Whenever Jay Pernu visits Stillwater Area High School, he carries a baseball. He inscribes his late son’s initials and jersey number on the leather: “JDP #9 – Love you Lefty.” He sets the ball on the pitcher’s mound.

“This was his favorite place on Earth,” said Pernu, who has the coordinates for the mound tattooed on his left arm, along with his son’s name and nickname, birth and death dates and 60’6″ — the distance from the mound to home plate. “They’ll find the ball the next time they play, and maybe they’ll think of Jayson.”

Jayson Pernu, who grew up in Lake Elmo, was a star pitcher for Stillwater Area High School. He died of a fentanyl overdose on May 23, 2019. He was 26.

The Ponies qualified for the state baseball tournament during the spring of Jayson’s junior year, in 2010, and Jayson received All-Metro and All-State honors and was the Ponies’ Pitcher of the Year.

Jayson, a southpaw, loved everything about baseball: the hitting, the fielding, the strategy and the throwing — especially the throwing.

“The mound was his special place,” Pernu said. “He loved the walk from the dugout to the mound at the beginning of the game. He wanted to be on the mound the whole game, every game, so he tried his hardest to stay there.”

Jayson injured his left shoulder in October 2010 in a pick-up football game with friends. He had surgery four months later but didn’t recover in time to pitch that spring.

“It was devastating for him,” Pernu said.

Jayson, who graduated in 2011, enrolled at Dakota County Technical College in Rosemount that fall and went out for the school’s baseball team. He pitched well, but started experiencing shoulder pain again, and “that’s when the downfall began,” Jay Pernu said. “He had started taking oxycodone after the surgery, and he was never the same person after that. We didn’t know for many years that he was addicted to opioids.”

Since Jayson’s death, Jay Pernu has made it his life’s mission to talk about the horrors of opioid use and addiction.

He shares Jayson’s story with strangers in line at Speedway. He talks to the health classes at Stillwater Area High School twice a year. He tells the players at Lake Elmo Baseball Association what happened to his son. He shares his story at Eagle Brook Church in Woodbury.

He doesn’t hold back. He doesn’t whitewash the details. He talks about the guilt, shame and embarrassment and sleepless nights that come with living with an opioid addict.

He talks about the jobs his son couldn’t hold. He talks about the cars his son crashed. He talks about the TV and jewelry and money his son stole. He talks about the lies his son told.

He talks about the 3 a.m. knock on the front door when a Washington County Sheriff’s Office deputy brought Jayson home instead of arresting him for vagrancy.

He talks about how he, on one below-zero night in 2019, saw Jayson walking on the side of the road near the high school, with a bag over his shoulder, obviously looking for a place to spend the night. He drove right by.

He talks about the white foam that was coming out of Jayson’s nose and ears on the morning they found him dead in their family room, crouched face down in a kneeling position on the couch with his cellphone — still lit — in his hands.

He talks about what happened with his beautiful boy so that maybe one other family won’t have to go through what he and his family went through.

‘He lived for sports’

Jay Pernu grew up in Eveleth, Minn., and Vickie Goroni grew up in Chisholm. The couple met when Jay’s sister introduced them in Minneapolis in 1986. They married in Hibbing in October 1987 and lived in Oakdale for 11 years before moving to Lake Elmo in 1999.

Pernu, 63, worked at 3M Co. in Maplewood before retiring in 2022; Vickie Pernu, 62, was a dental assistant. The couple owned Nutrition Cave in Woodbury before selling the business in February.

Daughter Jenna was born in 1989 at United Hospital in St. Paul, and Jayson David arrived 2½ years later in the same hospital room.

As soon as he could walk, Jayson was either “throwing a baseball or swinging a bat,” Jay Pernu said. “He always loved sports. He lived for sports. He was good at everything he did. He was just a natural, and he was very humble about it.”

The Pernus signed him up for everything — soccer, football, basketball, swimming, golf, bowling — but “baseball was his passion by far,” Jay Pernu said. “To whittle it down a little more, pitching was what he loved. He loved being on that mound. He was a different person out there.”

