CLEVELAND, Ohio -- A doctor gave a then-16-year-old Brandi Bradley her first prescription for pain pills in 1996 after she was diagnosed with chronic pain and depression following the birth of her first child.
"They prescribed her Vicodin, Xanax and Ambien," her sister Karrie Bradley said. "We're talking about a 16 year old."
Within a year, she was an addict. When doctors stopped prescribing her pills, she bought them on the street. When the street drugs became too expensive, she switched to heroin.
Two weeks after her son graduated from high school, on June 30, 2015, he found her lying face down on the bathroom floor. She wasn't breathing. Paramedics rushed her to the hospital, where she was pronounced dead at the age of 34. She also left behind a 5-year-old daughter who just finished kindergarten.
Brandy Bradley was one of 228 people in Cuyahoga County to die from an overdose heroin, fentanyl or a combination last year, according to the Cuyahoga County medical examiner. Her death also underscores that many of the people dying amid northeast Ohio's worst drug epidemic leave behind a generation of children who experience their parents' battle with addiction first hand.
"It's the children left behind that are hurt the most," her sister said. "The children who go through it and see this progressing, being scared and knowing one day their mother is not going to come back from that bathroom."
Brandi's story
Brandi Bradley was the middle child of three girls. She made friends, but often struggled with feeling loved, Karrie Bradley said. Middle school classmates teased her about her weight, and she desperately sought the attention of boys, her sister said.
Brandi Bradley got pregnant when she was 15 years old, and gave birth to her son at an age when most of her peers were learning to drive. She was later diagnosed with fibromyalgia and depression.
The new mother, then 16, left her doctor's office after her diagnoses with a prescription for Vicodin for the pain, Xanax for her depression and Ambien to help her sleep.
She got hooked on the drugs within a year, her sister said.
Brandi Bradley's moods became erratic when she was off the drugs, and she often spoke of how her world was dark and meaningless. When she was on them, everything seemed perfect, her sister recalled.
Brandi Bradley dropped out of school and eventually got her GED. The only jobs she could get involved a lot of standing, and the pain was too much to bear. She lived with her mother and younger sister well into adulthood.
Crackdown leads to other sources
Officials nationwide began cracking down on prescription drugs amid widespread abuse in the 2000s. Brandi Bradley's doctors started to ween her off her medication, but it was too late, Karrie Bradley said. Her sister was already addicted.
Like most painkiller addicts, Brandi started to "doctor shop" -- when she ran out of pills before the doctor would give her a refill, she would find another doctor and get a new prescription.
State regulators created a tracking system to prevent that practice, so she began buying the drugs from friends and on the street.
When law enforcement started going after street dealers, the street price of the drugs soared to almost $50 a pill. A friend told Brandi Bradley that a day's worth of heroin went for just $20, so she made the switch.
The final dose
About the time she started using heroin, Brandi and Karrie Bradley's mother died unexpectedly in her sleep. About a year later, Karrie Bradley moved out of the house and in with her fiance, leaving Brandi Bradley alone with her children.
Three months later, Brandi Bradley's 18-year-old son found her lying face-down in the bathroom. She took fatal cocktail of heroin, anti-depressants and sleeping pills, and she wasn't breathing. She was rushed to the hospital, where she was pronounced dead.
She was 34.
Like many family members who've lost someone to addiction, Karrie Bradley looks back and asks herself what she could have done differently. The decision to move out and move on with her life still haunts her.
"Sometimes I wonder, if I hadn't gone on and done me, would this have happened?" Karrie Bradley said, crying.
Parents lost in addiction
Brandi Bradley's path to addiction highlights the unintended consequences of both the overprescribing of painkillers in the 1990s and the subsequent efforts to curtail the problem in the 2000s.
But her story also highlights addictions' frightening power to convince parents who love their children to flirt with their own death every day.
Officials in East Liverpool sparked national controversy last week by making public photographs of an overdosed couple in the front seat of a car as a toddler sat in the backseat.
Many people who saw the photographs castigated the addicts and questioned harshly how any loving parent could use drugs around their child.
But Karrie Bradley saw the same grip on her sister.
She could see that Brandi Bradley loved her children. But no matter how much her kids showed her that they loved her back and they needed her, it wasn't enough to kick her addiction, Karrie Bradley said. Her sister's addiction, coupled with her depression, were too much for her sister to overcome.
"The only thing she thought that understood her was the heroin," she said.
She said she hopes her sister's story inspires just one parent to seek out recovery services.
"The hurt that the addict feels if they do have children, magnify that by a million, because when you don't wake up that one time, that's exactly how your babies are going to feel," she said.