The heroic life and tragic death of Trey Helten

Globe and Mail

24-05-2025

I saw Trey Helten for the last time in September last year. It was a typical day on Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. A steady drizzle fell. People huddled in doorways, slept on the wet sidewalk or stood slumping like broken dolls as their drugs took hold.
Trey had been there himself. He spent years homeless and addicted on those streets, then more years working in a supervised drug-use site trying to help people survive the opioids crisis. Now he was getting out. He had left his job, exhausted, beat-up and hoping to make a new start.
He showed up for our meeting with his ever-present black dog, Zelda. He tied her leash to a railing and we went into a diner for lunch and a talk.
His story was a familiar one. Trey got into trouble when he was a kid and started smoking crack cocaine when he was 14 years old. He quit school. He moved to the Downtown Eastside, one of Canada's roughest, poorest neighbourhoods. He graduated to heroin. He ended up sleeping on the sidewalk, a ruin of a man, his handsome face pale and scarred.
Then one day he walked into a Narcotics Anonymous meeting, pushing a shopping cart full of his stuff. With the help of NA and addiction medicine, he got sober. He started volunteering at the drug-use site. He was a natural, with a commanding presence and a knack for treating clients as equals. Before long he was running the place.
Trey became a famous figure in the Downtown Eastside, instantly recognizable with his studded leather vest and his towering, brightly dyed Mohawk.
He seemed to be everywhere. Striding down East Hastings Street with Zelda at his side. Speaking in documentaries and news stories about the devastation wrought by the overdose epidemic. Buying bacon and eggs for a struggling friend in a booth at the Ovaltine Café. He knew everyone and everyone knew him: cops, social workers, first responders, dealers, users.
Like a soldier in a long war, he saw many of his comrades perish over the years. But he saved many, too, jumping in to revive them with a shot of naloxone or a dose of oxygen.
He was at it days, nights and weekends. Driving people to drug detox. Visiting fallen friends in hospital. Offering someone a place to crash while they sorted things out. Where others saw ghoulish subhumans staggering along the street, he saw people. He knew their names and stories.
And yet a shadow hung over Trey whenever I went to see him. He had a haunted look. It was there in his eyes. He couldn't shake the feeling, so common among those in his world, that he was somehow contemptible, worthless, a failure. For others, he had all the compassion in the world; for himself, none.
In the first line of Charles Dickens' David Copperfield, David Copperfield asks 'whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life.' If you had put that question to Trey, he would have laughed or shrugged. He could never see himself that way, no matter how much good he had done and how much pain he had endured.
He was coming out of a tough stretch when I saw him over lunch last fall. He had started using drugs again.
He had an angry meltdown at work. He got into a fight with his teenage son. He passed out on the street one night and landed in hospital with pneumonia.
Something had to change. After days of agonizing withdrawal, he managed to quit the drugs again. When we spoke, he had just taken a new job: retrieving dead bodies for the B.C. Coroners Service. A strange choice, he agreed. Not exactly a mood lifter. But he felt it was useful work. He would get a text from a dispatcher, hop in his van and go. He was good with the families.
On days off he led meetings of Narcotics Anonymous. He was hoping to patch things up with his son. A few months after our lunch, his girlfriend became pregnant with his child.
I didn't talk to Trey for a while. The fall passed, winter came and went. Then last month my phone lit up with a text from the West Coast. Trey had failed to report for work one day. Friends went over to his place. Trey had died at age 42. No one said how, but everyone had the same sinking thought.
Throngs of people dropped into his day-long memorial service on East Hastings to say their goodbyes earlier this month. They were the usual motley crew, many bearing the marks and wounds of street life. They left flowers in front of his picture. They wept. They laughed. They sang karaoke. They bent to pet Zelda. They wondered how it was possible that Trey, the indestructible, was gone.
Trey Helten may not have been the hero of his own life, but he was one to them. He was one to me.