HOW THIS HEARTBROKEN DAD ENDED UP IN CUFFS AT THE HOLLAND TUNNEL

Arrested with a cache of firearms, dad says he was on a mission to save heroin addicts after his fashion model daughter went from using Xanax to heroin on which she fatally overdosed

By Melkorka Licea

New York Post
July3, 2016

“I’m not a vigilante or terrorist — I’m a father.”

That’s the mantra of John Cramsey, who spoke exclusively to The Post about the daughter he lost to a drug overdose in February — a tragedy that sparked his crusade to save other addicts from the same fate.

Cramsey, 50, was arrested June 21 on one of those rescue missions while driving a souped-up SUV toward the Holland Tunnel, loaded with a cache of weapons.

A die-hard Second Amendment supporter and owner of an indoor gun range, Cramsey now sits in the Hudson County Correctional Facility in Kearny, NJ, on $75,000 bail.

But his brush with the law has not dimmed his passion for his mission.

In two jailhouse phone interviews with The Post, he revealed the anguish of losing his model daughter Alexandria “Lexii” Cramsey, 20, and his determination to help others like her.

He recalls the last time he saw Lexii. It was outside his gun range, Higher Ground Tactical, in Emmaus, Pa. She had just been on a photo shoot in Mexico — her first big step toward breaking out as a fashion model.

“My last memory is giving my daughter a hug in the rain,” Cramsey said.

Lexii was found on Feb. 21 alongside boyfriend Marquillis “Quillis” Calhoun, 22, in his Allentown, Pa., warehouse apartment. Both had fatally overdosed on drugs while watching Netflix.

Cramsey learned that the cause of his daughter’s death was an overdose of heroin and Fentanyl.

“My world ended,” he said.

He knew Lexii struggled with fibromyalgia, depression and anxiety but never imagined she would turn to dangerous drugs.

Calhoun had a big smile, tattoos and a bad-boy allure. Lexii made her infatuation clear on social media.

“My boyfriend is absolutely fantastic in every way possible, but specifically because he lets me nap while he runs out to treat me to ice cream and pizza. Did I also mention he treats me like a princess?” she wrote on Facebook.

Cramsey didn’t like him.

“If I had a chance to go back, I would’ve intervened,” he said.

They had never met in person, but two weeks before Lexii died, Calhoun reached out to Cramsey on Facebook, the dad said.

“He said, ‘Don’t worry, Mr. Cramsey, I won’t let anything happen to your daughter. I’ll take care of her,’ ” Cramsey recalled.

Five months before Lexii died, the 5-foot-11 stunner was hand-picked by the director of Wanted Model Management to fly to Mexico for a three-month modeling residency.

“I was in love with her look. She had these beautiful eyes that popped out right away,” said Wanted director Mau Medellin.

“She was so confident in front of the camera and gave everything she [had] to make a great shoot. New gorgeous pose after the next,” said photographer Rodrigo Triana, who shot Lexii for Phoenix Magazine.

Raised by a single mom in a three-bedroom townhouse in Allentown with her brother, Johnny, now 19, Lexii was determined to succeed despite a troubled upbringing.

Cramsey admits he wasn’t around enough.

“I didn’t spend enough time with [Lexii], but there was no way anyone could have spent enough time with her,” he said.

And while she lusted for life, Lexii had a dark side — the drugs she used to hide her pain.

She got hooked on Xanax after it was prescribed by her doctor, Cramsey said.

Ex-boyfriend Anthony Aniades, 24, said she took the pills to cope with stress.

“She was eating Xanax like candy every day. I used to take her to CVS to pick up her prescriptions. She didn’t remember the first two months of our relationship because she was always blacking out,” said Aniades, who began dating Lexii in 2013 while she was a senior at Emmaus HS.

“At first, it was just for anxiety, but after so long, it just became her emotional crutch to get high when she couldn’t handle the lows. She had it pretty rough, though. Her life wasn’t easy.”

Cramsey was well aware of her drug problem.

“I knew she was doing Xanax and Percocet. To prescribe Percocets to a child at a very young age is totally stupid. It was early in her teens, 12 or 13,” he said.

Lexii and Johnny were still in diapers when Cramsey divorced their mom, Gina, and the exes fought over child support and how rarely John visited. (He has two sons, 16 and 10, with second wife Kimberly.)

Gina Cramsey, 51, raised Lexii and Johnny as a single mom, working as an instructional assistant a middle school, then moving to Lehigh Career & Technical Institute a few years later.

“I don’t have much money, but I did the best I could,” Gina said.

Lexii, meanwhile, was bullied by classmates.

“She got picked on for being taller than the boys, for being too pale, her boobs weren’t big enough, her teeth were messed up or how her family wasn’t rich. Trust me, she wasn’t treated great in the Lehigh Valley,” Aniades said.

Lexii created a YouTube video titled “It Gets Better” to encourage other teens to “not let people bring you down.”

“Her video is a really touching story from my angel,” John Cramsey said. “She has kept people alive from that video.”

Cramsey, recalled Gina, was never around.

“He wasn’t a part of her life and never answered her phone calls. She tried to have a relationship with him and he didn’t reciprocate,” she said.