Pernu, an assistant coach with Lake Elmo Baseball Association’s 13U travel team, was Jayson’s baseball coach during his son’s Little League years. He said Jayson at an early age showed he had the strong will and determination needed to be a pitcher.

“You can’t let little things bother you that much, and Jayson was really good at that,” Pernu said. “You wouldn’t even know he was our son, really, when he was out there. He just was so focused. There were not many smiles while he was pitching, but he just loved it to death.”

Their father-son relationship in many ways revolved around their love of the game. They loved going to Minnesota Twins games together, especially when Jayson’s favorite player, Johan Santana, was pitching. They traveled with friends Jeff and Tyler Chilson to Major League Baseball stadiums all over the country: Kansas City, Boston, Seattle, Cleveland, Chicago Cubs, Chicago White Sox, Milwaukee and Baltimore. They regularly played catch in the back yard or at the ball fields in Lake Elmo.

“We kind of joked about the movie ‘Field of Dreams,’” Pernu said. “I would ask him, ‘You wanna have a catch?’ like they do in the movie. We spent a lot of time together that way.”

As Jayson got bigger and stronger, Pernu had to focus more on “seeing the ball right to the mitt,” he said. “He could throw pretty hard. He had really good breaking balls and changeups, and he really kept batters off balance. He really controlled the strike zone, which was his biggest thing.”

Jayson, whose nickname was “Lefty,” was known for his off-speed pitches. His curveball was especially formidable. The average speed of his fastball was in the mid-80s.

Jayson, who also played for Blizzard, a club team, made varsity his junior year and ended up pitching the entire season, Jay Pernu said.

“He got in a game early in the season and kind of showed his worth,” he said. “Batters often struggle against a left-handed pitcher. It just looks different coming from the left side, and it’s harder for batters because they don’t see it as much as a right-handed pitcher.”

A photo of Jayson Pernu pitching for the Stillwater Ponies that is displayed in his parents’ Lake Elmo home. (Courtesy of Jay and Vickie Pernu)

There’s a photo of Jayson hanging in Jay Pernu’s office. He’s wearing his black Ponies uniform — No. 9 — and he is eyeing the target for his four-seam fastball. It was taken on May 14, 2010, at Cretin-Derham Hall in St. Paul. The Ponies defeated the Raiders, 4-3.

Here’s his dad’s recap of the game: Facing a Cretin-Derham Hall team that was averaging more than eight runs a game, Jayson pitched a complete seven-inning game allowing just eight hits with one walk and two strikeouts. He threw 105 pitches, 69 of which were strikes. He gave up only one hit in the last two innings.

Jayson finished the year with a 1.56 ERA, a strike percentage of 66 percent, and a 0.95 WHIP, which is walks (16) plus hits allowed (50) divided by innings pitched. In 69-1/3 innings, Jayson had 50 strikeouts and only 11 walks.

‘Beginning of the end’

In October of his senior year, Jayson was injured in a pick-up football game with friends at the Old Athletic Field in Stillwater. “He didn’t tell us about it for months,” Jay Pernu said. “I don’t think he knew how serious it was. He thought he’d work through it, but it was just something that wasn’t getting better.”

Jayson, a member of the school’s bowling team, bowled that fall without any issues. It wasn’t until January, when he was starting to get ready for baseball, that he approached his father and said he thought he needed physical therapy. “He tried PT for a little while, but it wasn’t helping him at all, so we eventually went to see a surgeon,” Pernu said.

An MRI showed that Jayson had torn his labrum — the cartilage tissue that lines the shoulder where the arm joins. He underwent outpatient surgery in February at a local surgery center.

“We were hoping that he could still pitch, and the surgeon thought there was a good chance,” Pernu said. “But after the surgery, we pretty much knew right away that wasn’t going to happen. That was kind of the beginning of the end, really.”

Jayson continued to show up for baseball practice and went to all of the Ponies’ games, but he wasn’t able to play. He was given a prescription for oxycodone for pain relief following the surgery and got one refill.

“Back then, we didn’t know anything about opioids,” Pernu said. “I don’t know if the world knew how dangerous they were.”

