Rescue mission gone wrong in father's vigilante war on heroin

On 21 June, Cramsey made international headlines after he was pulled over with two others on the New Jersey side of the Holland Tunnel in a truck filled with handguns, ammunition, and long-range weapons.

It was a little over a week after the largest mass shooting in modern US history took place in Orlando, so speculation began immediately that the “heavily armed trio” was on its way to commit another act of violence.

But when Cramsey’s friends back in Allentown, Pennsylvania, heard the news, they immediately called the incident a misunderstanding.

“He was rescuing a girl,” says Lyn Baker. “We have a few people who’ve been very angry at his arrest. Some information has been misleading or just downright incorrect.”

Baker and Cramsey are the co-founders of a group called Enough is Enough, which says it provides “family support, grief counseling and solutions” to Pennsylvania families dealing with opioid and heroin addiction. The state has seen a double-digit increase in the number of overdose deaths in recent years.

“John gets a little excited over stuff but what he was doing was trying to save a life,” wrote one supporter on the group’s Facebook page, which has over 1,000 members.

According to his own posts, Cramsey – who owns a gun range called Higher Ground Tactical – was on his way to “extract” a young woman from a drug den and bring her back to Pennsylvania.

“I’m currently 11 miles outside of Brooklyn New York and going to a hotel to extract a 16-year-old girl,” Cramsey wrote, alongside photos of himself in his truck with two friends. “Last night she woke to find her friend’s body next to her in the same bed where her friend died of another heroin overdose … I’m bringing her out of NY today and anybody else in that hotel that wants to go home too.”