Rachelle Nicole Dunagan’s life story is enough to bring Conasauga Judicial Circuit Judge Jim Wilbanks to tears.
“There’s no way for me to stand here and describe to you what’s happened in Rachelle’s life,” he said at the 89th graduation ceremony of the Conasauga Drug Court program. “Before they graduate the program, they have to give their exit speech to the group … this has all the details in it, I’ve read it, I cried.”
Dunagan, 24, was the lone graduate at the event, held at the Whitfield County Courthouse on Thursday.
“I was born and raised, for the most part, right here in Dalton, Georgia,” she said before a packed audience approaching 100 people. “My parents did their best to provide for my brothers and I, we all attended school and participated in athletics activities.”
That typical — if not idyllic — upbringing was shattered when her father committed suicide.
“It was the night I lost my very best friend and the person I valued the most in this world,” she recounted. “Not even a week later, my mom mixed alcohol with her prescription Xanaxes and also tried to take her life.”
Soon, Dunagan herself was taking Adderall daily and experimenting with alcohol and marijuana.
Before long, she was using high-powered painkillers like hydrocodone and Percocet.
“I didn’t go a day without using to numb the pain,” she recalled.
She said she became addicted to Roxicodone.
“I had fallen in love with being able to nod out and not think about things,” she said. “Eventually, that was not enough and I was introduced to heroin in 2018.”
That same year, she graduated from Northwest Whitfield High School.
“I cannot remember my graduation,” she said. “Shortly after this, my best friend hung himself with the same dog chain I had already hid from him once.”
She gave birth to her first child in 2019. She said she entered into an abusive relationship shortly thereafter with a man roughly 10 years her senior.
“One of our worst fights resulted in my head being split open and him refusing to take me to the hospital,” she said. “I decided that I was going to drive myself and passed out at the wheel.”
She said she lied and told hospital staff she slipped on some of her child’s toys.
In January 2020, Dunagan said she was arrested for possession of methamphetamine and exploitation of an elder.
Once released from custody, she said she stayed clean for barely a week.
“While I attended the methadone clinic I started to get my dealer to bring drugs to my job,” she continued. “I lost that job in less than a month.”
Even after finding out she was pregnant with her second child, she said she continued to abuse drugs.
“The O.B. told me if he came out positive that they would take him from me,” she said. “I quit using meth … (he) came out healthy Jan. 17th, 2021, exactly a year to the day of my last arrest.”
Dunagan’s struggles with substance dependency did not end.
Not only did she start using methamphetamine again, she found a new high — fentanyl.
“Before (my son) was five months old, I had already overdosed twice on pressed (Roxicodone),” she said. “I started seeing my dealer intimately and ended up getting real feelings for him.”
That individual would later start a high-speed chase with law enforcement.
The resulting crash, she said, “decapitated his head from his body.”
Dunagan said she contemplated suicide, to the point she stole a gun from a friend to kill herself.
She recalled experiencing an overdose while driving.
“All I remember is waking up to my seat laid back and receiving mouth to mouth in what I think was a school parking lot,” she said. “I got out and see Narcan laying in the floorboard and I immediately realized I almost killed myself, my baby and my best friend — and that’s not how I wanted to go out.”
About three weeks later, she said she was arrested again.
“Stealing, possession and altered identification,” she said. “I called my mom from the jail and she was relieved … her exact words were ‘I’m so glad I got the call that you were in jail, I was worried that my next call about you would be that you were dead.’”
On Dec. 16, 2021, Dunagan got a second chance.
That was the day she entered the local Drug Court program.
Dollars and sense
The Conasauga Judicial Circuit Drug Court program began in 2001.
“It’s touched hundreds of participants’ lives and if you exponentially just do some simple math, we have touched thousands of lives in these communities, Murray and Whitfield County, in a very positive way and a very powerful way,” Wilbanks said. “It’s always good to stop and remember where we came from.”
He described the intent of the incarceration alternative program.
“We have court every Thursday,” he said. “For two-and-a-half hours we’re working and talking about our participants … this is the highest level of intensive recovery treatment provided outside of an in-treatment program.”
The purpose of the program isn’t just to prevent recidivism, but turn nonviolent offenders into productive citizens.
According to the Council of Accountability Court Judges (CACJ), such incarceration alternatives provide more than $41.3 million in annual benefits to the state of Georgia, including an estimated $18.7 million in adjudication and imprisonment cost savings.
Each year, the CACJ also indicates the program adds about $1.5 million in additional state income taxes — while saving Georgia taxpayers $1.7 million in healthcare costs and about $3.1 million in foster care system expenses.
“We get referrals for the program from not only law enforcement, but from defense counsel, we get them from preachers, we get them from family members,” Wilbanks continued. “It is a voluntary program, I don’t order anybody to come into the program unless they ask me to allow them to come into the program.”
Wilbanks said the program includes both group and individual sessions.
Among other services, the program utilizes cognitive behavioral intervention, moral reconation therapy and several trauma recovery modules.
Nor does the program revolve just around things such as relapse prevention therapy. Other components of the program focus on co-dependent relationships and anger management.
The holistic impact of the program, he said, is evident.
“When we change the lives of our families, we change the lives of our communities,” he said. “And when we change the lives of our communities, we change the lives in our state.”
Full recovery
Dunagan said the early stages of the program were rough.
“I came in mad, I had no intentions of sticking around but eventually, something clicked,” she said.
She said she has been clean for the last two years — which garnered a standing ovation from the graduation attendees.
“I’m a much happier me than I was two years ago,” she said. “My message to the newcomers is a shared message from my mentor — you can choose to live or you can choose to die.”
Today, she said she is truly living an independent life.
“Today, I forgive people that I never thought I could,” she said.
There was one comment in particular, Wilbanks said, that especially struck him.
“Everyone you come in with is not who you leave with,” he echoed Dunagan.
Wilbanks presented Dunagan with a certificate signifying her completion of the program.
The ceremony concluded with a deeply symbolic gesture — Dunagan and her loved ones shredding up and discarding a giant image of one of her previous arrest mug shots.
On a projected screen behind Dunagan was an entirely different photograph — a picture of her in professional attire, beaming from ear to ear.
“If you change your life, you change the lives of the people around you,” Wilbanks said. “I’ve got two young boys now that have a mom — if you don’t think that’s important, you don’t know what you’re talking about.”
The immense positive influence of the Drug Court program on her life, Wilbanks said, is unmistakable.
Not only is she clean, he noted. But she’s herself again.
“We put our families back together, we put our communities back together,” Wilbanks said. “What Rachelle can do now that Rachelle is the Rachelle that she was intended to be? It’s powerful.”