Toward the end of his senior year, Jayson’s personality started to change, and his grades started to suffer. “He just wasn’t the same,” Pernu said. “He was just a little off. We thought it was maybe depression from what happened, but we still pursued college, and he still had a lot of opportunities.”

Jayson decided to play for Dakota County Technical College and went with the team that winter to a training session in Florida. Almost as soon as he got there, he called and said he wanted to come home, Jay Pernu said.

“He was calling and saying, ‘I want a plane ticket home. I don’t like this,’” he said. “We said, ‘No, you stay there and play,’ and he played, and he did well. All of a sudden, he was fine. He did pretty well through that whole first year of college, but he’d go up and down with the mood swings — up and down, again and again.”

Jayson transferred to Lake Superior College in Duluth in the fall of 2012, but he left after the first semester. He moved back home and worked several odd jobs — at a liquor store, a deli, a golf course and the Lake Elmo Inn, Pernu said.

“We didn’t know what was going on with him,” he said. “At first, he could keep a job, but as the addiction went on, he couldn’t keep any of them. I remember the first time he got fired, I ended up talking to the guy. He called, and he asked me if my dad had died, and I said, ‘Why are you asking?’ He said, ‘Well, Jayson said his grandpa died, and he couldn’t make it today,’ and my dad’s still alive, so, you know, stuff like that. It was an everyday thing.”

When Jayson finally told his father in June 2017 that he had been addicted to painkillers since his surgery six years earlier, Jay Pernu said he felt a huge sense of relief. “I’m like, ‘OK, we can fix that,’” he said. “I thought he was going crazy or something, which probably isn’t the most politically correct thing to say, but I didn’t know what was happening to him.”

The Pernus began making arrangements for Jayson to be treated at Hazelden in Center City, Minn. — the first of three visits over the next 12 months.

“The first time, he lasted a day, and then he came home,” Jay Pernu said. “He was over 18, so we had no control. Two days later, we brought him back.”

The second visit lasted just one day as well, he said.

Jay Pernu said he thinks that Jayson didn’t want to endure the pain of withdrawal during treatment. “It was terrible,” he said. “It was a horrible time, and this just continued and continued and continued.”

Jayson would call his parents in the middle of the night and ask for help. “He’d say, ‘You have to come pick me up,’ and it’d be somewhere in St. Paul or Minneapolis, and it would be scary places,” Jay Pernu said. “It’d be places where I didn’t know if I was being set up or what. I didn’t belong there, put it that way. I’d say, ‘What are you doing here?’ Sometimes he’d come home with me, sometimes he’d stay there.”

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Jayson would lie to his parents and say he needed money for a treatment program he had found. Eventually, things from their house started disappearing: TVs, a Toro snowblower, jewelry, cash.

They once saw their son in an image posted online by the Stillwater Police Department. Jayson was wanted for “fraudulent transactions” at Target and Cub Foods, according to the post. They prayed that Jayson would be arrested and put in prison “and get better,” he said. “We basically slept with one eye open all the time. We feared for him. We feared for ourselves.

“He wasn’t even Jayson anymore,” Jay Pernu said. “He was just doing whatever he could to just get through each day to avoid withdrawal and being dope sick. And you keep thinking back. It all started with the surgery.”

Rock bottom

The Pernus eventually had to change their locks, but Jayson would break in through the basement window, his father said.

“It just got to the point where we didn’t have anything,” he said. “We just kept hearing, ‘He needs to hit rock bottom.’ That was the advice we got from other people, and so we just said, ‘You can’t be here anymore.’”

There is a memory of that winter that haunts Pernu.

On a below-zero night, he drove past Stillwater Area High School and saw Jayson walking down the street. “He looked like a homeless person,” Pernu said. “He had a backpack, and he was all bundled up going nowhere, just walking, and I drove right past him. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life, and we probably did it more than once, but that’s one that we remember the most.”

When Pernu talks to students, he gives them permission to ask any question that they would like, and tells them that none are too hard for him to answer.

