AUBURN — It started when Corey Coburn’s car hit a patch of ice on Upland Road in Lisbon.

The car wrapped around a tree, caving in the roof, which slit his face from his forehead to his nose, his mother, Heidi-Sue Stuart, said.

He managed to climb out the rear window to the side of the road where two girls found him lying. They recognized him and called Stuart at 4:30 a.m.

“He had no face,” she said. The cut had “opened him up like a book,” she said. “His chin was laying on his chest.”

Coburn underwent six surgeries to “put his face back together.” Doctors wired his jaw shut for two months; a titanium plate supported one of his eyes.

That’s when doctors prescribed the drugs that would create an addiction to opiods that would eventually end Coburn’s life.

Two years after the crash, the doctors had stopped writing prescriptions despite Coburn’s continual pain. He began to medicate himself with whatever he could find from friends and the street.

Twenty-eight-year-old Coburn had gone to his bedroom before midnight on Nov. 14, 2015. Stuart remembered relaxing, thinking her child was safely at home.

At 5:30 the next morning, Coburn’s dog, Dreamer, was barking from his bedroom. Stuart awoke and went to his room where the light was on. She switched off the light, believing her son had left the room and she let Dreamer outside. But she didn’t see Corey outside, so she returned to his room and switched the light back on.

That was when she found him slumped in a fetal position, having hit his head on the wall. Blood ran from his nose and mouth. His skin was blue and white. She cradled his cold body in her arms and called her husband, who called police.

A syringe and spoon lay on his desk, along with a torn glassine’s bag.

Emergency medical technicians told Stuart to leave the room as they tried to revive her son, but couldn’t.

“Something’s got to be done about this,” Stuart said. “All these young adults dying needlessly. It affects more than just a family. It affects everybody.”

cwilliams@sunjournal.com

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Lisbon man to serve nine months