GREENFIELD — The mix of rain and sleet that buffeted Daniel Herlocker’s car the night of Dec. 9, 2014, was no match for the tears that streamed from his eyes as he made his way slowly home from Greenfield to Brattleboro, Vt.

Earlier that night, he’d received a call from his then-employer, Baystate Franklin Medical Center, where he’d been working as a per-diem nurse in the Intensive Care Unit and surgery floors.

“Daniel, we need you to come down to the hospital,” the ICU nurse manager had told him over the phone. “We have something we need to talk to you about. It’s very important.”

About an hour later, he sat in a room with his managers, pharmacist, and hospital security guards, where he readily admitted what he’d done.

For the past three months, he’d been secretly diverting morphine and Dilaudid, two powerful opioid painkillers, from the hospital’s automated drug dispensers and replacing them with saline solution, to be dispensed to patients.

When they asked if he’d been selling the drugs, Herlocker was stunned.

“No, no — oh, no,” he said, and pulled up his sleeves to reveal a series of needle marks. “I used those. They were for me.”

In January, Herlocker, 41, pleaded guilty to multiple charges of acquiring hydromorphone through deception or subterfuge, in Springfield’s U.S. District Court. He returned March 31 for sentencing, and was jailed for a week while the judge contemplated his punishment. Thursday, he returned to court to hear his fate.

When the hearing concluded, Judge Mark Mastroianni sentenced him to two years’ probation. The sentence was less severe than recommended by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the plea agreement, but taking the deal allowed him to avoid further jail time.

But Herlocker isn’t the stereotypical drug addict. Though he admits he carried a bit of the image, sporting a full head of dreadlocks up until the moment he decided to quit drugs, he’d been a nurse with a passion for helping people in their most vulnerable hours for over a decade. He’s also the co-founder of Inshuti of Rwanda, a charity he started with his wife, that’s been building homes for the poor in the African country for the past three years. Once, he’d been pursuing a degree in theology with hopes of becoming a youth pastor.

How had it all gone so wrong?

He said his descent into substance abuse and the addiction that destroyed so much of what he had built began slowly and subtly, with a tiny pill.

The downward spiral

Music has always been one of Herlocker’s passions, as evidenced by the acoustic guitar laid across his sofa and the framed concert posters on the walls of his Brattleboro home, where he spoke with a Recorder reporter earlier this year while awaiting sentencing. A good portion of the Maryland native’s early 20s were spent traveling and listening to music with close friends, he said, and he continued to love going to concerts.

“I definitely enjoyed music,” he said. “Traveling around and listening to music was a big part of my upbringing, but I have to say, unfortunately, that it kind of introduced me to the world of substances. They tied together.”

It was at a concert in the summer of 2014 that he took a pill offered to him. That, he said, “laid the groundwork” for his addiction. He wasn’t sure what that pill was, but he did know the opioid inside made him feel great, that it fulfilled some longing deep within.

Herlocker had dabbled in opioids before then, and before that had used alcohol and marijuana. When a friend had knee surgery in the early 2000s, he said, the doctor prescribed three refills of 80 Vicodin each.

“This is when pills were first being prescribed, and they didn’t think stuff like OxyContin was addictive,” he said. “That’s a large, stupid amount of pills. But I started taking them with him, and at first we were like, ‘That’s kind of fun.’”

When the first batch of pills was gone, though, Herlocker said he and his friend decided they’d had enough. Both sensed the potential for becoming dependent.

“After that first prescription, we both looked at each other and I said, ‘Do you actually need that?’ and he said, ‘No, not really,’” Herlocker said. “So I said, ‘Then don’t fill them, man.”

Herlocker stayed away from opioids for years after that. He went to nursing school in 2004, and the next time he took them was for an injury to one of his fingers about a decade later.

At the concert, Herlocker said it hadn’t crossed his mind that the pill he was offered could be the same as the ones he’d taken recreationally 13 years prior.

“When I was at those concerts, I was basically on vacation. I was in the moment. And when I came back, my body wasn’t addicted yet. I wasn’t having withdrawals, but my mind said, ‘Oh that was nice. That was really cool,’” he said. “That’s where it started.”

Diversion

Herlocker kept taking pills recreationally after that, buying them on the street or from people he knew, the quantity and frequency growing, until he said he felt the urge to steal opioids from work to fuel his addiction.

