with naloxone, a medicine that rapidly reverses an opioid overdose, and the treatment made her feel very cold.

Morgan had no driver’s license, and she knew arrest warrants had been issued for her, so she lied to police officers and said she was her sister, Megan. In the chaotic, high-risk world Morgan occupied at the time, it seemed a good idea, and perhaps the only move that would keep her out of jail. It didn’t work. Police took Morgan into custody. Court records show she was charged with identity fraud, possession of drug paraphernalia and operating a vehicle under the influence. Then things got really bad.

Sitting in a jail cell in Trumbull County, Morgan’s body ached for the opioids she’d been using for two decades. Hallucinations haunted her. She became convinced someone had kidnapped her son and was taking him to Mexico. She begged jail staff to help her stop the kidnapping and get a translator she could use to communicate with the kidnappers. Mexican music echoed in her jail cell. Was the music real? To this day, Morgan can’t say. She stopped eating. She remembers showering once but without soap, so she was filthy. The extensions in her hair became matted.

At one point, an officer arrived to take Morgan to court. The officer wore the wrong uniform, Morgan thought. Something wasn’t right. Morgan freaked out and refused to go with the officer. Someone screamed at her, “If you don’t go to court you’ll never get out of jail.”

After a week, Morgan was released. Depleted and ill, she staggered out of the Trumbull County sheriff’s office in Warren. She’d lost so much weight her clothes didn’t fit. She had to hold them on her wasted body. Morgan collapsed onto the sidewalk. She noticed a man with a cellphone across the street. She called out to him, “Hey, can I use your phone please?”

“Well,” he said, “you’ve got to come over here to use it.”

Years later, recalling this moment continues to pain Morgan. “I couldn’t get up,” she says. “I couldn’t even get up to go get the phone.” She pauses. “Oh my God.”

At one point she heard a voice. “There she is.” Morgan looked up. It was her niece, slowly driving past with a friend. She’d been in an earlier court hearing and knew her aunt was being released from jail.

Morgan climbed into her niece’s car. She still wasn’t thinking straight and became convinced one of the young women in the front seat was pregnant.

“I’m going to be a grandma,” Morgan said. The thought, Morgan now realizes, made no sense.

Morgan’s niece had stopped to pick up an ice coffee for her aunt. She handed it back to Morgan. Morgan took a sip and vomited on herself.

* * *

That day marked a turning point for Morgan. In the days after being released, she sat in her room and stared down at her phone – she couldn’t remember how it worked.  The moment frightened her. Maybe she’d been using too long, the week of detox in jail had been too damaging, and the confusion would never end. 

But as a result of that arrest and confinement, Morgan entered long-term recovery and, after several months, she moved back to East Palestine to live with her two children at the duplex she shared with her sister and mother. She landed a full-time job helping others struggling with addiction and separated herself from the community that had been such a destructive force in her life.

Two decades of addiction, however, had left a lot of damage. She owed about $15,000 in fines and court costs. And there were the memories, many of them quite devastating. Her life had become a delicate balancing act.

* * *

Within two days of the derailment, officials alerted residents in and around East Palestine of the dangers posed by the wrecked train. They feared, incorrectly, that some of the tanker cars could explode, so on Sunday, Feb. 5, officials issued an evacuation order.

Morgan and her family – including her sister and mother – booked a hotel room 10 miles east, in Chippewa, Pennsylvania. While there, they learned officials planned to blast holes in several damaged rail cars to drain the toxic chemicals into a ditch and then set those chemicals on fire. That seemed dangerous, so the next day Morgan and her family moved to a hotel 10 miles farther away, in Monaca, Pennsylvania. On a Monday afternoon, they all stood outside and watched black smoke rise over their town in the distance.

The Parkers stayed at the Monaca hotel for a week. Morgan heard news reports about the chemicals involved in the derailment and looked them up online. Exposure to some has been found to cause cancer and reproductive issues. Despite the risks, Morgan says, her mother wanted to go back to the home she’d worked her whole life to acquire. Morgan and Megan didn’t. They felt it was unsafe.

At some point, Morgan met a couple who owned a house on a farm a few miles east of East Palestine. She calls them her angels. They offered Morgan and her children the use of an unoccupied house on the land. All the couple asked was that Morgan pay the utilities. And so for the next six months, Morgan and her children lived in a one-story house on a farm and woke up each morning with a view of fields and cows.

Most of Morgan’s belongings, however, remained in the East Palestine duplex, where her mother continued to live, so Morgan returned there often. Her eyes and nose began to water constantly. Before going to work in Aliquippa, she’d try to put on makeup at the farm house, but the watering issue made this nearly impossible. She’d get one eyelash glued on; the other wouldn’t stick, so she’d drive to work frustrated and angry. Her physical symptoms were less severe at work, so she’d try to arrive early and apply makeup there. This seems trivial, she says, but looking her best was important. Morgan ran group sessions for people detoxing from opioid addiction and “going through the worst moments of their lives,” she explains. She’d gone through this process herself, and now she was doing OK. Her appearance was physical proof.

Some of her co-workers, though, couldn’t understand why she was so concerned about chemical exposure. “I almost ripped somebody’s head off one day in the hallway because they were just, making jokes of it,” she says. “And I was, like, ‘Are you kidding me? These are my children, and we’ve been exposed to forever chemicals. Do you even know what that means?’ “

All the while, she was trying her best to raise her two children during what was a stressful and frightening time for them. They’d endured isolation and online education during the pandemic, only to be thrust into a nomadic post-derailment life.

Morgan kept this up for months, but it proved too much, and so she quit her job in Aliquippa and took a part-time job as a community health worker at the Way Station, a Columbiana nonprofit organization that provides resources to residents in need. She moved back to the duplex shared with her mother and began studying to earn certification by the Ohio Board of Nursing as a community health worker. Certification would open more opportunities for her. 

* * *

So many of Morgan’s thoughts these days are conflicted. She wants to leave the house that’s now her home –  Norfolk Southern “ruined this land, ruined this home,” she says – but feels guilty about this because her mother worked so hard to pay for the home.

Like a lot of people who grew up in East Palestine, Morgan has fond memories of trains. Hearing them whistle and rumble through town had always been a comfort to her. During one of her stints in jail, she wrote letters to her mother, telling her how much she missed hearing the rhythmic sound of passing railroad cars. It never occurred to her that they could be carrying dangerous chemicals. 

Her daughter turns 15 this summer and is growing into a young woman. This is something to celebrate, yet Morgan is wary. She remembers her life at that same age and path she followed. “That is a terrifying thought for me,” she said.

And just as when she was a child trailing after her older sister, Morgan doesn’t want to be alone. Sometimes she thinks she should try to find a partner, someone to help her raise the children and be a father to them. But again, her memory gives her pause.

“I want to share my life with somebody, you know?” she says. “But guys have been problematic in the past. I do not ever want to be in a position where I’m with someone that’s abusing me or, worse, abusing my kids. That is my worst nightmare. And then, sobriety-wise, it kind of scares me. I’m very suggestible. I can make a man my higher power very quickly. I don’t want to do that. So maybe I should just stay alone.”

Her dreams? She thinks of erasing her debts, working full time at a job that gives her life added meaning. She’s been studying holistic health. Maybe, she says, she could start a business based on these ideas. But for now she waits for a letter and a check that can help her put the fire and the derailment and so much more behind her.

“It just feels like the whole thing has consumed me,” she said. “It just feels like a never ending kind of thing. You know what I mean? When is it going to be over?”

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