CHICAGO — In many ways, life is good for Amy Blobaum. She has a job she loves, is happily married to a Lutheran pastor-to-be and soon will give birth to her second child.
Yet over everything looms a shadow from her past.
Blobaum, 38, was convicted of drug-induced homicide in 2015 after she shared heroin with her boyfriend. The man overdosed, and even though Blobaum sought help by performing CPR and calling 911, a Will County judge sent her to prison.
Last year, in an attempt to reduce overdose deaths, Illinois legislators tweaked the state’s good Samaritan law to protect people like Blobaum from prosecution. If the same thing happened today, she probably wouldn’t be charged.
Even so, Blobaum’s criminal record remains a burden. Her plan to become a social worker took a hit when a university wouldn’t allow her to enroll in a master’s degree program. And the boyfriend’s mother, who is the court-appointed guardian of Blobaum’s first child, has cited it as a reason to deny her custody.
Blobaum said she has recovered from her addiction and paid her societal debt for a crime that, in a way, no longer exists. Yet she’s still being punished.
“I’m just feeling restricted, always scared,” Blobaum said. “A drug-induced homicide sounds pretty horrible if they’re not willing to listen to you.”
Painkillers to heroin
Blobaum, who was prosecuted under her maiden name, Amy Shemberger, spent her early years in Cicero, where she began what she said was a long and troubled relationship with her boyfriend, Peter Kucinski. They had a son after Blobaum graduated from college, and in time shared a substance abuse problem too.
Blobaum said hers began after she hurt herself working out and was prescribed a huge amount of opioid painkillers. She said she shared the pills with Kucinski, and when the prescriptions finally ended, the physical dependence she had developed continued.
To stave off a painful withdrawal, she said, she and Kucinski bought black market painkillers before turning to a cheaper and more readily available alternative — heroin.
“Pretty quickly I went downhill,” Blobaum said. “By 2014, I was not just snorting heroin, but I was an IV drug user. Everything you said you wouldn’t do, you ended up doing.”
She was arrested twice within the span of a few weeks for drug possession and received probation for the second offense. Six days after that, on Aug. 10, 2014, she and a drug-using acquaintance set off to Chicago to buy heroin.
The details of who did what on that fateful trip are still in dispute, but the bottom line is that Blobaum returned and gave some of the heroin to Kucinski. Court records say they used it together in a bathroom at their Lockport home; their son, then 5, waited outside the door.
According to court records, Kucinski, who had also drank enough to register a .378 blood alcohol level, fell unconscious after snorting his share of the drugs. When he stopped breathing, Blobaum called 911 and started CPR. Paramedics took Kucinski to a hospital, but he was soon pronounced dead.
Three months later, Will County prosecutors indicted Blobaum for drug-induced homicide. The vaguely worded statute went on the books during the crack epidemic of the 1980s as a way to target major drug suppliers, but for years prosecutors rarely employed it.
That changed about a decade ago when opioid-related deaths began to skyrocket. But defendants have often been drug users like Blobaum, who aren’t dealers in the traditional sense.
Some state’s attorneys say the aggressive use of drug-induced homicide charges has been an effective deterrent, though several studies have cast doubt on that. Researchers in Rhode Island, for example, interviewed 40 inmates with opioid-use disorder and found that most didn’t believe the law would make much of a difference.
“It’s always going to be a supply and demand thing,” one man said. “I know that for a fact.”
Blobaum pleaded guilty in August 2015. Kucinski’s mother, Dorothy Kucinski, who became guardian of the couple’s child a few weeks before the fatal overdose, testified at the sentencing hearing about how her family had suffered following her son’s death.
“My heart hurts so much because Peter was taken from me long before I would have let him go,” she said. “The pain of not being able to say goodbye, give him a last kiss and hug — the pain is everlasting in my heart. Lives will never be the same without him for all of us, especially (for) Peter’s baby boy.”
Blobaum gave a remorseful statement — “This addiction ate both of us up in the end,” she said — but the judge sentenced her to seven years in prison. She ended up serving just over four.
In all that time, she said, she didn’t see her son once.
Post-prison barriers
Ben Blobaum was just about to leave his job in prison ministry when, during his final visit to the Decatur Correctional Center, he met Amy.
She had gotten off heroin with the help of a 12-step program after Kucinski died, she said, and once incarcerated helped lead meetings with fellow inmates. She and Blobaum bonded over their Christian faith and dated via correspondence and phone calls as she served out her sentence.
“I’d be lying if I said (apprehension) wasn’t somewhere in the back of my mind,” Ben Blobaum said. “But even long before Amy was released, those concerns were almost entirely allayed. I just really came to trust her and have found Amy to be one of the most honest people I’ve ever met in my life.”
Blobaum was paroled in January 2020 — she and Ben Blobaum married later that year — and quickly landed a job as a behavioral health technician at Northern Illinois Recovery Center, an addiction rehab in Crystal Lake.
But she soon learned that advancing in the recovery field would be difficult. She said she applied to an online program at Aurora University to get her master’s degree in social work but was denied admission.
A university spokeswoman declined to address Blobaum’s case but said candidates aren’t admitted to the social worker program if their convictions would prevent them from getting licensed.
It’s not clear, though, that that would be Blobaum’s fate.
The Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation allows aspiring social workers convicted of a “forcible felony” to seek a review of their application. If they can prove they’ve been rehabilitated, the department might still issue a license. In 2020, a spokesman said, no one was turned down because of a criminal record.
Blobaum said her conviction has also impeded her effort to regain custody of her now 12-year-old son, whom she has seen just a handful of times since her release. Dorothy Kucinski’s lawyer has argued in court that Blobaum remains incapable of raising the boy.
“(Blobaum’s) course of recovery from her drug addiction, lies and deceit is a path that is inconsistent, counterintuitive and dangerous to the minor child’s mental, moral and emotional well-being,” the attorney wrote. “In fact, (her) path of treatment and denial for the death of Peter Kucinski directly endangers the minor child.”
Neither Dorothy Kucinski nor her attorney could be reached for comment.
Retroactive relief?
After lobbying from recovery advocates, Illinois lawmakers last year updated the state’s good Samaritan law to prevent people from being charged with drug-induced homicide if, like Blobaum, they seek emergency medical aid for someone who has overdosed.
But the change came too late for Blobaum. Unlike the tens of thousands of Illinoisans arrested for cannabis-related crimes before the drug was legalized, there’s no ready-made path for her to clear her record, said Ben Ruddell of the ACLU of Illinois.
“I would hope there’d be an openness for ways to reduce harm for people who’ve been criminalized, but there aren’t many tools in the legal toolbox to grant retroactive relief,” he said.
He said Blobaum could seek a pardon from Gov. J.B. Pritzker, though other states wouldn’t be bound to honor it. The better solution, he said, would be for Will County State’s Attorney James Glasgow to help her get the conviction vacated and expunged so that legally speaking, it would be as if it never happened.
Following an inquiry from the Chicago Tribune, a spokeswoman said Glasgow will review Blobaum’s file.
Blobaum said she might try for a pardon or expungement, though tight finances have prevented her from hiring a clemency lawyer. Ironically, while she thinks her conviction was unjust, she acknowledges that she benefited from her time in prison.
But enough is enough, she said.
“I don’t know if I would be in a good place if it wasn’t for that, but they’re also holding that against you,” she said. “At what point do you get to come out and say, ‘I served my time and don’t deserve punishment anymore?’”
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