Triggering A Recovery Shooting Leads To Tribal Member’S Drug Rehab Efforts

John Mahoney, rail-thin from a lifetime of drug and alcohol abuse, had enough of the big guy he’d been arguing with at an all-night party. He leaned back in his chair, pulled out a .380-caliber pistol and shot Randall Eller in the knee, severing an artery.

“Then I stood over him and shot, blam-blam-blam. I shot him in what I thought was the chest,” Mahoney recalls. “I didn’t even see the glass-topped coffee table he was under.”

The bullets ricocheted.

Just as dramatically, Mahoney’s life has sped in a different direction.

He hasn’t had a drink or used drugs since that party in April 1996, he says. His parole officer brags about him. His drug counselor considers him a spiritual adviser. His goal in life has become helping other addicts turn their lives around - anyone who needs help, but especially people who, like himself, belong to the Coeur d’Alene Indian Tribe.

He’s starting a nonprofit organization called Phoenix Rising. With the cooperation of Port of Hope, a Coeur d’Alene rehabilitation center, he leads weekly support sessions and sweat lodge healing ceremonies in Plummer.

Mahoney’s goal is to establish a haven on the Coeur d’Alene Reservation where people recovering from addictions could go after their release from prison or treatment programs. They’d have clean beds in a supportive atmosphere, away from old friends and habits. They would learn job skills and express themselves with Native American arts and crafts.

Without that kind of help, it’s tough to break the cycle of drug use and prison time. He sees a lot of people who are trapped.

“One’s been out three weeks and he’s been arrested three times. He’ll soon go back, or he’ll be dead,” Mahoney says.

The brown eagle feather is passed around the conference room at the tribal Wellness Center. It is shaking in the hands of a young man at the weekly Phoenix Rising meeting. He says he tried to kill himself with an overdose of Valium. He’d been out on parole, and clean, before returning to his old ways. He knows he has to deal with his addiction one day at a time. “For me, it’s down to one minute at a time.”

Mahoney reminds people constantly that the journey toward recovery starts from within. “There isn’t anything on the outside that will fix you.”

He’s 50 now. He was 46 when he accepted his cousin’s invitation to that party in Worley, which led to his conviction for assault with intent to commit second-degree murder.

“I weighed about 126 pounds. I was doing a lot of crank (meth), weed and whiskey. I’d destroyed and given away everything that meant anything to me.”

Mahoney was sentenced to four years in federal prison in Texas, where he took every drug and alcohol treatment program he could. But his recovery began that first night after the shooting, when he found himself locked up in the Kootenai County jail.

“The Holy Spirit just came over me.”

Mahoney’s chants fill the sweat lodge along with steam and the pungent scents of sweetgrass, cedar, sage and tobacco. Inside this dome, created with bent branches and old blankets, a dozen people have gathered to pray to Grandfather, the spirit. Some are Indians, some are not. Their sweat falls like rain on the dirt floor. Mahoney breaks from the native-language songs and begins another. “Our Father,” he sings, “who art in heaven …”

Like many Coeur d’Alenes, Mahoney was raised a Catholic. He also learned traditional spiritualism.

“It created a lot of confusion for a lot of years,” he says. “Today I’m comfortable fitting in both worlds.”

As a youngster, he was also confused by his status as a “breed” - son of an Irish man from New York and a Coeur d’Alene woman. His father was a miner, a carpenter, a janitor. A drinker.

“My dad died in a skid row hotel in Spokane of alcoholism. He’d just turned 50.”

Mahoney had seven brothers and sisters. He brags of the accomplishments of his four surviving siblings, all business and professional people. He was different, he said, and no one could have straightened him out as a teenager. “I was too angry. I was still in a state of mind of blaming everything and everybody but myself.”

He dropped out of high school in 1968, joined the Army, was sent to Vietnam. “I got back in the country and didn’t want to play soldier anymore. I got into some armed robberies.”

He was convicted and spent three years in the Oregon State Penitentiary. After his release in 1973, he married. It lasted 19 years, produced a son and daughter. “It wasn’t a happy marriage,” he says. “I wasn’t there emotionally. I didn’t know what parenting was.”