“One of the conversations we had on our last night together was about how she tried to reach out to her dad and he didn’t answer. She told me, ‘He didn’t call me one time.’ ”

But John Cramsey blames his ex for the family rift.

“Her mom had put up a wall between me, my daughter and my son,” he said.

Months before her high-school graduation in 2014, Lexii signed with the Philadelphia-based Reinhard Model and Talent Agency.

That summer, she moved to Philadelphia and lived with fashion photographer Mark Shiber, 31, for five months, working modeling gigs and as a part-time restaurant hostess. The two met over Instagram and became fast friends.

“I felt an instant connection with her. When she told us about her life story, growing up poor, I just felt like I needed to help her,” Shiber said.

As the summer passed, Lexii signed with Ursula Wiedmann Models in Atlanta.

“We did about 10 shoots together, and she kept getting better and better. Her facial expressions, the way she moved her body,” Shiber said.

But she continued to suffer.

“She was always in pain, she suffered from [fibromyalgia] almost daily. I also knew she was going through a lot of stuff, mostly relating to her family and how she grew up,” Shiber said.

When Lexii returned to Allentown, her relationship with Aniades became rocky.

“She started getting weird and distant,” Aniades said. “I knew she was cheating on me and seeing Marquillis. I feel terrible sometimes because I knew he was a heroin addict. One of the last things I said to Lexii was, ‘Can’t you go f- -k someone else? Because you’re gonna date Quillis, mess around with heroin and die with him.’”

Lexii and Calhoun made their relationship official on Facebook on April 10, 2015.

“He was a really sweet guy. He was nice to her, and that’s all that ever mattered to us,” said Cait Lynch, 25, a model pal.

On June 18, 2015, Lexii moved to Atlanta to be closer to her agency. There, she lived for three months and saved up to go to Mexico.

Lexii flew to Mexico City on Sept. 10 and returned to Allentown just before Christmas. Her mother was happy.

“She made me a book called ‘Everything I Love About My Mommy,’ and she wrote about memories from when she was little to now. She still called me ‘Mommy’ even when she was grown,” Gina said, sobbing.

Gina shared some of her daughter’s diary entries with The Post, revealing Lexii was concerned about Calhoun a few days before their deaths.

“I’m worried about Quillis. I think he’s secretly doing heroin again, and I don’t know how to help him,” she wrote.

Lexii’s death left her father desperate to fight for the lives of heroin addicts.

“Words can’t describe how fast it happened,” he said. “She went from this beautiful young lady to this beautiful young woman overnight, and just as fast, she was gone.”

He created a Facebook group, Enough is Enough, to provide “grief counseling and solutions” to Pennsylvania families coping with heroin and opiate addictions.

“I’m the inoculation for this disease. I’m going to make a damn difference,” he said at an anti-heroin gathering in Allentown.

“There was nothing I could do to bring my baby girl back. The only thing I could do to heal myself was to help other parents who are going through the same heartache,” he told The Post. “The difference is not seeing the body counts go up.”

He claims that since her death this winter, he has rescued dozens of addicts.

“There are people I’ve literally carried out on my shoulder,” he said. “I’ve also had people who consciously went into treatment.”

On June 21, he and friends Dean Smith and Kimberly Arendt headed to Brooklyn to “extract a 16-year-old girl who went up there to party,” he said in a Facebook post. He said the teen woke up in a hotel next to Sierra Schmitt, 20, who fatally overdosed on heroin.

Before they could make it, the trio of crusaders was pulled over by police at the Holland Tunnel for a cracked windshield around 7:40 a.m.

Police searched the Dodge SUV, which is covered in decals saying, “God Guns Guts Made America Free.” They found a trove of weapons including a .45-caliber handgun, an AR-15 rifle, a 12-gauge shotgun and four other semiautomatic handguns that were mostly all loaded.

All three were arrested and taken to Hudson County Correctional Center.

“I’m not the criminal people say I am,” Cramsey said. “There is a lot people don’t know yet.”

Gina Cramsey, however, thinks her ex’s actions are “phony and narcissistic.”

“He used her professional name to seek attention. He’s living in guilt and jumped into this Enough is Enough thing and used Lexii’s death to make his story look legit. He labeled my daughter as a closet heroin addict for his own benefit to make himself look good,” she said.

Back in Pennsylvania, locals, including Schmitt’s mom, call Cramsey a hero.

“Kudos to them that they tried to save these girls. There should be more people like that out there. They are heroes, not convicts. If I ever get to see them or meet them, I’d thank them,” Schmitt’s mom, Mandy Powell, told the Citizens’ Voice of Wilkes-Barre, Pa.

On Wednesday, Cramsey’s second attempt to lower his bail was denied by Superior Court Judge Martha Royster.

His attorney, James Lisa, says he’s working on an appeal.

In the meantime, Cramsey’s resolve has strengthened.

“We’re going to make the biggest heroin-awareness program that the state’s ever seen, and my daughter will be the heart of it,” Cramsey said. “I don’t want her to be remembered with drugs. This was new to her. This was innocence gone wrong.”