Remembering Trey Helten, a DTES Pillar and ‘Best Friend’

Trey Helten, who dedicated his life to helping others day and night in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, has died.

Helten, 42, was an advocate and an activist, a punk who loved karaoke and believed in people’s resilience, an artist, animal lover and dedicated friend.

“He didn’t have boundaries for his help; that’s very rare,” said Sarah Blyth, executive director of the Overdose Prevention Society, or OPS, where she worked closely with Helten for years. “He was special. He went above and beyond to help people.”

Around 600 people come through OPS every day, Blyth says, and she’s had “so many” people tell her how close of a friend, or even best friend, Helten was to them.

For many years Helten worked as manager of the OPS. But he didn’t distinguish between his on and off work hours.

He had a boundless generosity and would jump into action whenever needed to help friends, neighbours or community members, visiting people in hospital or making calls to help connect people with detox services. His couch was always open to crash on, and no matter what he was going through he had the time to grab a drink at the Ovaltine Café to sit with people and listen without judgment.

One of Helten’s closest friends was James Hardy, better known by his artist name, Smokey Devil. Hardy said he worries it was Helten’s selflessness and the energy he put towards caring for others that killed him.

“He did so much for people but never took care of himself,” he said.

Helten’s cause of death has not yet been reported.

Hardy always looked up to Helten, he said, because Helten had turned his life around and had an endlessly positive impact on the community.

“He had a domino effect, Hardy said. “He’d save people who saved people who saved people who saved people.”

His phone was a “lifeline” between people living on the Downtown Eastside, or DTES, and their families, said Nathaniel Canuel, a videographer who worked with Helten to produce videos that documented and destigmatized the neighbourhood.

“His phone had everyone’s contacts for moms and dads. If you wanted to get in contact with your family, you’d find [Helten] and he’d have those contacts,” he said.

Families would also contact organizations like Moms Stop the Harm when their kids went missing and the organization would forward the info to Helten, asking him to keep an eye out for them, member Deb Bailey says. Moms Stop the Harm is an advocacy organization of parents who have lost children to toxic drugs.

Everyone had his phone number memorized and knew to call when they needed help, Amanda Rose, Helten’s partner, told The Tyee. Rose is looking into ways to preserve Helten’s phone number as the one to call to connect with community resources, she said.

Rose, who is three months pregnant, said Helten would likely be uncomfortable with all of the praise that’s been heaped on him since his death — although she knows how deserving he is.

If he were alive he’d want people to focus on the work he did and not the fact that he did it, she said.

“Selfless” and “humble” are words people often used to describe Helten.

One of Helten’s biggest missions in life was advocating for harm reduction and the importance of overdose prevention sites, Rose said.

“People seem to think they’re the antithesis of recovery but they’re not. Dead people don’t recover and OPS keeps people alive, gives them a sense of hope and are often people’s first point of contact to get into detox or recovery,” she said.

Rose said she and Helten wanted to create a drop-in community space that centred on recovery rather than substance use, where people could explore what recovery would mean for them and could ask for help. Spaces like this could help support people in recovery without removing them from their community, loved ones and places where they’re accepted, she said.

Helten was often advocating to try to reduce barriers to detox programs, such as addressing long wait-lists, a lack of walk-in services and prohibitive rules around how many times a person can access detox services, Rose said.

“There’s not a lot of places for people to go when they reach a point of wanting help,” Rose added.

Helten believed if he could go through treatment and get to a place of lasting sobriety, anyone could, and he would jump into action whenever someone said they were ready for detox or treatment, said Guy Felicella, a harm reduction and recovery advocate.

Helten would call him four to five times a week, saying he was driving someone over to detox and asking Felicella to line up a doctor to assess someone and get them started on medication.

“He’d do whatever was necessary to connect people to services,” Felicella said. “The community really looked up to him for that. He was a guy that really cared about people. They don’t build them like that all the time.”

Towards the end of his life, Helten had taken a step back from his frontline work in harm reduction and had gotten a job with the BC Coroners Service, where he would pick up and transport the recently deceased to the morgue.

It takes a special person to do that job, especially because so many of the deceased were from the DTES and Helten would have known them, Hardy said.

Helten saw the job as a way to continue to support the community because he could be a familiar face and a person who understood what the family and friends were going through, said Sam Tobias, a member of the drug-checking service at the BC Centre on Substance Use who also worked with Helten at the coroners service.

He took the role very seriously and handled the job with grace and respect, Tobias added.

