Category: Personal Stories

Read the original story and listen to an audio version on the WHQR Public Media website.

Tina and Tom Johnson lost their daughter Brittany to a meth overdose in 2022. Nearly two years later, they’re still trying to find out what really happened — and secure justice for her. But they’ve hit some challenging roadblocks.

Since his daughter passed away nearly two years ago, Tom Johnson has felt like a man obsessed.

“I mean, all I think about is this. I mean, I can’t, you know, have any relief from it,” he told WHQR. “And she haunts me in my dreams.”

On December 26, 2022, he and his wife got devastating news: their daughter Brittany Johnson had died of a meth overdose. Brittany had been sober for 18 months, going through drug court in Brunswick County. She left behind a five-year-old daughter.

“She was just full of life,” said her mother Tina Johnson. “Loving life, loving her daughter, looking forward to overcoming all of her past mistakes.”

Brittany’s death came as a shock to her parents. In the months since her passing, they’ve been trying to understand the circumstances that led to her death. But the Johnsons say they’ve faced some roadblocks from the Brunswick County Sheriff’s Office as they try to understand what happened.

A tragedy, then questions

For Christmas 2022, the Johnsons had gone to the mountains with Brittany’s daughter Ava and the rest of the family. Brittany, who lived just down the road from her parents with her boyfriend, was supposed to join them, but called on Christmas Day saying she had been having car trouble. She said she would catch them back home in Supply.

Then, at 3:26 a.m., they got a call from Brittany’s boyfriend. The paramedics were at their house, trying to revive Brittany from an overdose.

“And then someone did confirm that she was actually dead,” Tina said.

The family immediately got up and drove back to the coast. When they got back to Supply six hours later, Brittany’s house stood empty. Law enforcement had already come and gone from the place, taking Brittany with them. According to the Johnsons, they wouldn’t see their daughter’s body for another four days.

“[The sheriff’s office] never called us, never. We had to call them,” said Tom.

“It’s not like TV,” Tina added.

In the days following her death, the Johnsons felt like the Brunswick County Sheriff’s Office did not do enough to properly investigate Brittany’s death. They couldn’t comprehend certain decisions the office made. For one, they didn’t understand why the sheriff’s office didn’t treat Brittany’s boyfriend, who was with her at the time of her death, as a suspect.

“We just wanted to know: why is this guy out of jail, and why is he going to a rehab?” Tom said. “They just simply said, ‘Oh, we’ve talked to [Brittany’s boyfriend].'”

Nor did they understand BCSO’s investigation of Brittany’s house. The sheriff’s office did find drugs in the house, and took some in as evidence. But upon getting back to Supply, the Johnsons found many other substances, along with needles and other paraphernalia, stashed throughout their daughter’s house.

“My son found some, you know, some jar of drugs,” said Tom. “There was a fully loaded needle. And a used needle.”

The Johnsons wanted to prosecute Brittany’s drug dealers through death by distribution. North Carolina’s death-by-distribution law passed in 2019. It criminalized the sale — and after the law was changed in 2023, any distribution — of drugs which later cause fatal overdoses.

So the Johnsons didn’t understand why the drugs they recovered from Brittany’s house were left behind. Couldn’t they serve as crucial evidence — as a way to identify her dealers?

They asked the sheriff’s office what to do with it all. The Johnsons told WHQR they were instructed to destroy everything.

“They didn’t want nothing to do with it,” Tina said.

It was around this time that the Johnsons hired their longtime friend Patti Hewett as a private investigator. Hewett had previously worked at BCSO. She was bewildered by their instructions to destroy the drugs.

“I have never — 30 years in law enforcement — I have never destroyed a drug like that or told anybody to destroy a drug,” Hewett told WHQR.

‘Turn around and go back. That car is bugged.’

And then, several months after Brittany passed, her mother found something strange.

Her parents still had Brittany’s Volkswagen Beetle. Brittany and her boyfriend had shared the car, which her parents had given to Brittany after she graduated from drug court. One day in March 2023, Tina was trying to connect her phone to the car’s Bluetooth speakers.

“I’m sitting in my driveway and I’m trying to figure out how to program my phone,” she said. “I’m looking down — it said Surveillance Unit 098. I’m like, ‘what the hell?'”

Her daughter’s car had a list of recently paired devices. One of them was named “BCSO Surveillance Unit 098.”

Tina was baffled.

“So I’m driving and I texted Patti [Hewett],” she said. “And I said, ‘you ain’t gonna believe this – this is what I found.’ And she’s like, ‘where are you?’ I said, ‘I’m right here,’ and she’s – ‘Turn around and go back. That car is bugged.’ I’m like ‘what?’ ‘Turn around!'”

The Johnsons searched the car from top to bottom, but found nothing. They didn’t know what to make of it. Was it a prank? Or was it something more serious — someone from the sheriff’s office monitoring Brittany’s whereabouts?

There was more. The Johnsons say BCSO examined Brittany’s phone and didn’t find anything concrete. But after Hewett examined the phone, she found a screenshot of Brittany’s settings dated November 8, 2022. It showed her phone pairing with that same Bluetooth device: BCSO Surveillance Unit 098.

