“He came back and saved people”: Downtown Eastside Tries Valvocate suddenly death – bc

In a moving homage on Saturday, parishioners from Vancouvers Downtown Eastside (DTES) and beyond also turned out to celebrate the life of Trey Helten, who suddenly died in the last month at the age of 42.

HELTEN headed the overdose Prevention Society (OPS) in the East Hastings Street 141 for several years, where he attributed hundreds of human life during the toxic drug crisis.

“He promised me that he would not return to drugs and he kept this promise for seven and a half years,” Derrick Nash recalled with OPS.

Nash, who knew HELTEN through OPS, said that he remembered the forgiveness, thoughtfulness and tenderness of his friend.

“He was an inspiration for everyone, and it is sad how it ended, but it (goes) it goes into history when the man who almost did it into history,” Nash told Global News in an interview.

Norma Vaillancourt, who had worked with Helten at Ops, remembered how he trained new employees in how to give oxygen and use naloxone, and took care of saving life in the community he loved.

“It takes heart and soul to do what we do,” said Vaillancourt on Saturday. “Trey was a special man.”

Helten was open to the fights of addiction, she said because he wanted to help others.

“He brought this community a lot of love in the city center of Eastside and everyone loved and respected him down here because he was a great man,” Vaillancourt told Global News.

The street artist Jamie Hardy, also known as “Smokey Devil”, was HELTENTENS KUNSTPARTNER and DENGER FRIEND.

“A large part of my life is gone,” said Hardy on Saturday. “He was something special because he was someone who was down here, and he was confused and had a drug addiction like everyone else, and he came out, he came back and saved people and saved people – like a domino effect.”

While he continued to support damage and recreational work, Helten had recently accepted a job at the BC Coroners Service and carried out body removal.

“He wanted to give people who died,” said Sarah Blyth, Executive Director of Ops.

It must have been really difficult for Helts, she said because many deceased people he had picked up were people whom he knew from the DTEs.

“He wanted to give people the dignity of being seen by someone and being touched who took care of them,” said Blyth.

As a strong advocate of the gentrification, Helten often used his sense of humor to emphasize problems with the community.

In 2023 he reacted to a viral Tikok video that shows a renovated SRO unit for 2,000 US dollars a month with an apparent life video in the neighborhood with sirens, overdoses, bed bugs and public defecation.

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HELTEN said that he and other dtes residents wanted to “show the whole truth” and gave the audience an insight into the 200 square meter apartments with shared bathrooms and kitchens in a single room accommodation (SRA) or SRO compared to the Lotus Hotel, where the controversial TikK-Video was shot.

As an artist, Helts used his gift from graffiti to build bridges with Chinatown, as a dealer with unwanted graffiti marking on their shop fronts.

Together with Hardy, he created several murals to beautify Chinatown, including the repeating of the rolling shutters from two companies that aim to vandalize repeated graffiti vandalism in 2022.

“We were like the strange couple, he was always the one who was like clean and brought his things together, and I was always the irresponsible guy,” Hardy recalled on Saturday. “It's really sad not to see him with us.”

Helft's death was unexpected, said Hardy. “He was the last person in the world that I thought she would die.”

Hardy belonged to hundreds who entered the Balmoral Hotel Lot for over six hours on Saturday to remember Helten, who contributed to creating Vancouvers first legal graffiti wall and had the dream of painting the Balmoralwand as a community wall painting.

Helten was an animal lover, and his dog Zelda, who is now being looked after by a friend whom he met in the Vancouver Recovery Club, worked the room in his memorial.

Ken Fantinic was tapped by Helten as a “dog father” if something had ever happened to him.

“He (Helten) was simply positive, just said that everyone never really gave up, so that stuck to me,” Fantinic said on Saturday about Global News when he and Zelda navigate together through the mourning process.

“Trey is always missing,” added Vaillancourt. “He is down here in all hearts.”

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