Children across the United States are being abused, tortured and murdered at the hands of methamphetamine addicts, according to a recovering addict who spoke at Annandale High School last week. David Parnell, who shot himself in the face two years ago while under the influence of meth, gave more than 600 AHS students a crash course in the horrors of the drug. The Methamphetamine Education and Drug Awareness Coalition of Wright County, also known as MEADA, brought Parnell from his home in Tennessee to address students at the county’s nine high schools and adults at a community event in Buffalo. Lt. Todd Hoffman, head of the Wright County Drug Task Force, has said the number of people using meth in Wright County is alarming and increasing. Some of the most hideous and inhumane murders have happened to children because of meth, Parnell told students Wednesday, March 16, then elaborated in an interview. “Methamphetamine has dispatched more children and suffering young people to the grave than any terrorist bomb ever has,” he said. “It’s happening all across the country because of meth,” Parnell said, referring to child abuse, murder and torture. “Meth drives them insane,” he said when asked why. “They’re all whacked out.” Tennessee has just started keeping statistics on meth-related child abuse and murder, Parnell said, and other states lag behind Tennessee. He would like to focus on child and spouse abuse to be aware of how much suffering is going on. Wives or husbands of meth addicts can leave them, he said, but children have no choice. “The child is trapped.” According to a MEADA spokesman, the child protection division of Wright County Human Services estimates at least 60 percent of its caseload is related to meth, and 29 children were taken last year from homes where meth was being used or produced. Parnell, 38, said he shot himself the morning of Feb. 21, 2003, with an SKS assault rifle when his wife told him she and their seven children were leaving. He was in a paranoid state after seven years of using methamphetamine, he said, and had been up for two days taking the drug. “This is the result of meth,” Parnell said as a photo of his bloodied face was projected on a screen in the Performing Arts Center. The man who took the picture later told him emergency workers had written him off as dead. But he survived a 21/2-hour ambulance ride to a Nashville hospital when a paramedic shot adrenaline straight into his heart and saved his life, Parnell said. On his sixth day in the hospital he told his wife he wanted to tell people about drug addiction. Disfigured face She told him he should let people see his disfigured face to show what his meth addiction had cost him. “If the way I look is going to change someone’s life, then my looks are a blessing,” he said. “The true victim was my little kids and my wife.” Parnell, who used drugs for 23 years, said he’s been sober for over two years. He’s told his story to more than 10,000 students across the country in that time. Doctors have rebuilt his nose using a bone graft from his hip and a skin graft from his forehead. They expect to spend another two years rebuilding his face, he said. “I’m going to look a lot closer to being normal than I do right now.” Parnell said he was hooked on meth the first time he tried it, and statistics say 95 percent of people who try it become addicted. He had been on and off the drug over the years. Leading up to the shooting, his weight dropped from 200 pounds to 160, he became “really sick and more and more violent.” He was paranoid, Parnell said, and thought every new face was someone out to get him. He asked his wife to buy him some guns. When she bought him the assault rifle and a .22 calibre automatic, he threatened her with the rifle. He would hear a voice upstairs and blow a hole in the ceiling. “My house had more than 200 bullet holes in it.” At one point, he thought the letter carrier was a narcotics agent and waited for him behind a tree with the assault rifle. “It (meth) robs people of the ability to love and feel compassion for other human beings,” Parnell said. “I think when a person gets an addiction they’re giving themselves a slow, agonizing death sentence.” When he was selling the drug he used to tell people meth wouldn’t hurt them. But now he says police are telling the truth: “This stuff will kill you.”