by Beth Macy
Note from Tess Henry, Roanoke, Virginia
Chapter Nine
Whac-A-Mole
By 2014, the suburban heroin-dealing scene had become entrenched in Roanoke’s McMansion subdivisions and poor neighborhoods alike. But the largest dealers weren’t twice-convicted felons like Ronnie Jones with elaborate dope-cutting schemes, multiple cars, and hired mules. They were local users, many of them female, dispatched to buy the heroin from a bulk dealer out of state, in exchange for a cut. And they were as elusive as hell to catch.
Among Roanoke’s first long-haul drug runners was a pretty brunet in her midtwenties whose name reflected her Hawaiian heritage: Ashlyn Keikilani Kessler. What distinguished Ashlyn as one of the region’s top mules, according to the prosecutor who sent her to prison, wasn’t just the volume of drugs she was transporting; it was also her body’s astonishing ability to metabolize the drug without overdosing. (“Generally speaking, there are people who overdose all the time, then there are people like me who have never overdosed,” she told me.) At the peak of her addiction, Ashlyn was using fifty to sixty bags a day. “She had a remarkable liver,” her prosecutor said.
She was an unlikely addict, a young mom and paralegal with a criminal justice degree from Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University. But her descent into drugs followed a familiar story line: After the birth of her son, in 2008, she was prescribed Lortab for mastitis, an infection not uncommon among breastfeeding mothers. She had lingering lower-back pain, too—the baby’s head had been resting on her spine throughout her last trimester. When the Lortab ran out, her obstetrician wrote her another script, for oxycodone. Within six weeks of giving birth, Ashlyn said, she was hooked. When her doctor left town after a few months and his replacement refused her refill requests, she bought black-market OxyContin through a friend of a friend. She occasionally stole Lortab from her disabled octogenarian grandfather.
She switched to Roxicodone in 2010, when OxyContin became abuse-resistant, then to heroin when the black-market Roxys became more expensive and harder to get. “It’s unreal how many people followed that same pattern: Oxys-Roxys-heroin,” she told me. “If you ask me, OxyContin is the sole reason for all this heroin abuse. If I had the choice between heroin and Oxys, I would choose Oxys.…With pills, you always knew what you were getting.”
By the time her son learned to talk, Ashlyn was doing heroin and/or heroin business with most of the Hidden Valley users. She had grown up in the north Roanoke County suburbs, but she had made lots of friends from Hidden Valley and Cave Spring. “Places like Hidden Valley are where you can get some of the best heroin because those are the kids with parents that have money,” she said.
From the Kentucky federal women’s prison where she was serving a seven-and-a-half-year sentence for distributing between thirteen thousand and twenty-three thousand bags of heroin, Ashlyn charted out, via email, the trajectory of heroin’s suburban sprawl, with intersecting spheres of users she knew who were now dead or doing time. She pointed out news articles I’d missed about people she’d once used drugs with, including a young mother named April who’d recently overdosed in the parking lot of a Roanoke Dollar General store, with her infant found crying in the car seat. She knew Spencer Mumpower and Colton Banks. At the height of her addiction, she’d wept through Scott Roth’s funeral Mass.
She mapped out her spiral from user to dealer, from patient to criminal. Two years into her addiction, she was fired from her job for too often being late or absent. Her co-workers had no idea she’d been shooting up in a stall of the law-firm restroom where they worked. (She had to have surgery once after a heroin needle became stuck in her arm but told colleagues “some crazy lie that I’d cut it on a fence.”)
After her dismissal from the firm, Ashlyn stole from her family to buy drugs: credit cards, checks, even heirloom jewelry from her Hawaiian-born grandmother, who was now, at eighty, raising her elementary-school-age son. A relative visiting from Wahaii had predicted when she was a little girl that “Ashlyn is gonna break your heart,” her grandmother Lee Miller told me.
And, sure enough, Ashlyn did. “We enabled her,” her grandmother conceded; her grandparents paid for rehabs she typically left after only a few days. They sometimes gave her money to buy Suboxone on the black market, “because she’d get sick and have to turn to heroin if she didn’t have it.”
It was the car her grandparents bought, a 2013 Nissan Sentra, that led to Ashlyn’s undoing and eventually—once she was forced, behind bars, to get clean—her saving grace. A dealer approached Ashlyn about driving him back and forth to New Jersey for three bundles (or thirty bags) of heroin; he had a Newark “connect,” a relative with a source willing to sell to them in bulk. When they progressed to bricks, or fifty-bag allotments, they bought them for $100 each, then sold them back in Roanoke for six or seven times that, she said, and made the fourteen-hour round-trip trek three, sometimes four times a week. Her dealer typically sent his girlfriend along on these runs to keep an eye on Ashlyn, who was known to inject the heroin, swiping bags from their mutual stash, at rest stops en route to Roanoke.
