I met Donny Treadwell in August of 2024 while looking for people to interview about living on the streets in Springfield. We spoke several times, and on four of those occasions I was able to interview him at length. After trying to connect with him again, I learned he froze to death while living outside this winter.
Treadwell, 58, was in a wheelchair by the time I met him. But he had previously been a foreman on a union electrician job, laying fiber-optic cables along hundreds of miles of railroad. He had two work-related injuries that resulted in surgeries, and the second one put him out of work forever.
Treadwell was injured in the early 2000s, when Oxycontin – the drug that kicked off the opioid epidemic – was being over-prescribed. Treadwell had never heard of the drug until he was one of the many given a prescription.
“I was put on so much medication that my doctor needs his ass kicked, because I wasn’t one for taking medication anyway. I was never told how it worked,” he told me during one of our interviews.
Donny wasn’t used to sitting around, and the chronic pain changed his outlook on life.
“I thank God for (the life) he gave me, but I didn’t ask for any more, you know? And I was just like, if you want to end it today, I could be OK with it,” he said.
He was quickly dependent on the prescribed medication, even as it became less helpful.
“It stopped being about the pain … whether I wanted to take it or not, my body had to have it,” Treadwell said. “I no longer had any say in the matter. It was just a straight, full-blown addiction. And it cost me everything.”
One time his medication was stolen, and he went into withdrawal.
“At that point, I was ready to die. I actually welcomed it,” he said. A friend offered to take Treadwell to a dealer to buy pills. After a long drive, Treadwell realized that there were no pills. It was heroin being sold.
Treadwell refused at first, but his friend convinced him it would help.
“For the first time in I don’t know how many years, my pain was completely, completely gone,” Treadwell said.
And with that, he started down the path of seeking illicit drugs in order to fill the hole that Oxycontin left. After a two-year prison sentence for his middleman role in a minor drug deal, Treadwell’s housing situation became more fleeting.
Treadwell told me that as a kid, his father abused him and his mother. Treadwell would sleep in his mother’s bed to try to protect her. He said that meant he reacted violently to being startled awake. It made staying in a shelter impossible.
The last time I interviewed Treadwell, in November, he told me he was making progress through a program at Washington Street Mission.
He was slated to get into an apartment Jan. 23 through a rapid rehousing program. According to the coroner’s report, he died of hypothermia on Jan. 21 after being found unresponsive outside of St. John’s Breadline. Temperatures that night had dipped down to negative 6 degrees Fahrenheit.
Treadwell isn’t the only person that has already died in Springfield this year as a direct result of being homeless. A few days before his death, Cory Beebe, 37, died as a result of a fire in an abandoned house that happened during freezing temperatures.
Steve Ohr is the pastor at Washington Steet Mission, a religious nonprofit providing social services. He knows of four people experiencing homelessness who have died so far this year and said he has performed memorial services for many members of the homeless community.
“We have a lot of death going on, and as the pastor here, I want people to know that people still love them,” Ohr said. “It helps keep me humble because in my alcoholism and addiction, I could have been one of those folks.”
Like both Ohr and Treadwell, I have experienced substance-use disorder, and I was homeless for three years. I am lucky enough to have survived countless overdoses. There’s nothing that differentiates me from anyone living on the streets, and to help these people survive we need to give them as many chances as they need to recover.
“So many people out here on these streets feel like nobody cares about them,” said Ohr. “One of the most important things is to let them know that they do not have to fight this alone.”
As Treadwell also told me, “That’s definitely a big thing. Seeing that you’re not alone, you know?”
Homelessness takes a deadly toll on members of our community. According to the Illinois Department of Public Health, people experiencing homelessness die nearly 20 years younger than the overall population on average.
The more housing we can make available and the more we can accept people like Treadwell as members of our community deserving of dignity, the better their chances of survival.
“I met some really good people out here that had a lot of hardship fall on them, and not by their own hands,” said Treadwell.
Keegan Otwell is active in Springfield’s recovery community, and he writes about his experiences with homelessness and addiction at nowherepod.substack.com/podcast. The full series of interviews with Donny is available on the podcast.
This article appears in Young offenders in Illinois still serving life sentences.