Jay Pernu’s forearm is tattooed with remembrances of his late son, Jayson Pernu, including the coordinates of the pitcher’s mound at the Stillwater Area High School baseball field in Oak Park Heights. Since his son’s death, Pernu has been working to raise awareness of opioid addiction. (John Autey / Pioneer Press)

“One asked me if I was driving past Jayson today and it was winter, would I pick him up?” he said. “I said, ‘If things were the same, I wouldn’t have. But today, knowing what I know now, yeah, I’d pick him up in a heartbeat.’ But knowing the things we knew at the time, my best phrase for a while was, ‘We did the best we could with what we knew at the time.’”

Jayson Pernu later showed his parents where he often slept outside — in a wooded area just east of Lowe’s in Oak Park Heights.

His last stay at Hazelden was in June 2018 for 28 days. He didn’t stay clean for long.

In March 2019, the couple were awakened by a knock on their front door at 3 a.m. A deputy had found Jayson and brought him home. “He said, ‘We can put him in the jail tonight, or he can stay here,’” Jay Pernu said. “We were so tired, I just said, ‘You know, stay on the couch in there,’ and that’s where he stayed for the last two months of his life. We knew by this time that he was doing heroin because it was way cheaper than buying prescription opioids on the street. He was pretty good at hiding it. I never, ever saw him shoot up. I never saw him take a pill.”

On May 23, 2019, Jay and Vickie Pernu found Jayson kneeling face down on the couch in the family room.

“I went down there, and I yelled for him,” he said. “He didn’t get up. He had just a pair of running shorts on. I shook him, and he’s just cold. He was just gone.”

When Pernu turned his son over, he could see foam coming from his mouth and ears. His face was blue.

“I turned to tell Vickie to call 911, and she was already on the phone,” he said. “They kept saying, ‘Give him CPR.’ Well, he was well past that. It was obvious that he probably died a couple hours prior, or maybe even more, I don’t know.”

The first responders who arrived on the scene said Jayson likely died of a fentanyl overdose. It was the first time the Pernus had ever heard the word.

Fentanyl’s toll

Drug traffickers mix fentanyl, a synthetic narcotic that is 10 times more powerful than other opioids, with other illicit drugs — in powder and pill form — in an effort to drive addiction and attract repeat buyers, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that in the 12-month period ending in December 2023, more than 107,000 Americans died of drug overdoses, with 69 percent of those deaths related to synthetic opioids like fentanyl.

Last year, the United States suffered nearly as many fentanyl-related deaths as gun- and auto-related deaths combined, according to the CDC.

Jayson Pernu was one of several people in the east metro who died of fentanyl overdoses in the spring of 2019. The number was so high that law enforcement officers issued an alert through the Overdose Detection Mapping Application about a “bad batch” of heroin that could be laced with fentanyl.

The Pernus never found out who supplied the drug that killed Jayson. Police officers took their son’s cellphone and tracked down a friend with whom he had had contact prior to his death.

“That person had just OD’d and was in the hospital, and they had to wait for him to get better,” Pernu said. “He sent the police to someone else, a girl. They went to her place, and they found her dead. It just went on and on from there. It was just such a mess that we eventually sat down and said, ‘What do we want to do? Do we want to fight the system? Do we want to get involved in that battle, or do we just want to make people aware that it’s out there?’ That’s what we decided to do. It’s not the easy way out. It’s hard to talk about it all the time, but that’s what we decided.”

Jay Pernu said he’s become much more compassionate since Jayson’s death.

“You have almost zero control as a parent, but, as a parent, in your heart, you’re like, ‘I failed,’” he said. “It’s like, ‘How did I let my kid get like this?’ These are things I work on every day. I really think it’s made me a better person. I’m probably less self-centered. You just want to help other people because you don’t want any other people to go through this.”

Opioid awareness work

Jay Pernu made a pledge to himself after Jayson’s death to “never say no to anything when it comes to talking about opioid awareness,” he said. “I’m going to jump in and help —  even if it helps only one person.”

In addition to his public speaking on opioid awareness, Pernu is a member of the council that has been convened by Washington County to decide how the settlement funds from pharmaceutical companies that made and sold opioid painkillers should be spent. The county expects to get $11.5 million over an 18-year period. The money must be used to combat the opioid crisis, including detailed programs and strategies focused on treatment, prevention and harm reduction.

Pernu said he hopes that some of the Washington County dollars will be put toward education.

