With 15 months of sobriety, aspiring S.F. firefighter was building a new life — until a fatal relapse
For 15 months, Kyle Emerson dedicated every day to creating the life he wanted.
The 29-year-old worked two jobs, participated in daily cold plunges and CrossFit, went to school to become an emergency medical responder and routinely attended Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. It was a major feat for the Petaluma man, who had struggled with addiction for half his life before reaching a point in early 2024 where he considered driving out to the ocean and overdosing on fentanyl.
Day by day, Kyle strung together his longest consecutive stretch without using drugs while working toward becoming a San Francisco firefighter. He hoped to help others suffering with addiction.
'Instead of being afraid all the time of losing him, I had a little over a year to just be so proud of him and enjoy watching him succeed,' said his mom, Tracy Emerson.
But just days after completing his EMT training program, Kyle failed to show up for work at the Petaluma eatery Lunchette, where many community members knew and loved him. And within a matter of hours, officials confirmed the outcome that Tracy had long feared.
Kyle was found dead in the bathroom of a hotel in San Francisco's SoMa neighborhood, with a pipe and lighter in his hands, according to his mother. An official cause of death is not yet available, but Kyle's mom believes he fatally overdosed after booking a two-night hotel stay and going to the city to purchase drugs. Kyle's main drug of choice was crack cocaine, but he had also overdosed on the powerful opioid fentanyl several times in the past, Tracy said.
Kyle's death — among the latest in an ongoing overdose crisis that claimed 637 lives in San Francisco last year — devastated his family and friends and left many questioning why someone who had such a strong support system around him and was on his way to achieving his dreams would return to using dangerous drugs. It also occurred amid a sustained debate about how best to address San Francisco's open-air drug markets and whether the city's policies toward drug consumption are too lenient.
An estimated 1 in 10 Americans, or more than 22 million adults in the U.S., have recovered from an addiction, according to the Massachusetts-based organization Recovery Research Institute.
But reaching long-term addiction recovery is notoriously difficult and it's not unusual for someone to relapse — even after achieving major accomplishments, said Keith Humphreys, an addiction researcher and professor of psychiatry at Stanford University.
'Addiction really is a chronic disease,' Humphreys said. 'A person's brain adapts to the repeated administration of these drugs, and when someone stops using, the amount of effort they have to expend not to think about or use that drug is much greater. Their ability to enjoy other kinds of rewards that are not associated with drugs are also weaker.'
The tragedy with fentanyl, he added, is that a person could die after returning to use one time.
About three weeks before Kyle's death, his Alcoholics Anonymous sponsor, Jonathan Parkhurst, said Kyle stopped calling and checking in. Based on Parkhurst's own experience, he grew concerned.
'There's a phrase we use in AA: 'Don't let the life AA gives you get in the way of your AA life,'' Parkhurst said. 'I think that's what happened to Kyle. He got his EMT license, got everything that he wanted, and he still relapsed.'
Parkhurst, who has been in recovery for more than 20 years, was a former drug user on the streets of San Francisco. He said a handful of times he quit using drugs and got a job, only to relapse and wind up on the streets or in jail again.
When Parkhurst heard about Kyle's death, he was heartbroken.
'I saw a lot of myself in him,' Parkhurst said. 'I'm sure he thought he could use that day and come home and he'd deal with the consequences later. But that's not the case. These drugs are deadly.'
Addiction ran in Kyle's family. Tracy is in recovery from alcoholism and Kyle's father has long struggled with drug and alcohol addiction. Kyle became dependent on marijuana in high school, and in the years that followed, he experimented with a variety of other drugs, including ecstasy, heroin, crack and fentanyl.
Tracy said her son's struggles with addiction took a turn for the worse about eight years ago, when a man who she sponsored through Alcoholics Anonymous took Kyle to downtown San Francisco and showed him how to buy drugs on the streets.
As Tracy has worked to process her grief over the past month and a half, she said she's grown angry with San Francisco and the way it has handled its drug and homelessness crises.
'Just knowing that someone like Kyle could get on a bus and go get any drugs that they want is terrifying,' she said. 'I just don't feel like there are enough penalties for drug dealers. I feel like they should face attempted homicide or something.'
A few prosecutors in California have begun to charge fentanyl dealers with homicides. San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins has warned that her office would pursue homicide charges against dealers whose sales result in a death, but to date no such charges have been filed. Still, since Jenkins took office in 2022, felony drug convictions have dramatically increased.
Jenkins said in a statement that she remains committed to 'doing everything possible to hold drug dealers accountable, including filing murder charges… if presented with a provable case.'
At a memorial for Kyle last weekend, community members from across Petaluma came out to pay their respects. Most remembered Kyle not for the way he died but for the bright smile he offered to customers at Lunchette and the Griffo Distillery, the other place he worked. They recalled the compassion and empathy he showed friends and strangers alike.
'I don't want to reduce all this work he'd done and the person that he was to the word 'overdose,'' said Kat Prescott, the manager at Griffo. 'He was so much more than that.'
Holding back tears as she spoke in front of the group, Tracy implored everyone in attendance to have less judgement against people experiencing addiction and to 'turn their grief into purpose.'
'Unfortunately most of us will never know of our impact until our life review on the other side,' Tracy said. 'But I want to encourage everyone to pick up where Kyle left off and to share our goodness, our compassion, our love, our hearts with one another in whatever capacity we are able.'
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