by Beth Macy
Her plan backfired when the emergency-room doctor returned with Scott’s test results. “It’s only marijuana, Mrs. Roth,” he said, a response that still sends her into a fury.
It was all the ammunition Scott needed, over the course of his remaining short life, to dismiss his mom’s warnings.
“Lighten up, Rob,” he told her.
But there was reason for Robin’s concern. Later, Scott admitted that he’d smoked his first heroin in 2006, around the time the news broke about the skin-popping weathermen. He was at a high school party when someone handed him a joint laced with heroin, and the high was so soothing, so enveloping, that he realized right away this was something special, something new.
“You think of heroin as seedy street slums, but that’s not at all how it started,” Robin told me. About a year after their ER visit, she found a needle and a syringe in Scott’s room and, figuring he was already in too deep, she left them there. Afraid he’d resort to sharing needles, she put him in rehab instead.
She tried everything she could think of to help her son, from attending Families Anonymous twelve-step meetings for relatives of people suffering from addiction to driving him to weekly drug tests at a doctor’s office. She took away his car after an alcohol-fueled fender bender in her driveway, and after he turned eighteen, she kicked him out of the house whenever she found him drinking or doing drugs. She had every door inside the house removed—including the ones to the bathrooms—so he could not hide his drug use inside her home.
When I met her, two years after her son’s death, she still had not gotten around to putting the doors back on. Racked with guilt and grief, she could no longer work. At Scott’s funeral Mass, friends had arrived with sunflowers, his favorite, placing them on the altar. Robin dried them and saved the seeds, and though she was too depressed to plant them the next year, a neighbor tilled up a garden plot in her side yard the following spring.
There she planted sunflowers by the hundreds. They grew so tall that they dwarfed her when she stood among them. It became her favorite place, her favorite thing to do, standing in the sunflower grove, listening to the wind chimes on a nearby apple tree that Scott had planted for her one long-ago Mother’s Day. She felt closest to him there, especially when the wind whipped down Sugar Loaf Mountain and through her subdivision, the chimes banging out their bittersweet tune.
That summer, Robin brought a cardboard box full of sunflower seeds for me to our first interview, wrapped up in a bow. Sunflowers were her touchstone, not unlike the 55 on Jesse Bolstridge’s football jersey. She texted me pictures of them repeatedly, along with snapshots of her very happy and very silly knife-wielding Vanilla Rice. She shared her favorite-ever picture, of a ten-year-old Scotty, the classic headless-at-the-beach trick where he’s buried in sand up to his neck.
In Roanoke, 2012 was the tail end of the epidemic’s stealth phase. Two hours up I-81 in the rolling farming country of the northern Shenandoah Valley, the epidemic was now rearing its head, too—though mostly still in pill form—and the news of its presence was even slower to emerge.
Jesse Bolstridge was now in high school and trading his ADHD medication Adderall to classmates who liked the way it allowed them to drink all night without passing out. In exchange, they plied him with painkillers, either bought on the black market or pilfered from their parents’ or grandparents’ medicine cabinets.
Like most parents of the addicted, Kristi Fernandez can’t pinpoint the moment when her son’s life became hostage to prescription pills. It was sometime after Jesse was diagnosed with Lyme meningitis at fifteen, sometime in between the half dozen high school football and snowboarding injuries that landed him in doctors’ offices and emergency rooms, where he was prescribed opioid painkillers including Oxycodone, Vicodin, and Percocet “thirties,” as he later referred to the 30-milligram pills, his drug of choice.
“The boy had so many rounds of stitches, so many concussions and broken bones from playing football, I lost track,” Kristi said. By his junior year, Jesse had sustained so many concussions that a neurologist told her he’d have to quit football if he got injured again.
What Kristi didn’t understand then was how much the drugs calmed him, dulled the purr of his motor, made him feel “normal,” as he would later confide. She didn’t know then, either, that Jesse and his friends were trading the bought and stolen pills around widely at so-called pharm parties.
