Autumn Bray was among the 2.3 million incarcerated people in America, but upon release, she was able to find the motivation to change her life in a positive way.
On a summer night in 2015, Autumn Bray woke up, dazed, in her silver Malibu on the side of the road. Bruises covered her chest, and the sticky traces of Mountain Dew covered her body. Her 2-year-old son, Liam, and 1-year- old daughter, Marleigh, were with her, along with Greg Underwood, the father of their kids, and his mother, Christina.
This was Autumn’s second heroin overdose.
The cold soda had been thrown on her to try to wake her up. The bruises were from attempts to give her CPR. Greg and Christina didn’t want to risk getting in trouble for using drugs themselves, and neither had a driver’s license. So, they tried what few options they could think of to revive her.
Autumn is just glad her kids weren’t old enough to remember.
“Honestly, I wish I just never would’ve touched it,” she says of heroin.
Autumn grew up in Muncie and met Greg on Facebook while in high school. They first met in person at a party. Before she knew it, she was sucked into the whirlwind of his fast-paced, drug-filled lifestyle.
Before Autumn’s first pregnancy in 2013, she had abused painkillers and smoked cigarettes. But when she found out she was pregnant, she quit everything. Greg was in and out of her life, partying often.
During this time, Autumn’s mother received news that the cervical cancer she had been diagnosed with in 2012 was back. She had already gone through treatment, but it returned.
When Autumn’s mother died on Thanksgiving in 2014, three months after Autumn gave birth to her own daughter, she saw her father cry for the first time. She didn’t know how to cope with the death and became depressed.
Michael Brown, chairperson of the department of criminal justice and criminology at Ball State University, says those with mental health problems might not get treatment because of the stigma surrounding it, or because they don’t have health insurance. When this happens, many self-medicate.
“So now you have a very toxic cocktail,” Brown says. “You’re taking alcohol and drugs, and you’re mixing it with mental health problems. And the outcome tends to be quite negative.”
Autumn, her kids, and Greg moved in together around Christmas in 2014. A few months later, Christina, who had just gotten out of rehab for drug use, moved in with them.
“That was my spiraling down moment,” Autumn says.
Autumn thought letting Christina move in was the right thing. She and Greg would help her get back on her feet. What Autumn didn’t know was that Christina wasn’t ready to change.
“She brought heroin in one night,” Autumn says. “I was just so depressed and down with everything going on, so I tried it. It was just kind of game over after that.”
According to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, 227,000 adults ages 18 to 25 used heroin in 2016.
The National Institute on Drug Abuse reports that more than 115 people in the United States die every day from overdosing on opioids. The epidemic can be traced back to the 1990s, when pharmaceutical companies told those in the medical field that the possibility of patients becoming addicted to opioid painkillers was nothing to worry about. Due to this reassurance, more and more prescriptions were written. Last year, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services declared that the opioid crisis was a national emergency.
Not long after moving in together, Autumn, Greg, their kids, and Christina were evicted in Muncie because they were so behind on rent. Greg wasn’t working, Christina had disability checks that she used on drugs, and Autumn had lost her job at IHOP due to using.
Brown says addiction can impact a person’s ability to keep a job, maintain relationships, and perform day-to-day tasks.
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The day Autumn woke up from the overdose in the car, the group was planning to drive back to Muncie from briefly living in Indianapolis after their eviction. For Autumn, seeing her kids in the car with her jolted her back into reality. She hates knowing that her kids, no matter how young, have seen the worst stages of her drug addiction.
She knew she had to stop using, but withdrawals were brutal, so she switched to methamphetamine. It was easily accessible—Greg and Christina were making it. When Christina got arrested again, Autumn’s father let her, the kids, and Greg move in.
On a November night in 2015, Autumn overheard Greg on the phone with someone. She couldn’t tell what he was planning, but it didn’t sound good. She didn’t say anything. When he used drugs, he was sometimes abusive—he would pull her off the bed by her hair or hit her, even when she had their daughter Marleigh in her arms.
The next morning, Greg and his friends came into the house and took Autumn’s father’s gun safe and his checks to sell. Autumn felt frozen. The men had guns, and her kids were with her.
Her father filed police reports, but Autumn didn’t think much of it until three months later when detectives came and took her to jail on charges of Level 6 theft. She was an accomplice, and at age 22, she spent her first stint in the Delaware County Jail.
Time Served
It was nighttime when Autumn arrived at jail. As she entered her cell, she was crying. It woke up her cellmate, who asked what she was in for and comforted her until she could sleep. In the first few days of Autumn’s four months in jail, she had no idea where her kids were. Those days were torture until she found out they were safe with Greg’s father and stepmother.
Autumn says the workers at the jail were nice, but the inmates stirred up trouble. At one point, she witnessed an outburst in which an inmate ripped TVs off the wall.
To pass the time, she read the Bible and James Patterson books, or she exercised. Those were pretty much her only choices.
It was a cold winter day when Autumn was released in February 2016. As she lit a cigarette, the fog of her breath mixed with the smoke. Greg was still in jail, but she had made her mind up that when he got out, she wouldn’t speak to him. She knew she wanted to quit using drugs, but she couldn’t trust that Greg would feel the same.
Upon release, Autumn agreed to the requirement from court that she go to a rehab center. If she didn’t, she would have to stay in jail longer. She went to Wayside Mission in Muncie, now known as Urban Lighthouse. There, she went through a 12-step program, did community service, and had to go to church every week. She was there around five or six months until she ran away.
“I don’t know what came over me, but I left,” she says.