Animal lover

Helten had a dog named Zelda, a cat named Chico, a tarantula, a collection of insects and occasionally some snakes. He was a huge animal lover and would go out of his way to help other people’s pets, Blyth said.

One week he drove out to the Fraser Valley to adopt a large goat, thinking it was a great opportunity to help out the animal, said Sally Kupp, program manager at the BC Centre on Substance Use. He was letting the goat graze in an empty lot in the neighbourhood when police were called and the goat was taken away.

Helten was often adopting animals or offering emergency pet care, from helping feed injured crows before taking them to a wildlife rescue centre, to taking distressed dogs to the vet and paying for their care out of pocket, to fundraising for them, Blyth said.

Helten was also an incredible bridge builder, forming alliances between the DTES and its neighbour Chinatown, so the two neighbourhoods could collaborate and advocate to the province together, she added.

He could work with business improvement areas to help them see the larger picture of the overdose crisis, and even brought Conservative MLA Claire Rattée in for training on how to reverse an overdose, Blyth said. Rattée is the B.C. Opposition critic for mental health and addictions.

Artist

Helten was an avid artist with a wicked ability to conceptualize something and make it happen using his own hands or by supporting other artists, said Chris Ferguson, chair of the OPS board of directors.

“Where I saw him at his happiest was when he was painting and when he was helping people,” Felicella said. “He was like a kid who saw the whole back alley as his playground. He’d have paint on his face, his clothes, his hands, and just the biggest grin on his face.”

Helten started the Downtown Eastside Artists Collective, which brought together and celebrated artists in the neighbourhood.

He created the first legal graffiti wall in a DTES alley — which his friends are working to get renamed “Ashtrey Alley,” after Helten’s nickname, Ashtrey, Ferguson said.

He painted the grey background of the six-storey-tall Land Back mural at 99 W. Pender St. by hand during the 2021 heat dome, videographer Canuel said.

Helten was using a cherry picker to get the job done and got stuck on it overnight, he said. By the time he finished the background Helten was sunburned “like a tomato.”

Graffiti artists are generally “curmudgeonly,” solitary types, but Helten could bring them together with the “patience of a monk,” even with stressors like a deadly heat wave, limited funds and tight deadlines to finish a project, Canuel said.

Hardy said his murals dedicated to those who went missing or died in the neighbourhood were all made in collaboration with Helten. Hardy would focus on the portrait and Helten would liaise with the family and do the lettering.

Hardy said they likely collaborated on at least 30 murals like that and worked together on countless other projects — such as hosting a radio show or going on a game show together, where they dressed up as each other. Helten dressed in all red as a joke about Smokey Devil’s persona, and Hardy wore tight pants to tease his friend about his punk rock look.

Combining art and harm reduction, Helten would often paint the address of a building in its back alley so if there was ever a medical emergency someone calling 911 would know where they were, Blyth said.

Ferguson said Helten helped brighten up the neighbourhood in many ways. “Part of his legacy is in graffiti, which you can see when you walk from one end of the DTES to the other, it’s so bright and colourful,” he said. “That’s thanks to his art and art he helped organize.”

He was also an avid art collector.

He loved “history you could touch” and would buy art produced by his neighbours and friends, knowing that their time would likely come before their talent was widely recognized, Rose said. She added that Helten would then call up the Vancouver Art Gallery and argue how there should be exhibits featuring local artists.

Helten’s impact

It’s hard to try to conceptualize how wide an impact Helten had, or how many lives he saved, touched or celebrated with his “domino effect” of caring for people.

He’d even walk into church and drop the names of people he didn’t like into prayer boxes, because he wasn’t about to let his own feelings get in the way of the universe helping someone, Blyth said.

In late April there was a minute of silence for Helten at the 28th Harm Reduction International Conference held in Bogotá, Colombia.

In Vancouver, a memorial is being held Saturday from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. at 159 E. Hasting St., in the Balmoral lot. There will be a talking circle for people to share their memories of Helten, food to share and then karaoke.

Helten loved karaoke and would bring in a machine to get everyone singing, Blyth said. He was a great singer and a funny dancer and believed that “singing, even if it’s bad, is therapeutic,” Blyth said.

Everyone is welcome at his memorial, she said.

Blyth is also organizing a memorial mural for Helten. Anyone wanting to donate can visit Blyth’s X account, or volunteer by emailing Blyth.

There is also a GoFundMe campaign to support Rose, their child, and Helten’s teenage son Styles.