In a moving tribute on Saturday, community members from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (DTES) and beyond turned out to celebrate the life of Trey Helten, who died suddenly last month at age 42.
Helten spent several years managing the Overdose Prevention Society (OPS) at 141 East Hastings Street, where he is credited with saving hundreds of lives during the toxic drug crisis.
“He made a promise to me that he wouldn’t go back on drugs and he kept that promise for seven and a half years,” recalled Derrick Nash with OPS.
Nash, who knew Helten through OPS, said he remembers his friend’s forgiveness, thoughtfulness and endearment.
“He was an inspiration for everybody, and it’s sad the way it ended, but it’s (going) to go down in history as the man who almost did it,” Nash told Global News in an interview.
Norma Vaillancourt, who worked with Helten at OPS, remembered how he trained new staff on how to give oxygen and use naloxone, and cared about saving lives in the community he loved.
“It takes heart and soul to do what we do,” Vaillancourt said Saturday. “Trey was a special man.”
Helten was open about battling addiction, she said, because he wanted to help others.
“He brought a lot of love to this community in the Downtown Eastside and everybody loved and respected him down here because he was a great man,” Vaillancourt told Global News.
Street artist Jamie Hardy, a.k.a ‘Smokey Devil’, was Helten’s art partner and close friend.
“A big part of my life is gone,” Hardy said Saturday. “He was special because he was someone that was down here at one point, and he was messed up and had a drug addiction like everybody else, and he got out of it, he came back and saved people and saved people and saved people — like a domino effect.”
While he continued to support harm reduction and recovery work, Helten had recently taken a job with the BC Coroners Service, doing body removal.
“He wanted to provide dignity to people who passed away,” said OPS executive director Sarah Blyth.
It must have been really hard for Helten, she said, because a lot of the deceased he picked up were people he knew from the DTES.
“He wanted to give people the dignity of being seen and being touched by someone who cared about them,” Blyth said.
A strong advocate against gentrification, Helten often used his sense of humour to highlight issues facing the community.
In 2023, he responded to a viral TikTok video showcasing a renovated SRO unit renting for $2,000 a month, with a mock video of life in the neighbourhood complete with sirens, overdoses, bed bugs and public defecation.
Helten said he and other DTES residents “wanted to show the whole truth” and offered viewers a glimpse of the 200-square-foot apartments with shared bathrooms and kitchens in a single room accommodation (SRA) or SRO across from the Lotus Hotel where the controversial TikTok video was filmed.
As an artist, Helten used his gift of graffiti to build bridges with Chinatown, when merchants were hit with unwanted graffiti tagging on their storefronts.
Along with Hardy, he created several murals to help beautify Chinatown, including repainting the rolling shutters of two businesses targeted by repeated graffiti vandalism in 2022.
“We were like the odd couple, he was always the one that was like, clean and getting his stuff together, and I was always the irresponsible guy,” Hardy recalled Saturday. “It’s really sad seeing him not with us.”
Helten’s death was unexpected, said Hardy. “He was the last person in the world that I thought would pass away.”
Hardy was among hundreds who dropped in to the Balmoral Hotel lot over six hours Saturday to remember Helten, who helped create Vancouver’s first legal graffiti wall, and had a dream to paint the Balmoral wall as a community mural.
Helten was an animal lover, and his dog Zelda, who is now being cared for by a friend he met at the Vancouver Recovery Club, worked the room at his memorial.
Ken Fantinic was tapped by Helten to be the “Dogfather” in the event that anything ever happened to him.
“He (Helten) was just positive, just told everybody never give up right, so that’s something that stuck with me,” Fantinic told Global News Saturday, as he and Zelda navigate the grieving process together.
“Trey will always be missed,” added Vaillancourt. “He’s in everybody’s hearts down here.”