Life after meth: Health problems abound for family in meth-contaminated home

Julie McCoy Sabatino keeps track of legal notices on a bulletin board in her dining room.

CHURUBUSCO, Ind. - Julie McCoy Sabatino would be fighting mad - if she wasn’t so sick.

McCoy Sabatino is not a drug user, but she believes she, and her 14-year-old son, are suffering from secondhand exposure to methamphetamine.

A single mom in October 2006, McCoy Sabatino was overjoyed when she closed the deal on her new home in Churubusco. Looking forward to this new fork in the road, McCoy Sabatino moved with her then 10-year-old son into the small, but neat 2-story home at 501 South Main Street.

Within weeks, both mother and son began to experience respiratory ailments, joint and muscle pain, headaches and flu-like symptoms.

“By December, my son had to go to the doctor and get a nebulizer for his asthma,” McCoy Sabatino said. A nebulizer is an inhaler filled with medication that is used to treat asthma and respiratory ailments.

McCoy Sabatino was working at Bluffton Rubber Company in Churubusco, making $9 an hour, and was one of the fastest press operators at the plant, she said.

“But the deterioration of my body was even faster,” she said. The tingling in her hands turned to numbness and traveled up her arms as the nerve damage made its way through her body. Soon, she could no longer grasp with her left hand. Her feet also became numb and it began moving up her legs, she said.

“And,” she added, “my hands and feet are always cold, no matter what the temperature is.”

After many doctor visits, where no diagnosis could be made, McCoy Sabatino was told by her doctor that she would have to quit work.

McCoy Sabatino began to notice other physical changes in her family’s health, especially loss of concentration and chronic depression.

Her son had been listed on the honor roll when they moved into the house. Within months, his mother said, his grades began to fall. Today he is failing several subjects, she said.

To add insult to injury, after news of the ‘meth house’ made the televised news across the state earlier this week, her son was called "methhead" and teased at school.

“Kids can be cruel,” McCoy Sabatino said. “But my son is hurting enough already.”

McCoy Sabatino and her son also experienced decreased motor skill abilities and coordination, she said.

“I noticed that we were a lot clumsier than we used to be and my son would fall a lot.”

“The doctors have noticed it too,” she said, “but no one had any answers.”

Buying a contaminated home

Drug users and dealers cook a soup of toxic chemicals to produce methamphetamine. And today - even after concrete evidence that meth residue can cause long-term illnesses and symptoms in those who come in contact with it months or even years later - there are still no clear cut regulations or rules in the State of Indiana on what exactly is to be done with the sites that have been used to manufacture and store methamphetamine.

In Indiana alone, over 1,000 meth labs were raided in 2008, more than double the numbers of six years ago. Nearby Noble County continues to gain a reputation as the meth capital of Indiana, keeping close pace with Vigo County in Southwest Indiana.

“How much more evidence do they need before something is done?” McCoy Sabatino asks with exasperation.

She is convinced that her family’s sickness is directly related to a drug bust that took place at the Main Street home shortly before she bought it.

At the time of the sale, realtors told her beforehand that there was a chance the home had once contained meth, even though there is no state law that obligates realtors to disclose such information.

“The realtors I worked with were as happy as I was that I was going to be able to purchase my own home,” McCoy Sabatino said. “None of us really knew the dangers.”

Before March 2007 there were no rules or regulations on how officials were to clean up a meth lab or a site where a lab was housed. Today, only 16 states require realtors to disclose information about any meth-related activities to potential buyers. Indiana is not one of those states. McCoy Sabatino’s house was just one of thousands of homes that were sold before the clean-up law took effect.

“The realtors were told to just ‘let it air out for five days,’ ” said McCoy Sabatino. “And they did.”

Connecting the dots

McCoy Sabatino said she once asked a local police officer if there had ever been any meth in the house and he told her that there had been “no evidence of that.”

“I didn’t buy it,” McCoy Sabatino said. “I had already found a hypodermic syringe in a heating vent, suspicious carpet burns and boxes of pills (a name brand cold medication used in the making of meth) in the garage.”