She wasn’t ready to fully immerse herself in the steps to recovery, but thinking of the potential of messing up visitation with her kids caused her to turn herself in.
She had to go back to jail for another five or six months. This time, she knew what to expect, but the experience was no more enjoyable than the first time. Her time in jail totaled 222 days. Upon release the second time in November 2016, she returned to Wayside Mission.
This time, the rehabilitation center was under different management. Sonni Stevenson, who is now Autumn’s future mother-in-law, was running the center.
“It was a home of love, to give them time to know that somebody cares,” Stevenson says.
Stevenson’s first husband was an alcoholic. She saw the impact his alcoholism had on her kids and felt it herself. Through this, she realized her passion for wanting to help women in tough situations. She would often bring the girls who were at Wayside Mission to her own house during the holidays.
While at Wayside Mission, Autumn shared a room with other women she grew to trust, which was difficult for her to do after her mother’s death. But eventually, her roommate brought in meth, and Autumn couldn’t resist. She cried as she used for the first time in a year and a half.
Why am I doing this? she asked herself. Christina had died from an overdose during Autumn’s second stay in jail. Autumn also saw middle-aged women stuck in jail for drug possession. When she heard that a friend she made in jail overdosed and died three weeks before her baby’s due date, he
r heart broke.
She didn’t want to join them, yet something still didn’t seem to click.
“The thing is, if you’re in treatment and you’re having constant temptation, that’s not good,” Brown says. “So you’ve got to have a surrounding that reinforces not using. And how does that happen? It happens by engaging in conventional, or law-abiding, culture.”
When Stevenson learned of Autumn’s use, she typed up an email to the court. She stared at the send button. It was hard, but she wanted Autumn to know there was accountability for what she was doing. Autumn was like a daughter to her, and she didn’t want to see her go back to jail for the third time. Stevenson convinced the court to get her into a more structured rehab facility. She wanted to show Autumn that she was serious and cared about her.
“She had an innocent side to her that followed people,” Stevenson says of Autumn. “I thought that if I could get her to stand up for herself, that she had a chance. I could see that in her. So I went that extra mile with her.”
Brown says mentoring, a method that used to not be taken seriously, paired with drug counseling increases the likelihood of success. He says drug counseling, in a group or as an individual, is effective. But when it ends and someone reenters society, they need to still be held accountable and have guidance.
Stevenson says the second time Autumn was released, she was different. Autumn seemed to have her mind made up about changing her life, so Stevenson found a recovery center in Richmond, Indiana, that seemed like a good fit.
The Breakthrough
Autumn’s time at Cross Road Christian Recovery Center for Women in Richmond was cleansing. Away from Muncie, she knew no one and wasn’t able to use her phone. During the day, she exercised and went to counseling sessions or classes where she talked through what had led to her using.
One thing she learned there was how to write letters. It was difficult, and she didn’t want to do it at first. The letters caused her to focus on the root of why she began using drugs. She wrote letters of what she would say to her mother, and of what her mother would say to her if she was here.
“They had us read the letters out loud, and that was kind of a breakthrough,” Autumn says.
Four years since the death, she still writes letters on her mother’s birthday and Mother’s Day.
Autumn graduated from the four-month program in July 2017, and around Christmas, she got engaged.Though the journey has been long, she has found a sense of peace.
“I feel like I found myself there,” Autumn says. “I was so lost for so long.”
Life Today
Now, Autumn lives a drug-free life and surrounds herself with like-minded people. She says she can’t really say her change was because of her kids, because if that was the case, she would’ve never gotten as far into using as she did.
“I wish I could’ve done it for them,” she says. “But I think it got to the point where it was so tiring, it wasn’t fun.”
According to the Urban Institute, about half of prisoners are able to find jobs within the first year of being released. Kohl’s in Muncie is one of the places that hires felons, and Autumn was honest with the staff about her past. Now she has worked at Kohl’s for more than a year, which is the longest she has kept a job.
She loads trucks and packages items for shipping. Sometimes, as she marks down the price of clothes or toys, she considers what she might want to buy for her kids. When it was warmer, she got Marleigh dresses and Liam shorts. She recently got a Minnie Mouse book set for just $5 to give to them.
The friends Autumn had before jail were also using drugs, so making a change meant ending those relationships and starting over. Now, Autumn keeps to herself for the most part, but she has found friendship with her coworkers, who know her story and accept her.
“I’m not so much a follower anymore. I’m more of a leader,” Autumn says. “I’m a lot more independent. It’s nice to be able to pay my own bills and buy stuff for my kids.”
She lives alone in an apartment with her boxer dog, Jax, and is saving to buy a house with her fiance. She’s also working on getting Liam and Marleigh back. They still live with Greg’s father and stepmother. Autumn is transitioning into seeing them more, like on the weekends, when they often go fishing with her and her fiance.
But they no longer call her mom. They call her Autumn, like their grandparents do.
She’s also working on repairing relationships with her family, including her father and four siblings, some of whom she thought would never speak to her again. But now, her older sister Stephanie works with her part-time, and the process of mending those family relationships is going well, including with her father.
The first time she was released from jail, he was there.
“He wasn’t very happy about it, but he was there,” she says. “He was very hard on me. He was understanding because of the kids, but at the same time, he didn’t show compassion toward me. But I’m glad that he didn’t. That would have enabled me more.”
Now, they text every day, and he has remarried. Autumn is glad that he has found happiness, and that she has found it for herself, too.
“I want to help other people know that they don’t have to stay stuck in that situation,” Autumn says. “There’s way more life to live. And it’s so much more fun than partying and using drugs.”