On Oct. 3, 1990, he stopped denying his addictions. He was sober for the next 22 months. Then a romantic relationship, which produced another son, went sour. Mahoney resumed drinking, drugging, depression.

“I don’t know how John does it. He takes on everybody’s problems,” says a friend from the reservation who’s come to lead the sweat lodge ceremony. In the darkness of the lodge, as in the brightness of the tribal Wellness Center conference room, the stories are repeated every week. “I’m 19. I have one kid and another on the way. I’ve used drugs for 11 years.” … “I haven’t drank for 104 days” … “I’m a two-time felon. My sobriety means a lot to me.”

The penitentiary offered Mahoney plenty of chances to backslide. “I could have had anything I wanted. Home brew. Whiskey from the outside. Marijuana. Believe me, I was offered a lot. But after a while, people left me alone.”

Fourteen months into his sentence, he was transferred to a low-security prison so he could participate in a comprehensive, 500-hour drug treatment program.

“It’s very difficult to get into the program,” says Richard Gaylor, federal probation officer for the Coeur d’Alene and Nez Perce reservations. “If you complete that, you get a certain amount of good time credited.”

Mahoney got six months shaved off his four-year sentence. He was released from prison to the Port of Hope, where he spent six months.

“For the first six weeks, I wanted to go back (to prison),” he says. “I didn’t want to be around a lot of addicts and alcoholics, just off the street, and deal with the chaos.”

Toward the end of his time in Coeur d’Alene, Mahoney told counselor Clay Simpson about his dream of providing a recovery system for people coming out of institutions. Simpson was excited by the idea. Once Mahoney was back in Plummer last fall, the tribal Wellness Center agreed to let the men hold support meetings on Tuesday evenings.

They put up posters to spread the word. For weeks, no one showed up.

Then Simpson got permission to bring Port of Hope residents to Plummer for the meetings. Word got around the tribe. People started coming up from the Nez Perce Reservation, too. Now it’s common to have 15 or more people.

“The next step is to form a nonprofit organization,” Simpson says. “The broad vision for Phoenix Rising involves teaching life skills in a vocational compound, a transitional center.”

To show the need for a facility, Simpson notes that nine people from federal prisons started supervised probation at the Port of Hope last October. Eight of them are back in an institution he says. “We call it the `three and nine.’ Three months out, nine months in. Sometimes it’s three hours out.”

Mahoney insisted on including spirituality in the program, as Alcoholics Anonymous has always done. “Not religion, but spirituality,” Simpson says. “This is a very deep, spiritual man.”

Simpson says he and Mahoney have benefited greatly from their relationship. “He’s a wonderful mentor for me.”

Mahoney says his own mentor is his partner, Ellen, whom he met when she worked at Port of Hope. They share a 22-foot travel trailer home, a dog and a strong belief in Phoenix Rising.

Ellen asks that her last name not be published, because of potential harassment from a previous partner. She’s especially eager to see a transitional center that would be a refuge for women and children in danger. It was she who came up with the name of the program, based on the mythical bird that destroyed itself by fire then arose from its ashes.

Mahoney would like to devote all of his time to native arts and crafts and to Phoenix Rising. He’s worked at his brother’s convenience store and is now selling fireworks, earning money to pay off his $19,241 court-ordered restitution. He’ll remain on supervised release until October 2002.

He’s come a long way from the night when, in his drunken rage, he threatened to kill the bleeding Randall Hancock Eller III if he got up off the floor. The victim, then a Spokane resident, could not be located last week.

“I deeply regret what happened,” Mahoney says. “I pray for the man.”

He can’t envision going back to a life of addiction, he says. Forced to choose between “a bag of dope, a bottle of whiskey and a pistol,” he’d choose the gun and turn it on himself.

“There’s no wasting time,” he says. “This is about life and death.”

This sidebar appeared with the story: Phoenix Rising

For more information about Phoenix Rising, contact Clay Simpson at the Port of Hope in Coeur d’Alene, 208-664-3300.