We reported in April of last year the death of a 28-year-old San Juan Capistrano man at West Coast Detox Services in Huntington Beach.
Now, the rehabilitation facility is reportedly shutting down.
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KABC7 TV news has the “exclusive” on West Coast Detox agreeing to shut down and surrender its license amid allegations that the late Jason Redmer and other rehab patients were given highly-regulated drugs without prescriptions.
Jason Redmer Dies at Problem-Plagued West Coast Detox Center in Surf City Neighborhood
Redmer was found dead the morning of April 16, 2012, at the facility housed in a single-family home on Yale Circle, a quiet residential street next to an elementary school. Addicts would go there to detoxify before being sent to treatment facilities.
West Coast Detox had only been at the Yale Circle address about a year when Redmer died, but by then numerous complaints had piled up from neighbors, who complained about spotty supervision of clients and discarded drug paraphernalia found in the neighborhood.
Only a month before Redmer was gone, the neighbors stormed a Huntington Beach City Council meeting to demand that West Coast Detox be shut down. City officials responded that state law tied their hands–at least until a city code was violated.
Under an agreement with the state Department of Alcohol and Drug Programs, West Coast Detox will give up its license by Sept. 15, according to the KABC7 report.
“This has been nothing short of a miracle for us to have some closure to know that place is going to be shut down,” Lynne Redmer, the dead man's mother, reportedly told the station.
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OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.