Earlier this year, Indiana State Police confirmed to McCoy Sabatino that the couple who had lived in the home were arrested in 2005 on methamphetamine-related charges.

That’s when McCoy Sabatino had an “aha!” moment.

“I knew then - for sure - that we were suffering from exposure to meth (residue),” she said.

She concluded that the previous tenants had stored the meth ingredients in an upstairs bedroom, where a suspicious stain continues to bleed through the new paint. It was her son’s bedroom. She immediately moved him downstairs into the living room.

Her live-in boyfriend - in his 40's - developed a sore throat in April of this year and was diagnosed with stage 4 throat cancer. Although they separated in August, McCoy Sabatino is still in touch with him and said he is undergoing aggressive treatment for the cancer.

She thinks living in the house for as long as he did and sleeping upstairs may have contributed to his illness.

McCoy Sabatino still sleeps upstairs. Both she and her son continue to experience health problems.

“The pain is constant. It hurts to climb the stairs,” she said. “My son complains of aches and pains when he climbs the stairs and he’s only 14. That’s not normal.”

“My dreams were thrown away,” she said, “when someone else decided to make meth.”

Let the governmental red tape begin

McCoy Sabatino has talked to her state representative, Rep. Matt Bell (R-Dist. 83) and to U.S. Congressman Mark Souder.

Bell has been the most responsive, McCoy Sabatino said. Bell told her that Indiana lawmakers are reviewing a bill that would require sellers to disclose if a home has ever had any history of methamphetamine use or storage.

But this is still in the proposed legislation stage - a long way from becoming law. In the meantime, McCoy Sabatino and her son are stuck in a house that is sucking the life out of them - with no money, no job and nowhere to go.

The home is in foreclosure - McCoy Sabatino quit making payments when she lost her job and when she suspected that the house was poisoned and not a sellable commodity. But McCoy Sabatino said the mortgage holder - Wells Fargo - keeps extending the date of the foreclosure. It seems no one really wants the house, McCoy Sabatino surmised.

Except maybe the Federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).

“A representative actually told me they could acquire these types of houses and use them” to relocate lower income families, McCoy Sabatino said.

Once McCoy Sabatino told HUD officials what she thought of their “crazy” idea, she said they refused to communicate with her.

McCoy Sabatino pointed to a letter on her bulletin board, which is covered with documents and letters from various government agencies. The letter from the Federal Department of Housing and Urban Development states, “”We will not take any further action, nor will we respond to further correspondence.”

“I guess they didn’t like me telling them that I would fight to keep them from moving poor families into former meth houses,” McCoy Sabatino said.

As McCoy Sabatino continues her fight to make the government acknowledge the vast problems that face future generations of home buyers as well as the innocent children who are and will be living in “meth” homes, the clock is ticking on her own home situation.

“They won’t foreclose if I can come up with $6,000 by April 1,” McCoy Sabatino said, and then laughed, adding that the fact that the due date was April Fool’s Day was not lost on her.

McCoy Sabatino also has been told she is financially responsible for any clean up of the former meth lab.

With a wry smile, McCoy Sabatino shakes her head in disbelief.

She is trying to receive Social Security Income, she said - which sometimes takes years - and has been working with Legal Services. She receives no child support, and was recently cut off of food stamps because the agency ruled that her 1994 Cadillac, which is not working and which McCoy Sabatino has not driven since last fall - is worth more than $2,000.

“I’m still in the process of appealing that decision,” McCoy Sabatino said.

If she receives a settlement (retroactive pay) once her Social Security Income is approved, McCoy Sabatino said she plans to buy another home - a used truck and camper.

“I don’t know what else to do,” she said.

She glances at her son and smiles.

“We still believe in God and we continue to say a lot of prayers,” she said. “All I can do right now is continue my fight and live one day at a time.”

(Ed. note - Julie McCoy Sabatino's house was sold in a foreclosure sale and she and her son moved to a rented home in the country six weeks ago. She reported that her health - and that of her son's - is already improving, but said she plans to continue her fight to help change the disclosure laws regarding confirmed  drug houses being sold or rented to unsuspecting tenants.)