Kristi remembers the first time someone in town suggested her son had a pill problem. Jesse had spent the night at a friend’s, and the friend’s mother called to accuse him of stealing Percocet from her bathroom cabinet. Kristi defended her son, even suggesting that it had been the woman’s son, not Jesse, who swiped the pills.
The manager of a temp agency, Kristi is a businesswoman. Civic-minded, she has always followed the news about nearby towns Strasburg and Woodstock. But the only 2010 stories that would have been of relevance to her son’s story had been occluded by bigger, headline-making news: the attempted bank robbery by a local young man, someone she didn’t then know. One among a small but growing group of area heroin users, Brandon Perullo had become so desperate in his dopesickness that he tried to rob a bank, donning a bandana and a black hoodie. He entered the bank twice before demanding cash by handing the teller a threatening note, but his jittery demeanor had already given him away. Brandon was arrested, unarmed, as he exited the building with $1,860 in cash.
At his February 2011 sentencing hearing, the twenty-seven-year-old described the growing problem in the region, offering to tell his story to teenagers to warn them away from the drug. “No mistake is too big that I can’t bounce back from,” Brandon told the judge, who sentenced him to three and a half years in prison.
In a quaint town full of historical markers and pricey antiques, the bank robbery in Woodstock made headlines across the Shenandoah Valley. Brandon’s mother, Laura Hadden, begged the local newspaper to write about the growing heroin scourge. Her son wasn’t the only one buying pills and heroin from mules and commuter dealers driving to Baltimore, she told an editor. “But they blew me off. It was more interesting to write about my son being arrested for robbing a bank!” she said.
Just before Brandon left for prison, in 2011, the local sheriff teamed with school prevention workers to hold the first community-wide meeting about opioid addiction.
Stigma was the real enemy of hope for the drug-addicted, Hadden decided. So to tamp it down, she decided her job was to explain the misunderstood science of addiction: Once a person becomes addicted, he loses his power of choice; his free will becomes hijacked along with the opioid receptors in his brain. When a person’s natural opioids are shut down by the deluge of synthetic ones, she told the audience at the community meeting, it creates a growing tolerance to the drug, making the brain crave ever-larger quantities of opioids just to keep from being violently ill.
Hadden asked the parents to imagine this: You haven’t been able to eat for three days, and you’re starving. Then someone shoves a plate of delicious food in front of you and leaves you alone with it—but it’s strictly off-limits.
Because of the urge to quell that insatiable hunger, she told them, young people in their midst were now “driving up to Baltimore, bringing the heroin back here, and selling it like crazy. People you don’t even think would be using heroin are using it.”
But Hadden’s lesson about dopamine-overloaded neurons and Baltimore drug deals fell on the deaf ears of the select attendees. No one wants to believe that heroin will ever touch the veins of their children.
“Maybe ten people showed up, and no one asked me a single question,” she recalled. “The response was a joke.”
Years later, not long after her son was released from prison, Hadden began a second, more urgent round of drug-prevention advocacy. Soon after Brandon got out, he moved to New York, to live near his father and his tight-knit extended Italian family, because it was almost impossible to get hired anywhere around Woodstock with a felony record.
Brandon was doing well at first, working for his dad and teaching bodybuilding on the side. But seven months after his release from prison, he relapsed. His family encouraged him to seek treatment, Hadden said, but it was as if some remote dictator had claimed eminent domain on his brain. He died two weeks later from an overdose of cocaine and heroin.
His mother believes her son died by suicide, driven by his outsized fear of becoming dopesick. “I wonder, to this day, whether he just couldn’t do it anymore,” she told me.
Two days before his death, Brandon posted on Facebook: “I hope people remember all the good I’ve done.”
Kristi had not been among those Brandon’s mom tried to warn in 2011. If Jesse had any problem at all, she told herself, it had to do with pills, not heroin. But over the next year, her own mother’s wedding ring would turn up missing along with some cash and more pills. And Kristi could deny the severity of her son’s addiction no longer. Her husband, Jesse’s stepdad, insisted she install a lock on their bedroom door.