“We’ve got to somehow deal with the stigma,” he said. “Addiction can happen to anyone, anywhere, anytime. It knows no boundaries: male or female, Black or white, rich or poor, it doesn’t care.”

Vickie Pernu said that she is proud of the work Jay is doing. “When Jayson died, we said that something good had to come of it,” she said. “Jay is on a mission. He’s on a mission to bring awareness so what happened to Jayson doesn’t happen to anybody else. He’s on a mission to keep Jayson’s memory alive.”

Five years after Jayson’s death, Vickie Pernu said she and Jay still grapple with “many ‘what ifs?’”

“But I think we did everything we could,” she said. “It’s just like the drug had him, and I didn’t see him getting better. It was like some monster.”

Jay Pernu said he wishes he had shown Jayson more love — “whether he accepted it or not.”

“We were so mad and angry at the things missing from the house and all this stuff, and we didn’t understand what was going on,” he said. “We understood he was addicted, but we just didn’t get it. We’d never been through it. I would have spent more time — even if he didn’t want to talk — just trying to talk to him.”

The Pernus, members of Eagle Brook Church in Woodbury, say their faith helped them survive the dark days of Jayson’s addiction and death.

“We knew that God could help us through this,” he said. “Without that, I don’t know where we’d be. We’d still be here, probably, but it would have been really hard. We had a place to go. We had a place where people would talk to us and listen and pray for us and help us. It didn’t end up the way we wanted, but they’re still with us today.”

Jay Pernu has a Bible verse — 2 Corinthians 5:7 — tattooed on his left arm. It reads: “For we walk by faith, not by sight.”

“You’ve got to be all in as a human,” he said. “You’re looking for proof all the time, but faith is faith.”

Jay Pernu shared Jayson’s story with the Eagle Brook community last year in a video that Pastor John Alexander estimates has been viewed by more than 50,000 people in person and online.

The video shows footage of a Lake Elmo Baseball Association league game that was played on the fourth anniversary of Jayson’s death. Before the game started, the young ballplayers removed their caps and held a moment of silence to remember Jayson. They started the game in a huddle cheering Jayson’s name.

“It’s a story of redemption,” Alexander said. “Jay’s search for redemption is not necessarily for himself, but to redeem a painful, tragic story and situation by enlightening others and by bringing light to a real serious problem … and seeking to point people to a greater good.”

Closer to his son

Jay Pernu has moved his office into the front family room area where Jayson died. He says he feels closer to his son there.

The room is filled with photos and paintings of Jayson.

Jayson’s first baseball glove is on a shelf on display. His high school glove is there, too. There are trophies, plaques and championship rings. There’s a sign on a wall with a baseball shaped like a heart that says: “Jayson, Love you to the center field fence and back.”

“This is a ball we used to play catch with,” Jay Pernu said. “I always held on to that one. It’s one of the ones I just said, ‘Well, we got to hide that, so it doesn’t get lost.’”

One photo has been framed and printed to look like a vintage shot. Jay Pernu saved a screen grab from the video of the Ponies baseball players clearing the bench to hug Jayson after the team defeated Cretin to win the 4AAA Section game on June 9, 2010, at Midway Stadium in St. Paul.

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“Jayson came in on a rare relief appearance after pitching as a starter on the previous Monday, so he was pitching on two days’ rest,” Jay Pernu said. “He pitched the final four innings to get the win, which sent them to the state tournament. He gave up one earned run on four hits, one walk and two strikeouts. They won 5-1. I would say that was the happiest moment of his life right there.”

After Pernu left another ball on the mound at the high school last month, he soaked in the moment. The JV team was taking batting practice nearby.

“I love the sound of batting practice,” he said, and fought back tears. “He just loved being here. He just loved being in that spot on the mound. It’s just sad that it had to end the way it did, but he had some good times out here. I’m glad we could share that.”

How to help

Jay and Vickie Pernu have organized a fundraiser for Minnesota Adult & Teen Challenge, a faith-based treatment program, in memory of their son Jayson. The couple hope to raise $25,000 “to promote awareness and recovery of the national opioid epidemic.”

To donate, go to classy.org/fundraiser/5597292.

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