Kim Foxx’s former trainer caught up in ‘unending cycle’ of drug arrests; ‘It breaks my heart’

Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx started working out in 2012 to cope with the grief after her mother’s death from cancer.

That’s when she met Juan Johnson at the gym, where he was a muscular trainer trying to hide his tattoos. Soon, he was her personal trainer.

The two bonded over their similar backgrounds. Foxx grew up in the now-demolished Cabrini-Green public housing complex, Johnson in a rough part of Humboldt Park.

“We had personal intimate conversations about our life and her life where she grew up and stuff like that,” Johnson said. “She just opened my eyes to a lot of stuff.”

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Raymond Galloway says that, even though his two drug possession arrests were soon thrown out, he was unable to work regularly for more than six months, resulting in more than $6,000 in lost wages.

When Foxx knew him, Johnson was a 210-pound weightlifting fanatic. Now, he weighs 140 pounds because of heroin use, which he resumed about five years ago following a long stretch of sobriety when he ran his training business and counted Foxx among his clients.

“It’s so painful, actually, to hear that he is not doing well,” Foxx said after learning for the first time of Johnson’s recent troubles. “It breaks my heart.”

Johnson’s was among several hundred low-level drug possession cases the Better Government Association and Chicago Sun-Times randomly chose to examine.

The arrests were concentrated in swaths of the West Side where drugs are sold at open-air markets. Most of the people arrested were older Black men like Johnson. Under state law, possession of any amount of controlled substance — even just the residue left in a baggie — is an automatic felony.

In interviews, Johnson revealed his relationship with Foxx while talking about his fitness career. He said he was Foxx’s trainer at a gym for a few years, and he did not do drugs during that period.

For him, the arrest was humiliating. He said he stopped communicating with Foxx because he was embarrassed about his drug use and his legal struggles stemming from it.

Foxx said she didn’t know about it. She remembers Johnson as “a sweet, humble guy.” He’d gotten out of prison for a federal gun conviction and had worked hard to become a trainer at the LA Fitness in Broadview, where they became friends, Foxx said.

“He talked about the struggle of finding employment and how grateful he was — with having the record that he had — to be able to do this,” she said.

Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx remembers Johnson as “a sweet, humble guy.”

“I think I paid him $30 an hour. I spent four mornings a week with him, six o’clock every day. He was on time every time.”

Johnson was arrested for drug possession in 2017, about a year and a half after he said he started using heroin again. A Chicago police officer pulled over his car in Brighton Park while he was working as a ride-share driver. Police said they found a straw and 0.4 of a gram of heroin in his wallet and towed his car. He was in jail for a week until he was released on bail. About two weeks later, his case was dismissed.

Johnson said he had to pay $3,000 to get his car out from the police impound lot. Last year, the city lowered such fees, which Mayor Lori Lightfoot had promised to do during her campaign.

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Alicia Hume, 42, outside her home in Metolius in central Oregon. — Alicia Hume saw her drug possession case dropped because of a new Oregon law — the first in the nation — making possession of small amounts of drugs the equivalent of a minor traffic infraction.

Johnson also lost his job because of the arrest. He wondered: “Am I going to go back to the streets?” He said he eventually got another job, but the arrest set him back financially.

Johnson remembers when Foxx was elected state’s attorney for the first time in 2016. He said he went on LinkedIn and congratulated her for “knocking out” incumbent State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez.

“I still got [Foxx’s] text that said, ‘She should have known better to go up against me,’ ” Johnson said.

But he said he was too ashamed about his arrest to congratulate Foxx on winning re-election in November 2020.

In an interview on a Humboldt Park bench, Johnson recalled his old life as a trainer. At the peak, he said, he made $5,500 a month training clients. This was during a period of sobriety he describes as one of the happiest periods of his life, when he had money, stability and peace of mind.

“And I let that go,” he said.

Foxx said she’s familiar with that.

“People in my family have struggled with addiction and arrests,” she said.

“The reality is for so many people who maybe are not ready for services or who have tried it for multiple years or who cannot unstick themselves from the addiction, it is just this unending cycle for them and for the people who love them, who root for them.”

Frank Main is a reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times. Casey Toner and Jared Rutecki are reporters for the Better Government Association. This story uses data from The Circuit, an Injustice Watch and BGA courts data project, in partnership with civic tech consulting firm DataMade. The University of Southern California’s Annenberg Center for Health Journalism provided support for the project through a 2021 National Fellowship.