And though she still feels guilty about it, she did.
In 2012 there weren’t yet Facebook groups to connect the suffering parents in different parts of the state, to share tips about rehab and coping strategies, or to offer physical and monetary support.
Back then Robin Roth felt as if she walked around Roanoke with a giant F on her forehead, branded as a parenting failure. She suffered in silence and anger, much of it directed toward the young man she held responsible for the death of her only child. At Spencer Mumpower’s 2012 federal court sentencing, Robin carried a framed portrait of Scott to the witness stand. She looked directly at Spencer, his dark mass of curly hair now neatly shorn, and leveled a litany of questions designed to make him understand the pain his actions had caused:
“Spencer, will you be there to visit me when I am old and lonely? Neither will Scott.
“Spencer, will you be there to eat dinner with me, mow my lawn, and wish me a happy birthday? Neither will Scott.
“Spencer, will you be there to hold my hand when I am sick and dying? Neither will Scott.”
Her anger was so palpable that U.S. District Court Judge James Turk, an affable octogenarian who shook every defendant’s hand and brought his dachshund mix, Baby Girl, to court, encouraged her to meet with Spencer before he left for prison. Turk had already sentenced the dealer who supplied the drugs to twenty years; Spencer had played middle man in the deal, pleading guilty and helping prosecutors nab his roommate dealer in exchange for a lighter, eight-year sentence.
“I think it would help you,” Turk told Robin, gently, from the bench, as Spencer sat.
But Robin declined, saying she wasn’t ready.
In the summer of 2012, I followed Robin and Spencer as Spencer prepared for prison. I gave Spencer rides to karate classes, recording our conversations with his permission as I drove. At a KFC lunch buffet, I watched him cheerfully demonstrate a recipe he’d picked up during his earlier jail stint on state charges: blending packets of ketchup, Tabasco, and barbecue sauce.
I sat near his relatives as he graduated from drug court, looking childlike in his too-big suit. I spent a Saturday with him while he volunteered his time teaching first-time teenage drug offenders and their worried parents, who leaned in intently, trying to divine where Spencer’s parents had gone wrong. I found it impossible not to like the kid, honestly. I could ask him anything my mind conjured up, and he would answer me warmly and enthusiastically. He seemed more concerned about being honest than trying to control the narrative.
In a freewheeling talk full of advice and drug-detecting techniques that was half Scared Straight and half American Gangster, Spencer had parents alternately laughing, wincing, and crying as he displayed the needle-mark scars on his arms and the teeth once ruined by amphetamines, now restored by forty hours of dental work. He showed off his jailhouse tattoos, fashioned by burning Vaseline mixed with VO5 Shampoo and a contraband staple, though he’d since had those neatened up, too.
He discussed the dangers of black-market Adderall, an ADHD medicine and amphetamine he once took hourly for eight days straight. He recited a list of places where he’d hidden his stash as a teenager—inside computers, emptied Sharpie markers, and socks, and in the pockets of gym shorts he secretly wore under his jeans. “My mom made me empty the pockets of my jeans, but she didn’t know about the shorts,” he said.
He shared tips that, in my view, remain among the best prevention advice I’ve seen dispensed to parents of at-risk teens: Rid your medicine cabinets of anything that has codone, indicative of morphine components, in the name. Set rules and hold kids accountable when they break them, even if it means they go to jail. “The problem with me was, the trouble had to outweigh the fun,” he said. Though his mother, Ginger Mumpower, had sent him to fifteen different rehab facilities, for eight years Spencer managed to use and sell drugs before his name ever entered a police blotter.
He described what led to his decision to quit selling drugs after being targeted by local police in a catch-and-release drug bust in 2009. Hoping to convert him into a confidential informant, police had taken his drugs and told him, “We’re gonna wait for you to mess up again so we can catch you again and get you for more things,” Spencer recounted, an oversimplification that police only partially confirmed. The threat was enough to make him give up dealing, but in a case of warped reasoning he believed he could still keep using heroin without getting caught. He allowed his dealer to live with him in exchange for drugs.
