According to the handmade sign on the side of the road, a mask was missing, and the man who made it was asking for its return.
“Please help,” Trey Helten had said.
Helten was requesting help in finding the decorative diving helmet that had survived a devastating house fire. The helmet had belonged to someone who had held it very dear, until Helten had stolen it, he admiited.
“It was the only thing he had left from his mother,” Helten said.
He said he sold the diving mask to support his addiction, before hitting rock bottom, starting a 12-step program, and striving to make amends.
“It’s very important at to me that I right this wrong,” he said.
Along with making that sign, Helten spent months searching second-hand stores for the helmet. Then, almost a year a later, the person who bought the helmet and saw CTV’s original story on it, brought it to in and enabled CTV reporters to surprise Helten.
“What?” Helten said when he first saw the helmet. “No!”
Disbelief turned to laugher and then, after he picked up the helmet and confirmed it was the one he had been looking for, tears of gratitude, which turned to a smile of relief.
“It’s intense,” Helten said as he had approached the house of the person he stole the helmet from.
“It’s really scary, facing it instead of running away.”
It was really meaningful for the man who was reunited with that reminder of his mom, who’s anger towards Helten had been replaced with admiration.
“I think he’s alright,” the man said. “Especially for what he’s done.”
While that one step on the road to recovery went well, countless others did not - but Helten never gave up. The last time he sat down with CTV to speak he was six-and-a-half years sober and drug free.
“As long as I’m working towards being a better person or rectifying behaviour, I can find peace,” Helten said.
Helten started paying that forward, by volunteering at Vancouver’s Overdose Prevention Society with his dog Zelda, before working his way up to the paid position of General Manager.
Before he died unexpectedly this week (from a cause that’s not immediately known), Helten had become a beloved member of the Downtown Eastside community, known for going above and beyond to help people along their recovery journey.
“Every life is worth saving,” Helten said. “People are so much more than their addiction.”
Helten was also an artist, who hand drew the picture of the missing helmet on the sign from memory, before helping paint bright murals in the Downtown Eastside to inspire hope.
“I say [to people dealing with addiction], ‘This may be just a temporary thing in your life,” Helten said. “‘This might not be forever.”
The missing can be found, Helten showed us. Mistakes can be forgiven. Hurt can be healed.
“If you work for it anything is possible,” Helten said.
And despite the dark, you can leave a legacy of creating light.
