John Cramsey was sipping his coffee on the morning of Jan. 26 when the Facebook message buzzed on his phone.
“That . . . girl you tried to save . . . is dead now,” it read. “It was an overdose.”
Cramsey’s heart plummeted. He’d lost another one.
“Please, tell me you’re not serious,” he replied, sobbing as he typed.
The Allentown, Pa., native, 51, reeled as he remembered the terrible day last June when he had set out to rescue the 18-year-old girl, Jenea Patterson, from a Brooklyn drug den. It was also the day his own life began to unravel.
Cramsey was arrested June 21, 2016, at the Holland Tunnel while attempting to travel into the city with two friends in a souped-up SUV — covered in decals reading “God Guns Guts Made America Free” and loaded with firearms.
Dubbed the “Kooks of Hazard” and making national headlines, the anti-drug trio was indicted in October on 63 charges, including weapons possession, and spent nearly three months in New Jersey’s Hudson County jail. Denied bail and unable to pay his bills, Cramsey lost his home and business.
But during his time inside, those problems didn’t weigh on him as much as the fact he could no longer save kids from the throes of addiction.
“All I could think about [in jail] was young people out there who needed my help and I couldn’t give it to them,” Cramsey told The Post. “I’ll never know how many people may have died because of me being in jail.”
Now out on bail, Cramsey sat down last week with The Post to reveal for the first time the full extent of his crusade to rescue Jenea in the name of his daughter Lexii, whom he lost to a heroin overdose one year ago.
Jenea dying, he explained through tears, “is like losing my baby girl all over again.”
Alexandria “Lexii” Cramsey was 20 years old when she overdosed on a lethal mixture of heroin and fentanyl with her boyfriend, Marquillis “Quillis” Calhoun, 22, in February 2016. The two had been watching Netflix in Calhoun’s apartment in an old warehouse in Allentown.
Lexii was just starting to find success as a model, but she struggled from a debilitating combination of fibromyalgia, depression and anxiety. She got hooked on Xanax and Percocet after the pills were prescribed to her by a doctor, Cramsey said, adding, “It was early in her teens, 12 or 13.”
He admitted he wasn’t around much at that time in his daughter’s life. Lexii and her brother, Johnny, now 27, were raised by their mom, Gina, after the couple split while the kids were still small.
“I didn’t spend enough time with [Lexii], but there was no way anyone could have spent enough time with her,” he said.
After his daughter’s death, he felt moved to make up for lost time. “I can’t bring my girl back, but I can help bring other people’s kids back,” he said.
Three nights after Lexii’s death, Cramsey spoke of his loss and grief at a town-hall meeting in Allentown. That same evening, he started a Facebook group called Enough is Enough, a gathering place for the parents of addicts both living and dead.
“I just said, ‘We need to end this epidemic,’ ” Cramsey recalled.
At his daughter’s funeral, a parent of one of Lexii’s friends asked Cramsey for help.
“Their daughter was going down the same path mine did,” he said. The 20-year-old girl was “messed up with the wrong people.” He started researching her friends, habits and behavior by scouring Facebook.
It’s a method he still employs.
“I’ll find out where they work, what their hobbies are, what kind of car they drive, what type of music they listen to, what their grades are like — and [at] what stage they started doing drugs,” he said.
That first time, “I thought about it like a map on the wall and started connecting the dots. I figured out how she got caught up in drugs.”
He also figured out where the girl, whom he declined to identify, would be smoking marijuana one day with her friends, surprising her at an Allentown park. Cramsey sees himself “like the Ghost of Christmas Past, [who] comes over and wakes you up.
I show them how they got there and what happens if they don’t stop.”
It worked. The girl entered detox and rehab shortly after.
After that first success, Cramsey’s desire to save others grew — and so did his reputation. “I immediately got all kinds of requests for help over Facebook,” he said.
“I truly believe it was a mission given to me by God.”
A month later, Cramsey was introduced to Andrew, 27, who had struggled with heroin for 10 years.
“By then I had helped about a dozen kids,” he said, “and he was the worst I’d seen. When I picked him up, he was projectile vomiting 15 feet and blew chunks all over my truck.”
Cramsey helped Andrew get into Lehigh County’s drug and alcohol services, which landed him a bed at a 28-day rehabilitation program.
Before dropping his rescues off at rehab, Cramsey ends the intervention by showing the addict his left forearm, where Lexii’s portrait is tattooed. He tells them her story, and how it ended.
“Introducing them to my daughter,” he said, “is a powerful thing.”
Among the tools Cramsey plans to use in future interventions is a wooden coffin he built by hand and debuted at an Allentown anti-drug rally on Jan. 27.