When Scott Roth showed up at Spencer’s apartment to buy heroin, the two hadn’t seen each other since high school at Hidden Valley, some three years before. They were never best friends, just drug buddies who hung out in the basement of the home of a fellow partyer whose dad gave them space to get high and routinely shot up heroin in front of them, according to both Spencer and Robin Roth.
Spencer played go-between in the deal, a move that resulted in death by overdose for Scott in April 2010 and prison for Spencer and his roommate dealer.
When Scott showed up on his doorstep that night, Spencer was already a full-blown heroin junkie. In his jailhouse mug shot, his eyes are bruised and sunken, and there are chicken-pox-like scabs on his face—from the itch of amphetamines, to which he was also addicted. He weighed 135 pounds.
“One day in jail I realized I could touch these two fingers around my forearm,” he told me, making a C out of his thumb and middle finger. “It meant I was a junkie.” When fellow inmates teased him about how skinny he was, he started lifting weights in his cell. He fashioned them out of trash bags he filled with water, tying them with bedsheets ripped into strips. He used the money his mom put on his jail commissary account to amass multiple cartons of milk, to help build up his muscles—by trading ramen noodles and bags of coffee for his cellmates’ quarts of milk.
For eleven months, his mother refused to bail him out, and even though she knew that jails and prisons could be rife with drugs, she also believed that jail was her best chance for keeping Spencer alive while he awaited federal sentencing. She encouraged church friends and relatives to write to him. His sister, Paris, an art student, mailed poems and drawings. Ginger sent him inspirational song lyrics, copies of pages she’d marked from the Bible and The Purpose Driven Life.
His lawyer, Tony Anderson, recalled his transformation: “After six months of begging for his mother to bail him out, he finally hit bottom and accepted he had nowhere to go but up.” Spencer soon realized, “I like being clean. I like being sober. I like being able to talk to my mother and she talks to me, and I get what’s going on here.”
As his counselor Vinnie Dabney remembered it, “Fifteen rehabs had not convinced Spencer that it was not in his best interests to get high. It took time in jail and a friend dying before he could decide he wanted to change.”
In our interviews, Spencer was alternately immature and wise. His goal, he told me, was to get in shape, physically and mentally; to earn some karma before he went away t
o federal prison. “God knows, I’ve got a lot I need to build back up,” he said.
He was happy to school me on drug culture—how he’d once saved his lunch money to buy weed and cocaine, the way he extracted the gel out of a fentanyl pain patch and smoked it, where the best places were to find drug dealers (loitering outside Narcotics Anonymous meetings). Driving by a diabetes-supply pharmacy, he recalled once buying OxyContin off a pharmacy delivery driver. The driver was eventually arrested. “But somehow he had another six hundred or seven hundred pills the next day. That’s a shitload of dope.” he said.
Spencer talked about his drug counselor, Dabney, who years before had been a mostly functioning heroin user for three decades, snorting a much less potent form. “It’s hard to explain, but some people can manage it. Like if I knew that none was gonna be in till Friday, and it’s Tuesday, and I normally do ten bags a day but I only have thirty left, I would do the math and make sure I had enough to last till Sunday…because you’ll do anything to make sure you’re not dopesick.”
He even offered parenting advice for one of my friends, whose son had already been busted for smoking weed, once in a northern city, where it was deemed a misdemeanor, and once on a Blue Ridge Parkway overlook—where it was on federal property and therefore a federal offense. “When he’s eighteen, tell him to move to a state where [marijuana] is legal. Until then, tell him he’d better start lifting weights because he’s not gonna do well in jail. Scare the hell out of him, if you can. But honestly, there’s only a small percentage of kids you can get through to. When I was that age, I didn’t want to hear it either.”
Spencer was making amends to his mother, apologizing almost daily for the hell he’d put her through and helping with her latest jewelry-store opening. As she recalled committing him to a psychiatric facility after he’d busted himself out of a Christian rehab in West Virginia, Spencer immediately stood up and walked over to hug her for maybe the fourth time that day.
