West Virginia families raise addiction awareness with billboards of overdose victims

HUNTINGTON, W.Va. (WCHS) — Addiction, its a sickness West Virginians are all to familiar with, and the life shattering impacts that come along with it.

“It’s gut-wrenching,” said Lorie Messinger. “It’s hard, it will bring back every memory in a matter of seconds that you have of your child or somebody else’s child that’s here.”

Lorie Messinger lost her son to an overdose. Since his passing she’s worked along side Leona’s Legacy of Love. Most recently putting up billboards in Huntington with the faces of families loved ones who lost their lives to overdoses.

“I hope that it brings awareness to what’s going on and people are not so judgmental,” Messinger said. “That they don’t criticize. That they’re actually kinder.”

In April the West Virginia Department of Human Services reported a 40% decrease in overdose deaths in 2024.

Despite the decline, families across the state like Rikki Abbott’s who’s brother is memorialized on the billboard are still seeing the impacts substance abuse has had on the ones they love.

“By the time that my brother was deep in his addiction, I’d already lost my dad and my mother,” Abbott said. “My dad was, before we even knew what it was, and he was on very strong medication. He was addicted to it. And then my mother had struggled as well and I lost her to suicide.”

Abbott hopes the faces of lost loved ones like her brother incline people to take the step towards recovery.

“If you’re in Huntington and you’re struggling with substance use disorder, I hope you see it and you think about it,” Abbott said. “And you realize how much those people were loved and what it meant for people to put their loved one on that board and that you would seek help.”