The evening before Chad Baker died, his fiancée, Katie Offenburger, came home from her job as an account manager at a credit card company, let the dog out, and smoked a cigarette on the back porch of their three-bedroom house in Newark, Ohio. The couple had met in addiction recovery, and they had moved in together a few years after they got out.
Offenburger, a petite woman with short, wavy brown hair, was tired but happy after a long day. She and Baker had both endured more than a decade of heroin addiction, recovery, and relapse—a cycle that, for Baker, included six months of incarceration. Now, however, Offenburger, who had turned 34 two months earlier, was more than three years sober, and Baker seemed to have turned his life around as well. He had a job as a plumber's assistant, and his recovery, as far as Offenburger knew, was going well. Thirty-four years old, he was active in recovery groups, and his outlook appeared to be positive. In drug court, a diversion program that promotes treatment, drug testing, and social services as an alternative to prison, he met Aaron Campbell, an artist and Newark native, and the two became close friends. They bonded over their sobriety and shared love of basketball. They checked in on each other when they were tempted to use and watched games together whenever they could. One Sunday afternoon, Campbell fell asleep on Baker's couch, a Cavs game on the television. Baker snapped a photo and posted it to Facebook: This is what true friends do, he wrote.
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