Aunt charged with drug trafficking in Ryan Good death

COLE HARBOUR, N.S. – More than a year after Ryan Good died from a Dilaudid overdose, his aunt has been charged by RCMP for allegedly providing the prescription drug.

Leah Bordage, 44, faces a charge of Trafficking in a Controlled Substance and will appear in Dartmouth Provincial Court on May 7.

According to Ryan’s family, the 21-year-old had taken a combination of cocaine and Dilaudid on December 10, 2012, just before he was found unresponsive by EHS. The accused is the sister of Ryan’s father, and has a prescription for the painkiller.

“It’s been over a year now and finally someone has listened – that I wasn’t just crazy, I wasn’t just some mom out for revenge and looking for someone to blame,” said Ryan’s mother, Trine Lise Good.

“I’ve always said Ryan was partly to blame. He took it willingly, but it wasn’t his drug – it was a prescription. So there were two people that day … and one of them holds a prescription for that drug.”

Ryan’s case was initially closed in February 2013, a couple months following his death, without any arrests or charges. In August 2013, his family filed a public complaint against the RCMP on how they handled the case.

“I refused, refused to have him just be another case, another statistic,” said Good. “I just think they said, ‘Oh another one. Too bad, so sad’ and that’s unfortunate. Someone loved that boy. A lot of people loved that boy.”

During that public complaint investigation, new information came forward, prompting RCMP to re-open the case.

“In the initial investigation, we did not have enough evidence to support a charge. When the investigation was re-opened, we had new information and that was certainly sufficient evidence to lay a charge,” said Insp. Trish MacCormack of the RCMP/HRP Integrated Criminal Investigation Division.

MacCormack said she hoped the charge would give the Good family a sense of closure and serve as a reminder to the public.

“Out of this tragedy, hopefully the community will learn something from it … that we shouldn’t be sharing prescription drugs. It’s very dangerous and it’s reckless and unfortunately in this case, someone died.”

But prescription drug safety advocate Amy Graves hopes the case will also serve as a lesson for police.

Graves’ brother, Josh, died three years ago from a Dilaudid overdose, and she too filed a complaint alleging the RCMP had not done enough to investigate his death.

“I feel there’s a transition where the police were used to investigating illicit drug use, illicit trafficking – the cocaine, heroin or investigating those types of crimes,” she said. “Where now, prescription drug abuse has taken over a lot of that area. They just have to catch up to speed.”

The public complaint investigation filed by the Good family is still ongoing.