“I now know that he enlisted me because I am a well-spoken, young white girl that drives a nice car, therefore it didn’t look [to police] like we were there for what we were really there for,” she wrote. More important, her craving for the drug was so insatiable—her skinny, desperate look practically screamed white female addict—that no Newark dealer would mistake her for an undercover cop.
When Ashlyn first landed in downtown Newark, heroin was so easy to get that the moment she left her car, a man approached her, wanting to know, “Hey, baby girl, what you lookin’ for?”
By 2014, when DEA agents and federal prosecutors caught up with her, the government’s case laid itself out in the fifteen thousand text messages recovered from her phone—enough evidence to map out a pyramid of addiction, from her New Jersey source to dozens of Cave Spring and Hidden Valley kids. The exchanges were marked by logistics, deals, and despair:
Can you meet me at Sheetz
on Peters Creek Road?
Whatcha got? Can you do two?
Yeah.
You got ten more? Can I owe ya?
Ashlyn was almost home when Virginia state police pulled her over on I-81 just north of Roanoke, ten minutes from the end of another Roanoke–Newark round trip. Unbeknownst to her, drug task force officers were following her movements with the help of a GPS tracker they’d hidden on the undercarriage of her car. She’d been on their radar six or seven days, ever since a former classmate overdosed on the heroin Ashlyn sold him. He lived, selling her out to an undercover cop in exchange for avoiding jail time.
Now, a week later, DEA agents were searching the trunk of her Nissan, beginning with her purple paisley Vera Bradley purse. They found the 722 bags of heroin, not so carefully hidden inside the monogrammed bag. (She and a friend had already blown through half a brick.) Now they were handcuffing the former paralegal and reading her her rights.
Ashlyn realized there was no story to tell herself that didn’t begin with the first of the Twelve Steps, she told me: She was powerless to overcome her addiction. She was about to lose her son, who was six at the time, because she had chosen heroin over him.
She watched as officers extracted her belongings from the car, including her Narcotics Anonymous book, left over from two earlier rehab attempts, which had been there all along, next to her purse.
As the interstate traffic roared by, the agents waved the NA book around, laughing about it. Then they tossed it on the ground, next to Ashlyn’s other stuff. It was windy and unseasonably brisk that September day, and she remembered shivering by the side of the road in her flower-print skirt, wedge sandals, and shirt, purple to match her purse.
The man in charge of prosecuting Ashlyn Kessler keeps a portrait of the American president James Garfield above his desk. Before he was named brigadier general in command of twenty-five hundred U.S. Army Reservists nationwide, Andrew Bassford was tasked with
the job of laying a wreath on the grave of each one of the eight Ohio-born presidents on the anniversary of his birth, then delivering a speech. Bassford viewed it as tedious but important work, the challenge being to say something inspiring while not repeating what he’d expounded on the year before.
Compared with the other Ohio presidents, Garfield is, in Bassford’s view, an overlooked gem. He was a beast of a worker, his rags-to-riches story so inspiring that Horatio Alger penned his campaign biography. Among Bassford’s favorite Garfield quotes: “Most human organizations that fall short of their goals do so not because of stupidity or faulty doctrines, but because of internal decay and rigidification. They grow stiff in the joints. They get in a rut. They go to seed.”
Bassford is also the assistant U.S. attorney in charge of prosecuting many of western Virginia’s heroin-distribution and overdose-death cases. That’s his primary job, the brigadier general position being a part-time gig that takes him out of town on weekends twice a month. He takes being a prosecutor seriously, this important but sometimes tedious business of sending people like Ashlyn Kessler and Spencer Mumpower to prison—though he’s the first to admit the system is inept and flawed.
From his high-and-tight haircut to his dress cowboy boots, Bassford exudes law and order, communicating in staccato sentences and wry one-liners, like a character from the television series Dragnet. On the timing of illicit drug sales, for instance: “Heroin is morning, crack is night.”
On the federal judge who halved the prison time specified by Ashlyn’s plea agreement, saying he was impressed by her perseverance, after her arrest, in a jail-based treatment program: “I think Judge Urbanski is trying to save those that he thinks can be saved.” (In 2017, Urbanski knocked Ashlyn’s sentence down even more.)
On what he thinks of law enforcement’s efforts to quell the opioid epidemic: Not much.
The system is too rigidified, as Garfield would say, not nimble enough to combat heroin’s exponential growth. The drug’s too addictive, the money too good. “You whack one [dealer], and the others just pop right up, like Whac-A-Mole,” Bassford said.
Bassford prosecuted Ashlyn and her dealer in 2015, but only after putting away her first heroin dealer, from southeast Roanoke, the white working-class neighborhood where heroin initially took hold in the city. Thirty-year-old Orlando Cotto had enlisted his girlfriend, his twin brother, an uncle, and a next-door neighbor to help him transport 60 grams of heroin every two weeks for distribution and use. They took turns meeting their supplier in the parking lot of a Burlington Coat Factory in Claymont, Delaware, clearing nearly $60,000 a month.