He said it felt as if a switch had been flipped in his head. One moment, he was walking down the hospital hallway, and in the next, his head seemed to have been yanked to one side, carrying the rest of his body with it, toward the drugs.

“My mind just — flipped — and I really craved it,” he said. “It didn’t make any sense. Out of nowhere, it was like I thought, ‘That would be really nice.’”

He remembered thinking that the notion was absurd at the time. “‘Nope, not going to do that. That’s crazy, dude,’ I told myself.” But then, he did it. “It — ate at my brain for the rest of the night.”

And then he did it again, a couple weeks later.

“It just happened. But once it did, it was full-blown. There’s no other way to describe it,” he said of his addiction. “Even then it wasn’t that extreme, but it was strong enough that it got me to do it once. Once I did it, it was just — I was already addicted.”

To extract the drugs, he stole syringes from the hospital, and filled them from drug vials. To cover up his theft, he smeared Krazy Glue over the hole in the container’s packaging, according to court testimony. He said he didn’t get high at work — that came later, in private.

Herlocker said he became very good at hiding his diversion and drug use. Court testimony revealed that he would use his personal password to gain access to the machine, take the drugs, and replace them with saline solution using a syringe. Speaking on Herlocker’s behalf, Thomas T. Merrigan, his attorney, told Mastroianni during the sentencing hearing that patients still received some level of pain medication, since he diluted the drug and did not remove all of it.

Still, Mastroianni questioned his methods and whether a person who was operating under the lack of judgment that his addiction brought on could have ensured that the needle remained clean and no foreign substances had been put into a patient’s system. Even if no direct harm had been done, he said, reducing the patient’s prescribed dose still carried the risk of increasing their pain, and he defined that as harm.

A spokesman for Baystate Health told The Recorder in January that the hospital had found no evidence of such contamination, but could not be sure because Herlocker’s actions were not logged or tracked. They came to light after other hospital workers noticed “red flags” that indicated theft.

Most of his friends didn’t know he’d become addicted, nor did his wife, even when he suffered withdrawals as he attempted to become sober shortly before he was found out.

“I was a highly functional addict. I really held it together pretty well until all of a sudden, I didn’t. Then, it got really out of hand,” he said. “My nurse brain tried to rationalize it. ‘You’re using a sterile procedure, you’re doing this, you’re doing that. You’re being safe, it’s pharmaceutical grade, so you’re not a street-drug user.’ Those weird rationalizations that go through your brain as you are stealing drugs and injecting them into your body. It was a full-time job (to keep it hidden.)”

For three months, he continued to steal drugs. Sometimes, he resisted and didn’t follow through with the theft. He estimated that was about half the time. All the while, he was working to nurse some of his patients who had come to the hospital either seeking help with their own addictions or suffering from overdoses. What he had become was right in front of him, he said, and he couldn’t even realize it.

“I saw those people come in every day and I had so much sympathy for them,” he said. “Through it all, I didn’t realize (I was an addict). It was really surreal.”

Eventually, he found himself using the drugs not to get high, but to ward off the effects of withdrawal, such as vomiting, diarrhea and fever. It took an arrest in 2014 for drunken driving for Herlocker to realize the extent of his problem. He resolved to become sober and put himself through the withdrawals, effectively becoming his own nurse, he said.

“By then, I’d reached a really dark place with incredible shame, incredible regret. I had just gone down a really bad path.” Herlocker said. “I was sober before (the hospital) found out.”

But the damage had already been done. Herlocker lost his career. His wife didn’t leave him initially and worked to help him achieve recovery, he said, but the strain on their relationship eventually proved too much, and they separated. He faced multiple federal felony charges. He said he thought every day about the patients that he may have put in harm’s way through possible contamination or infection.

“The fallout from the last 15 months — just awful. (Opioids) ruined me. They ruined what I had,” he told The Recorder in early February. “In some ways I’m extremely glad that I’m not using anymore. That’s the one saving grace in all this. Now the biggest thing is for me to find out how to move on.”

Recovery

On a warm Wednesday afternoon in March, just a day before he was to be sentenced, Herlocker sat on a tweed couch in the top-floor room of an old Brattleboro church. Around the pale yellow room, men and women sat in wooden chairs, young and old, from all walks of life.

