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Nathan McIlvaine called his mother Friday morning to tell her that he loved her and that he was a new man.
One day out of jail on a DUI charge, Nathan was planning a drug-free future.
"I am going to start getting my life in order," the St. Charles 19-year-old had said.
Hours later he died alone in a friend's basement.
"I just don't know why he took that last dose," said his mother, Leslie. "He wasn't happy doing heroin, and he wouldn't want other people to do it."
Fiercely independent, with a leather jacket and sometimes sporting a 3-foot tall mohawk, Nathan didn't seem to care what others thought about him, but he often thought about others.
He played video games with the neighbor boy 10 years his junior, just so the boy wouldn't feel so alone in a neighborhood full of girls.
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