“I might even ask people to lay down inside and get comfortable, because that’s where they’re gonna end up if they keep [using heroin],” he said.
Perhaps the most harrowing of his rescues was at a drug house in Allentown, where a young woman was being injected with heroin in her neck. She was also, Cramsey said, being used as a “sex doll.”
Strapped with a .45-caliber pistol on his hip and a 9mm gun on his ankle, Cramsey waited outside the house until he knew all the drug dealers were gone, then he darted inside.
“I found her upstairs sitting in her own feces,” he recalled, “and carried her out on my shoulder.”
Cramsey persuaded another young woman he reached through Facebook, Sarah Seydl, to go to rehab and then accompanied her to an Allentown clinic on Nov. 8, 2016.
Today, Seydl says, she is clean and working hard on her sobriety.
“If it wasn’t for John, I may not be here today,” she said.
Jenea and Sierra Schmitt, 20, a friend from her hometown of Wilkes-Barre, Pa., had been partying with some new pals — a “rough crowd,” according to Cramsey — in a Brooklyn home on June 20, 2016. Jenea nodded off in one of the dingy bedrooms sometime after midnight; when she woke, she found Sierra lying next to her, dead of a heroin overdose. When members of Jenea’s group found out, they took away her phone and locked her in the room.
In a panic, Jenea pulled Sierra’s phone from the dead girl’s pocket and texted Kimberly Arendt, who had once been her summer-camp counselor and was now a confidante. Arendt, 29, reached out to her friend Cramsey, knowing of his rescue missions.
By 5 a.m., Cramsey, Arendt and videographer Dean Smith, 53, were on their way to Brooklyn to extract Jenea from the Brooklyn bedroom. In the back seat of Cramsey’s Dodge SUV was a duffel bag full of weapons — including a .45-caliber handgun, an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle, a 12-gauge shotgun and four other semiautomatic pistols. Most of them were loaded.
“I took that truck because it was ambulatory,” Cramsey explained. “There’s a pull-out bed in the back and a stash of Narcan spray.” Also known as naloxone, Narcan is carried by first responders across the country to revive overdose victims.
Asked why he didn’t call police after Arendt called him, Cramsey replied, “They have too much red tape. [Jenea] needed help right away and I could give it to her.”
As the trio neared the Holland Tunnel in Jersey City, Arendt began looking through the duffel, removing the guns as she went, in search of a phone charger so she could stay in touch with Jenea. Cramsey believes someone in a passing car may have spotted the weapons and tipped off cops.
Port Authority cops pulled the trio over at the toll plaza, purportedly for having a cracked windshield, at 7:40 a.m.
“I was never gonna shoot up the place,” Cramsey claimed. “I was gonna put Jenea in my vehicle and take her back home.”
The guns were already in the SUV and he simply didn’t have time to move them, he said. Jenea couldn’t wait. He got testy when asked if he would have used the weapons at the drug den. “I can’t answer that question because I was never there,” he said.
Instead , he was arrested. While languishing for three months in the New Jersey jail, Cramsey said, he counseled inmates going through detox and withdrawal.
“I coddled them as if they were my own child. I talked them through it, made sure they had food and water, and covered them up with my blankets,” he said.
Meanwhile, he burned through his savings on lawyers. The gun range he owned in Allentown, Higher Ground Tactical, was hemorrhaging money. With no cash coming in, he was kicked out of his rental home. Today, he bounces among the homes of his girlfriend and acquaintances.
He’s heartbroken that he wasn’t around to continue helping Andrew, who fell back into drugs after rehab. Andrew did not respond to requests for comment.
“Andrew blames me going to jail for his relapse,” Cramsey said. “I should have been there to help him.”
But these losses have only fueled Cramsey’s motivation to save addicts in need.
On Sept. 8, a judge upped Cramsey’s bail to $175,000 but added a bond option. A group of supporters raised the $17,500 needed to spring him.
One of the first things he did upon his release was reach out to Jenea on Facebook. She denied his friend request.
“I think she was afraid,” he said. “Had I been able to reach her . . . I know I could have changed this outcome. I’ll have to live with that ‘What if?’ forever.”
Jenea was found dead Jan. 25 after using drugs with several friends in her Lehigh Valley hometown, her father, James Patterson, 59, told The Post. She had struggled with heroin since she was 13 years old.
“I always told her, ‘You need to get out of the game. There’s death in that path,’ ” said Patterson, himself a former dope addict.
“I have 99,000 things running through my head, like, ‘I could have done this, I could have done that.’ There’s too much dope up in this valley.”
Although Cramsey couldn’t save his daughter, Patterson is still grateful for his efforts.
“I stand behind him 100 percent. I just wish he could have made it to my girl.”
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