CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Camelia Carter spent the final weeks of her 25-year-old son Rusty James "R.J." Parker's life hiding in bushes and knocking on doors of drug houses across Cleveland's southwest side.
He disappeared in early May.
"I hunted him like an animal for 17 days," she said.
The hunt ended on May 29, when Parker took a lethal combination of heroin and fentanyl in a house in Cleveland's Bellaire neighborhood.
He was rushed to the emergency room from the house, but he was already dead.
He left behind a 2-year-old son.
Parker is one of more than 300 people who died this year from an overdose of heroin, fentanyl or a combination of the two in Cuyahoga County. The surge in deaths is likely to double 2015's death toll and has left public health officials, law enforcement and grieving families struggling to come to grips with one of the deadliest drug epidemics in decades.
When Parker was a boy, he dreamed of becoming pilot and flying his mother, who worked as a photographer, to shoot weddings across the country, she said.
They used to dream of hitting the lottery, and would drive the backroads on the way home from Carter's jobs to search for small, out of the way places to buy tickets.
"It's always the small-town, little store that wins the lotto," she said.
Carter's erratic schedule meant she relied on babysitters to watch her son some nights while she photographed weddings. She suspects that some of the babysitters openly used drugs, including marijuana and crack cocaine, in front of her son.
Carter doesn't know when her own son started using drugs, but said as a teenager he became rebellious. The rebellion turned to violence.
He struggled with family and identity issues, and was diagnosed with dyslexia, and dropped out of school when he was 16 years old. He eventually moved in with his grandparents.
That's when his troubles with the law began. In 2009, at the age of 19, he was busted for underage drinking by Medina police.
A year later he pleaded guilty to robbery and assaulting a police officer. Carter suspects her son was already drugs by the time this happened. He spent two years in prison and was paroled.
He was arrested again in 2014, and pleaded guilty to burglary. But a judge sentenced him the Nancy McDonnell Community Based Correctional Facility, which offers treatment, job training and other services to low-level, nonviolent offenders.
He was eventually kicked out after he was caught using drugs in the facility.
Parker spent the next year struggling to get clean while on house arrest. In February, after he was sober and stayed out of trouble for eight months, Parker's probation officer talked about releasing Parker from probation for good behavior, Carter said.
He went to court on May 9, but the judge was in the middle of a trial and had to postpone Parker's hearing, according to court records.
Parker went to Carter's house that afternoon and cradled his son.
"He was acting like he was never going to see [his son] again," Carter said.
It was the last time Carter saw her son alive.
She suspected that he was selling clothes on Craigslist, so she replied to postings and set up a time to meet to try to catch him. She went to motels across the West Side of Cleveland and in Brook Park. She knocked on doors of drug houses on Fulton and Denison roads.
He had disappeared for a few days before, usually when he relapsed, and she knew where he usually went to use drugs.
But this time, she never found him.
In the four months since her son's death, Carter has learned about the heroin epidemic choking the nation.
Carter has a plan that she hopes lawmakers will hear. She started an online petition for Ohio Gov. John Kasich to declare a state of emergency over the heroin epidemic, and is calling on lawmakers to use some of the state's $2 billion rainy day fund to expand treatment options.
"We have to treat this like the crisis that it is," she said. "Or else we're going to lose an entire generation."