Laura Lane and Abby Tonsing, Herald-Times
Toward the end, Steve Tafoya grabbed his daughter Dominique’s track-marked arm as she walked past. “That’s what’s gonna kill you,” he screamed. “Right there.”
She pulled away with promises he had heard before. “I’m not using as much. You’ve got to believe me. I’m giving it up.”
She didn’t.
Four days before Halloween in 2015, her parents got the call. There’s a hesitation, a wisp of fear and apprehension, when the phone rings at 5 a.m.
Dominique Tafoya was dead from a heroin overdose at 19. Medics had tried to revive her there in her dad’s pickup parked behind the church she had attended most all her life. They found the orange plastic cap from a hypodermic needle on the floorboard.
Greene County Sheriff’s Department dispatchers got a call at 3:04 that morning. Dominique and her 32-year-old boyfriend had purchased a tenth of a gram of heroin, a standard dose, from a dealer in the parking lot at the Walmart in Bloomington around midnight. They prepared and injected the heroin in the truck, tossed the needle they shared out the window and drove Steve Tafoya’s blue 1998 Dodge Ram to Solsberry Christian Church in eastern Greene County, a few miles from the house on Tulip Road where Dominique grew up, where her parents and younger sister were sleeping.
The boyfriend told police he and Dominique passed out and that when he awoke, she was unconscious in the driver’s seat. Her cellphone battery was dead, so he ran a mile to the home of his father, who called 911. They drove back to the church and tried to revive Dominique with CPR. Medics arrived from the nearby volunteer fire department. One of them was Don Thie, senior pastor at the church. He called youth minister Chad Stowers from the church parking lot about 3:30 a.m. “I’m on scene with Dominique. We found her unresponsive in a truck parked behind the church. Can you get to the hospital?”
Stowers arrived at Indiana University Health Bloomington Hospital at 4:30 on a rainy 50-degree morning. He said he was a pastor, looking for Dominique Tafoya, could they please direct him to her. Stowers prayed she was alive as a nurse offered coffee and took him to a small, quiet room with reclining chairs, a table, magazines, a box of tissues. He knows the room. It’s where they tell families the bad news. A doctor entered. “Dominique was here for an overdose in August and she survived,” the doctor said. “But unfortunately, this time, she did not.”
The hospital didn’t know how to contact her family. Stowers had Dominique’s stepmother’s number programmed in his cellphone. He called Jennifer Tafoya. “Why in the world would Chad be calling me so early in the morning?” she wondered.