A pastor’s family members kept dying from overdoses. Now she saves lives in her community

By Matt Woods

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    WEST ST. LOUIS, Missouri (KMOV) — Pamela Paul felt compelled to make a change in her life. It wasn’t good enough that she had turned her life around for the better and was able to lead a productive life. Seeing people all around who needed support, she wanted to dedicate her life to serving others.

Paul was in the hospital when the feeling arose again to make a leap of faith. She remembered she had written plans to start a church in her neighborhood. After leaving the hospital, she was going to turn that inspiration into her career.

Paul, known as “Pastor Pam,” is a faith leader at Faith, Hope, and Love church on Union Boulevard in St. Louis’ Academy/Sherman Park neighborhood. The church has a congregation of a few dozen people.

Sitting inside Faith, Hope, and Love, Paul explained how the people she’s lost motivate her to help others. Four people in her family have died of a drug overdose, three of them since 2017. The crisis reaches far and wide. For Paul, it hits home.

There was Corie, Paul’s brother.

“He was my big bro,” she said. “I loved him, period. He was everything a big bro should be.”

Corie had a substance use disorder. He was on probation when he failed a urine test, sending him back to prison for six months around 2009. When he got out, he took street drugs again one night. His girlfriend woke up the next morning to find him with blue fingertips. He lost oxygen after overdosing.

“He had been away from that for six months,” Paul said. “Got out, tried it again, and it took his life.”

Then there was Bryan, Paul’s son.

“A person’s son or daughter is everything to them,” she said. “My son Bryan was great and wonderful.”

Bryan got a job in Kansas City and had his own apartment around 2017. He was doing well, and while visiting St. Louis, he told his mom he wanted to move back home.

“I said, ‘Of course you can come back home. The basement is still here,’” she said.

He just needed to stop in Kansas City one more time to pay his roommate for rent. But he never made it back to St. Louis.

“I was expecting him, but when I got a call, it was, ‘Your son has overdosed and died,’” Paul said.

Bryan changed the supply of drugs he was getting before his death. Paul suspects he got something he wasn’t familiar with.

There was also Trayvione, Paul’s nephew.

After a six-month hospital stay, he started using. He overdosed on fentanyl on New Year’s Day in 2019 and died. He was 25.

Paul’s cousin, Carrie, became the fourth member of her family to die of an overdose in 2020. She was a mom of four.

“She was a wonderful mom, the best mom in the world,” Paul said.

Carrie’s sister called Paul to tell her Carrie was having trouble with drugs. Paul was already familiar with what addiction looked like.

“She said, ‘Cousin Pam, I can’t get up in the morning unless I use,’” Paul recalled from one of their conversations.

Paul brought Narcan, the overdose-reversing drug, to give to Carrie’s boyfriend and train him on how to use it. She also encouraged Carrie to seek treatment.

There was a weekend after that when Carrie was overwhelmed. She was staying at her parent’s house when her stepmom went to check on her in the basement. Seemingly snoring, she figured Carrie must have just been tired.

But she wasn’t snoring. She was overdosing.

“If somebody’s a heavy snorer, you might think they’re snoring, but she wasn’t,” Paul said.

Carre was 28 when she died in 2020. While reminiscing about her loved ones, Paul also mentioned the “textbook” nature in which they died. Using after a long hiatus. Changing the supply source. The sound of loud snoring that is actually an overdose.

All of Paul’s family members died a preventable death. They slipped through the cracks at one point or another.

Paul began to dedicate much of her time to community outreach after seeing overdose deaths affect her family. Her work began with a phone call.

“I didn’t know where to start, but I had heard about Narcan,” she said. “So I called this guy.”

The man, working for the organization Prevent Ed, trained Paul on how to use Narcan and gave her 300 doses to give out to the community. He told her it should last a few months.

“It was gone in a week,” she said.

She went where the people were. At gas stations and grocery stores, she saw people who needed help. They looked familiar.

“When I’m looking at them, I see my loved ones,” she said. “I’m engaging with someone who has a situation very much like people that I loved, people that I’ve lost.”

She continued getting Narcan. Today, her outreach has expanded to educating the public about treatment and recovery services, as well as providing overdose training for local companies.

One place Paul does outreach is the Crown Food Mart gas station at the corner of Dr. Martin Luther King and Kingshighway. She packed up a few dozen drawstring bags one rainy evening in December and left the church to hand them out.

A few years back, Paul said, people were unaware of Narcan and sometimes hesitant to take it with them. But that day in December, not a single person told her no. Some of them took multiple bags.

The treatment and recovery resources, Narcan, and information on the Good Samaritan Law that Paul hands out comes from the University of Missouri-St. Louis-Missouri Institute of Mental Health (UMSL-MIMH) addiction science program. A team packs the bags, which number in the thousands, to disperse across Missouri.

“We have been able to get out a lot of really needed information, education and resources about what works and what doesn’t work when it comes to saving a life from an overdose or helping someone who is struggling with opioid use disorder,” Rachel Winograd, head of the addiction science team at UMSL-MIMH, said.

Paul approached a man at the Crown Food Mart who had a story to share. He had a friend who overdosed on fentanyl.

The man, who did not want to be identified, said he remembered he had Narcan after panicking in the moment. He rushed to his friend, gave him two doses, and reversed the overdose while waiting for paramedics to arrive.

Paul was the one who gave him the Narcan. He thanked her and stuck out his arm to shake Paul’s hand, but a hug was more appropriate for the situation.

“I appreciate that to the fullest,” he said right before the two embraced.

More than 2,000 Missourians and 3,000 Illinoisans died in 2022 from a drug overdose, the majority of them caused by fentanyl. First Alert 4 is putting the spotlight on the epidemic with a special live show, “Combating a Crisis: A roundtable on fentanyl.” The show, which will air Thursday at 6:30 p.m., will include Paul, Winograd, and other local advocates to advance the conversation on a crisis that continues to take thousands of lives.

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