Kristen Ochry still holds on to one of the final texts her son sent to family and friends – a chilling warning about the man he was buying pills from in order to get much-needed sleep.

“If anything happens, it’s this guy,” Ochry said, reading from that old text.

Her son, Nick Steckman, 25, was a young, aspiring writer who dreamed of a life in the arts. But his next chapter stalled amid a battle with addiction and the rollercoaster of recovery.

“He had been up for four days and just wanted to get some sleep,” she said.

But Steckman never woke up.

He died that night in November 2022 from a fentanyl overdose. Months later, the dealer that he warned his family about, Eric Traft-Johnson, faced justice for selling the drug.

Prosecutors agreed to drop a third-degree murder charge when Traft-Johnson agreed to plead guilty to a lesser drug offense in a separate case. 5 INVESTIGATES was in court as a judge sentenced him to seven years in prison.

“I would like to apologize,” he said to the court. “I never meant to hurt anybody ever. We all struggle with one thing or another, but mine was addiction, and I’m sorry.”

Face-to-Face

When Traft-Johnon went off to prison in St. Cloud, Ochry was left wanting more. She had questions for the last person to see her son alive.

“I just didn’t want to have these regrets that I didn’t get to speak my peace,” she said.

Ochry was eventually referred to a program at the Minnesota Department of Corrections that facilitates in-person meetings between victims or their families, and offenders. 

“We don’t reward people for participating. We don’t punish them for not participating,” said Sarah King, the DOC’s Restorative Justice coordinator.

But as Ochry soon learned, the process can take months or even years.

5 INVESTIGATES first sat down with Ochry in February 2024 and remained in constant communication as she received regular updates from facilitators working with Traft-Johnson in prison.

“He said, ‘I will 100-percent meet with her. I’ve been thinking about her,’” she recalled from one of the conversations with the facilitators. 

But as the months dragged on, the near-certain meeting seemed in doubt. 

Her phone rang out of the blue late last year: the DOC called off the meeting.

“Really shocked and disappointed,” Ochry said. “[They] just said they didn’t think he was mature enough to handle the conversation nor would he ever be.”

Rare Meet-ups

The DOC would not discuss this case but said many things can derail a meeting and the agency always gets the final say.

Data obtained by 5 INVESTIGATES shows Minnesota prisons typically receive dozens of requests but average less than two in-person meetings a year. 

“Of the ones that actually take place, we tend to have a lot of success,” said King, the person in charge of the program at DOC.

But the data tells a different story for Dr. Mark Umbreit.

As the founding director of the Center for Restorative Justice & Peacemaking at the University of Minnesota, Umbreit helped facilitate the first meeting within the Minnesota prison system 30 years ago. 

“To me, it is not reflective of the needs of the people who request this at all,” he said of the low numbers of in-person meetings. “It is disappointing in the sense that this is one of the most powerful interventions to serve people who have been deeply harmed by criminal activity.”

That first meeting that Dr. Umbreit facilitated was between the parents of Carin Streufert and the man who murdered her in June of 1991 in Grand Rapids, Minnesota.

The meeting went so well that Dr. Umbreit said it led to more meetings, and they all remain in touch today. He believes that success helped push DOC to establish the program – a partnership that he applauds today.

“The work that I’ve done with them over the years with severe, violent cases that they have referred to me has always gone exceptionally well,” he said.

Research from the Reason Foundation, a nonprofit Libertarian think tank focused on advancing individual freedom, found that more than 30 states offer some type of victim-offender dialogue in prisons.

But as Ochry found – and Dr. Umbreit has seen firsthand – months of prep can be for nothing.

Ochry says she’s not done trying to meet with Traft-Johnson. Just this week, he was released from a prison in northern Minnesota and is now under DOC supervision at a halfway house.

“I would if he’s still willing,” she said. “I would love to have the conversation. That hasn’t gone away. The things that I want and need to tell him are still there.”