Jeff Peterson stands in his Largo living room with his guitar.
His fingers start to move up and down the strings and a soft melody fills the room. Eyes closed, he starts to sing.
It’s a song about choice.
The song’s message hits close to home for Peterson. His daughter, Jessie, started doing drugs when she was 14.
"It’s hard for me to even talk about,” Peterson said. “I get all choked up because I’ve missed so many years with her."
Peterson said Jessie got into a bad crowd, started skipping school and running away from home.
“I could tell she was lying all the time, especially in the morning,” Peterson said. “She would wake up and her whole goal was to get up and go somewhere and get a fix and she would lie to get out of the house.”
Peterson recalls the almost 60 times he drove around at night looking for his daughter after she ran away from home.
“I try and figure out through phone calls and this and that where she might be and I will go there and look through abandoned houses and I will look through everything," Peterson said.
Things escalated so much that law enforcement got involved. Now almost 19, Jessie is rehab for the sixth time.
As an emotional outlet, Peterson grabbed his guitar. He wrote the song “Choice” which he will perform at the Narcotics Overdose Prevention and Education (N.O.P.E.) annual vigil.
“That’s kind of why I wrote this song, so all the kids, to be able to have some kind of word, even after dying, at least they can have some kind of word out there,” Peterson.
He’s performed the song before, but this year he recorded it, eager for his lyrics to touch more people.
“It happens to some kids, I was just hoping it wouldn’t happen to mine, but it did and I’ve gone through it and I learned from it and this song that I wrote came out of it and hopefully it will touch other people,” Peterson said.
Peterson hopes next year Jessie can join him at the vigil and share her story.
The N.O.P.E. vigil is on October 22 at 7 p.m. at Largo Central Park.