Oct 29, 2017 5 min read

Sandy Kotwica doesn’t make it through a morning without thinking about her son, Carl “Chip” Kotwica.

“I wake up, and it could be a beautiful day, and I’ll get out of bed, see the sunshine and think, ‘It’s going to be a beautiful day,'” said Kotwica, of Imperial. “And then it hits me. Chip is gone.”

Chip Kotwica died of a heroin overdose on September 19, 2012. He was 30.

Blindsided by her son’s death, Kotwica almost immediately made it her mission to help other families avoid the torment she has endured.

For the past five years, Kotwica has worked doggedly to educate students, parents and lawmakers about the dangers of opioids through her work with the Washington County District Attorney Office and, most recently, the DA office’s Washington County Opioid Overdose Prevention Coalition.

“I don’t want another mother to go through what I’ve gone through. I find the thing that helps me cope with all of it is trying to help others,” said Kotwica. “If what I do can help save even one life, then I will feel like something positive will come out of sharing Chip’s story.”

Growing up, Chip was a good student and athlete, doted on by his mother and two older sisters.

He played football and basketball, and enjoyed hunting and golfing.

“At home, he was happy. He joked a lot. He was a great kid,” said Kotwica.

After graduating from Bishop Canevin High School, Chip received a degree in electronic engineering from Pittsburgh Technical Institute.

He landed a job at an engineering company in Pittsburgh and purchased a house.

But Chip had suffered a neck injury playing football years before, and he became addicted to opioids after he was prescribed Oxycontin by a doctor.

After he was arrested in Bridgeville for possession of a controlled substance, Chip spent 70 days in Washington County Jail, where an outstanding warrant had been issued for a DUI incident.

Kotwica was shocked when she found out her son was addicted to heroin.

“I’m really not sure how long he was using heroin,” said Kotwica, who suspected Chip was using marijuana. “I would say it was long enough for him to become a totally different person. He was no longer the son I knew. He was extremely thin. His nose ran. He distanced himself.”

But she was hopeful he would remain clean after he got out of jail.

“He got clean, and he stayed clean, but all it takes is one time, and that one time is the one time that killed him,” said Kotwica.

The week before he died, Chip went shopping with his mother and niece to buy a suit for him to wear to a cousin’s wedding in Chicago. They picked up the suit, went out to dinner, and then Sandy Kotwica dropped him off at his home.

“We had so much fun. I brought him home and kissed him goodbye,” she said. “Later, I texted him a couple of times and there was no answer, but I knew he’d been working. He was busy working for his dad and busy getting his life back together.”

Days before the wedding, Kotwica received a phone call that Chip hadn’t shown up at work for three days.

She drove to her son’s house and found his body in the living room with a tourniquet tied around his arm.

About three months after Chip died, a flier advertising a drug awareness program at Burgettstown High School arrived at Kotwica’s flower shop, Lily’s a Flower Boutique, in Burgettstown.

Kotwica contacted the Washington County District Attorney office and offered to share her story with students.

“She’s a phenomenal person,” said District Attorney Gene Vittone. “Here is this woman who lost her son three months ago, and she wants to come in to talk. Boy, did she make an impact on the kids. You could hear people crying and sniffling when she was talking. The thing that is most incredible about her is her strength and her ability to deliver that talk again and again. She wants kids to be safe, she wants them to make good choices, and she wants them to learn from her tragedy so their parents don’t go through the same suffering.”

Kotwica doesn’t pull any punches when she describes her son’s death during her talks.

“Basically, I tell Chip’s story and how he grew up, and that he had a good home, that he didn’t have any deep-seated problems as a reason to turn to drugs. And I tell them of his incarceration and of his eventual death, and I very graphically tell them what I found and my reaction to what I found,” she said.

In addition to her work with the county opioid overdose prevention coalition, Kotwica was selected to serve on the FBI Pittsburgh Citizens Academy Alumni Association’s HOPE (Heroin Outreach Prevention and Education) Initiative, which is working to form and implement proactive solutions to the opioid abuse epidemic.

Since Chip’s death, Kotwica has spent long hours learning as much as she can about opioid addiction, talking with other families who have lost children to prescription drugs, working to prevent opioid addiction and encouraging rehabilitation.

“Instead of spending money on incarceration, let’s put it toward rehabilitation,” she said.

After Chip died, Kotwica wrote a poem.

It reads, in part:

“He was my child. He made my life circle complete. Yes, he was an addict. Yes, he made a bad decision. We all have. Even you … There but for the grace of God goes you. Or your child. And, yes, it can happen to you.

“You don’t need to like the situation, you don’t need to agree that addiction is a horrific disease. But please, show compassion and understanding. They are someone’s child, not worthless, not a degenerate, not just another addict. I know, because he was my child.”