Most of them were alcoholics, but many were also addicted to other substances. Some had been ordered to attend by a judge. Others, like himself, had sought out the gathering themselves. It was “High Noon,” one of the area’s daily Alcoholics Anonymous meetings — one of the many tools Herlocker uses to keep himself clean.

Herlocker said he began attending the meetings in November of 2014, just before he was caught, while still in withdrawal, and that the solidarity he found there has helped him maintain his sobriety.

“I walked into that first meeting, and I was sick as a dog. But everyone in that room turned and looked at me, and it was like, ‘I get it, brother. You’re hurting,’” he said. “It’s so helpful because it makes you realize you’re not the only one out there whose brain has been hijacked by a substance.”

Now over a year clean, Herlocker regularly attends those meetings up to four times a week. Prior to his sentencing, he was also in a state-run Substance Abuse Rehabilitation Program, or SARP, designed specifically for medical professionals battling addiction.

After his withdrawals had passed and he’d been caught, Herlocker was still relatively free until charges were filed against him, and he was able to take another three-month trip to Rwanda with his charity. It allowed him a chance to get out of the environment in which he’d been using drugs, which many experts consider crucial to maintaining one’s sobriety.

“I think that kind of saved me,” he said. “I was completely stone-sober that whole time, and it gave me a chance to get out of western society.”

With his entry into the five-year SARP program, Herlocker shifted into a more structured form of recovery. The program came with a slew of conditions: he must attend regular 12-step and peer support group meetings, submit to random drug and alcohol tests, keep meticulous medical records, take courses about substance abuse and regularly see a substance-abuse therapist.

But if participants complete the program, they get their nursing licenses back. The conditions of the plea deal now exclude him from that program, but he continues to attend the peer group portion and see his counselor.

“I was offered the ability to go to the program and I took it willingly. I needed help,” he said.

Outside formal treatment, Herlocker said, he uses mindfulness meditation and other techniques to maintain his sobriety. He avoids situations or events associated with substance use, and he hopes to enroll in a vocational retraining program in case his options for returning to nursing are limited.

He also tries to actively help other people with substance-abuse problems. Doing that work, which includes his charitable efforts in Africa, helps him begin to “feel worthy, to love himself,” again “through loving others,” he said.

“Reaching out to someone who is doing worse than you, not only are you helping them, but you’re helping yourself be worthy to that person,” he said. “As an addict, you take drugs, take people’s trust, you just take, take, take. You have to turn around and give, give, give. It’s a good testament to show that I’m 14, 15 months out from doing any opiates. So there’s a chance to get your brain back.”

Consequences

For the most part, Herlocker was fortunate to receive the plea deal he did. Under the charges, he could have been locked up for eight years and forced to pay a $500,000 fine, the maximum penalty, since concealing his theft made his crimes federal felonies.

Since he quickly admitted to his addiction-fueled deeds, the U.S. Attorney’s Office recommended three years’ probation with the condition that he lose his nursing license for three years.

“The proposed sentence recognizes the defendant’s struggle with drug addiction, and his swift admission and cooperation in the investigation, the steps he has taken to address his drug addiction, and his history of working for the benefit of those less privileged,” the office’s sentencing memo reads. “The government believes the defendant has the potential to be a productive member of the community who has learned through his mistakes.”

Mastroianni opted to reduce even that, shaving a year off the probation, but adding the week in jail. He decided to not levy a fine, since he did not want to take away funds that could be used to benefit Inshuti of Rwanda, he said.

He’ll be required to attend drug counseling, and submit to random drug screenings. He’ll also have to lose his nursing license, excluding him from most of the SARP program.

Still, Merrigan said Herlocker’s deal represents the most lenient punishment in light of what he did.

“It’s an acknowledgement that this is a byproduct of addiction,” he said.

He said Herlocker is doing well in recovery, and he is confident that losing his opportunity to officially continue in SARP will not be a threat to his sobriety. Many of the conditions of that program that are designed to ensure accountability are still part of his probationary conditions.

Next steps

Herlocker now makes his living as an exterior/interior painter. He plans to continue his recovery activities for the foreseeable future, and hopes they’ll one day help him regain his nursing career. He can reapply for his license in three years.

“I loved being a nurse. I really did, and my addiction wasn’t supposed to be a part of that,” he said. “Even though it will be three years before I can apply for a license again, I know it’s my calling. I’m just hoping that when the time comes that someone will give me a second chance.”

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