The Johnsons began to wonder if Brittany had been a confidential informant, or if someone she was close to had been a confidential informant. It was hard to tell from what was on Brittany’s phone.

“It’s like Brittany doesn’t exist on that phone from November the 29th, 2022,” Hewett told WHQR. “Her pictures are gone. Everything’s gone off of that phone.”

One thing was for sure: the Johnsons felt like they could not trust the sheriff’s office.

Tense meetings

In spite of their doubts, the Johnsons still cooperated with law enforcement. In April 2023, they scheduled a meeting with District Attorney Jon David. The hope was that they could come up with a plan for prosecuting Brittany’s dealers.

Tom said the first meeting went well. David promised them he’d look into the circumstances of Brittany’s death, and set up a second meeting. This time, Hewett would come along to share information she had uncovered about Brittany’s dealers. So would Sheriff Brian Chism, who’d just been sworn in to replace longtime Sheriff John Ingram, and who the Johnsons hoped would offer some answers.

But when they met at the DA’s office in May, Chism was not there. In his stead were case investigator Kip Hester, deputy Tony Henson, and Glenn Emery, who serves as attorney for the Brunswick County Sheriff’s Office.

The Johnsons asked the sheriff’s office whether or not Brittany had been a confidential informant. According to them, the sheriff’s office said no, but would not answer questions about whether Brittany’s boyfriend, dealers, or other acquaintances had been confidential informants.

They also told the Johnsons they would not pursue death by distribution.

“I tried to be amicable with him in the meeting with John David,” said Tom. “I just tried to simply say, ‘I just want to know what happened. Here’s a little bit of what we have.'”

But Tina said after some back-and-forth, the sheriff’s representatives just left.

“Next thing I know, Tony Henson said, ‘Let’s go boys,’ got up and walked out of the meeting. They’d had enough,” she said. “They told Patti they’d had enough of the drama.”

Emery told WHQR that he was “not comfortable” commenting on his meetings with the Johnsons.

But in an email to WHQR, he did explain why the sheriff didn’t push for death by distribution charges.

“After a very thorough investigation,” he wrote, “there was no clear suspect and no clear sale of at least one controlled substance. Investigators were unable to determine where Brittany Johnson procured the Methamphetamine that caused her death, much less whether it was sold, traded, or simply given to her. This has been explained to the family on several occasions by the Sheriff’s Office and the District Attorney’s Office.”

Emery also addressed the Bluetooth pairing in Brittany’s car.

“I can assure you that the Brunswick County Sheriff’s Office had nothing to do with the pairing of any device to Brittany’s vehicle. Further, we offered to conduct a forensic analysis of the vehicle to attempt to provide the family with answers, but they declined our offer,” he wrote.

Tina said she rejected the offer for one simple reason — she didn’t trust BSCO. She thought they’d tamper with or remove the device.

“Kip Hester called me I think two days later and wanted to know if I would be willing to take that car to Carolina Beach Police Department for them to extract it,” she told WHQR. “And I said, ‘Let me think about that for a minute… No. And don’t call me ever again.'”

Emery did not respond to follow-up questions about BCSO’s instructions to destroy Brittany’s drugs, about his meetings with the Johnsons, or about any potential efforts by BCSO to secure justice by bringing in federal law enforcement to pursue U.S. death by distribution statutes.

Not just a number

The sheriff’s office closed the case on July 31st, 2023. But Tina told WHQR that has no bearing on her and her husband.

“If they think I’m gonna stop, I’m not. I’m not gonna,” she said.

On June 23, 2024, the Johnsons attended a meet-and-greet with Sheriff Chism hosted by the North Brunswick Republican Club. In an exchange recorded in a Facebook video, they stood up and started asking Chism about the investigation into Brittany’s death — specifically, about which elements of death by distribution Brittany’s case lacked. North Carolina’s death-by-distribution law changed in 2023, making it possible to prosecute not just dealers, but anyone sharing drugs which later caused fatal overdoses.

“To answer your questions, yes, the elements changed,” the sheriff said during the meet-and-greet. “Unfortunately, they don’t retro. We cannot go back. So before, when your incident happened, you had to prove a sale. We couldn’t do that.”

“It’s not an incident,” Tom responded. “It’s a death.”

Brittany’s case is, to be sure, a complex one. And with so many people dying of overdoses in eastern North Carolina, the Johnsons say it’s easy to see how a police force could let a case like theirs go.

“‘Oh, well, we’ll look into it.’ I never heard anything. Nothing. Because [Chism] didn’t care,” Tom said. “Anything about it… This is another drug addict dead? Who cares?”

“To the Brunswick County Sheriff’s Office, ODs just seem to be a number,” Hewett said.

But the Johnsons still want answers on how their daughter’s investigation was handled and why.

“I want them to tell us what they found. They said our daughter died of an overdose. Case closed. No elements of a crime,” Tina said. “Okay. Well, y’all were in that house for two and a half hours while she lay there. And you don’t know anything?”

Currently, the Johnsons are trying to obtain the district attorney’s 75-page investigative report into Brittany’s death. Emery told WHQR that they won’t show it to the Johnsons without a court order, saying the report does not count as a public record.

The Johnsons say they’ll do whatever it takes.

“We just want to know what happened to our girl,” Tina said.