After Ashlyn went to jail, “I whacked four more,” Bassford said of subsequent dealers, all intertwined with Ashlyn’s and Cotto’s networks.
But the demand for heroin persisted, predicated on the evangelical model of users recruiting new users, and Bassford’s whacks could not keep pace. “We’ll score a huge drug bust that we’ve been working on for maybe a year, and all that does is create a vacuum in the market that lasts maybe five to seven days,” said Isaac Van Patten, a Radford University criminologist and data analyst for Roanoke city police. “And because the amounts of money involved are so vast, we’re not going to stamp it out.
“We don’t enjoy the cooperation of the supplier nations,” Van Patten explained, referring to drug-cartel production in western Mexico, South America, and Afghanistan, with profits estimated at more than $300 billion a year. “Their attitude is: ‘Tell your people who are wanting to consume our product, we’re going to supply it.’”
While Roanoke’s quietest heroin users were privileged and upper-middle-class—Van Patten called them the café crowd—it didn’t take long before suburban users like Ashlyn were casting their lot with former OxyContin addicts from the working-class Southeast who were already tapped into illicit networks, he said. “In the suburbs, heroin started out as a trendy drug that people believed they could control. But the rich kids spiraled right down with everybody else and then, suddenly, you couldn’t tell between the two.”
The rich kids were crashing alongside the poor kids on friends’ couches (the lucky ones, anyway), all of them cowering before the morphine molecule and beholden to its spell. Fifteen years earlier, Art Van Zee had predicted that OxyContin would eventually be recalled—but not until rich kids in the suburbs were dying from it. Now they were, and that pained him equally, he told me. “I was absolutely dead wrong.”
I thought of Tess Henry, the young mom I met in late 2015. The daughter of a local surgeon and a hospital nurse (they divorced when she was ten), Tess had grown up in multiple homes—one in the nicest section of Roanoke, with mountain-biking trails and the Blue Ridge Parkway abutting her backyard, the other on secluded Bald Head Island, North Carolina, accessible only via ferry.
Tess was a high school track and basketball standout, an honor-roll kid who would go on to study French at Virginia Tech and the University of North Carolina–Asheville, though she didn’t complete a degree. Among the things she loved to do before she fell into a raging, $200-a-day heroin habit were writing poetry, painting, reading, and singing to her dog, a black rescue mutt named Koda. (The two were particularly happy when Tess belted out the words to Train’s “Hey, Soul Sister” in the car.) Her favorite author in the world was David Sedaris; she’d run into him once in a local coffee shop after a reading, she told me, and he was so, soooo unbelievably nice.
Of Patricia Mehrmann’s four kids, Tess was the quietest, the one who voluntarily walked the dogs with her on the beach. Patricia emailed me a beach picture of the family Labrador, Charlie, and a ten-year-old Tess, all freckles and a toothy smile, with both arms wrapped around the dog. They liked to head out early at low tide to look for beach treasures. “She was the queen sand-dollar finder,” Patricia said.
But Tess struggled with anxiety from a young age, her relatives told me, recalling a panic attack she had as a young teenager on the way home to Roanoke from the beach. (“She thought she was dying,” Patricia remembered. “She was throwing up and calling me from the back seat of the car.”) At her private Catholic primary school, where students wore blue and khaki uniforms, Tess was stressed that her shoes weren’t right.
Tess was twenty-six when we met, a waitress-turned-heroin-addict. With a ruddy complexion and auburn hair, she wore leggings with long sweaters and liked to apply makeup cat-eye style, at the edges of her eyes, which were luminous and shifted color from brown to green depending on the light. She had consorted with most of the Hidden Valley crowd mentioned in this book, working not as a runner or mule but as a lower-level “middleman,” as she called herself. She did worse than that, too.
Perhaps she was genetically predisposed to addiction, her mom theorized; there were alcoholic relatives on both sides of the family. Tess’s older sister had been in recovery for five-plus years and was a devoted member of Alcoholics Anonymous. Perhaps, during Tess’s college experimentation phase, it was the twenty-five Lortab pills a friend gave her, left over from a wisdom-tooth extraction, that set her up for the ultimate fall. Tess knew only that her daily compulsion for opioids began in 2012, the same way four out of five heroin addicts come to the drugs: through prescribed opioids. For Tess, a routine visit to an urgent-care center for bronchitis ended with two thirty-day opioid prescriptions, one for cough syrup with codeine and the other for hydrocodone for sore-throat pain.
“When I ran out, I started looking for them on my own, through dealers,” first through the drug-dealing boyfriend of a fellow waitress at the restaurant where they worked, Tess said. Asked how she had known what to do, she told me she Googled it. “Because I was sick. Jittery. Diarrhea. All of it. I looked up my symptoms and what I’d been taking, and I realized, holy crap, I’m probably addicted.”
She could get anything she wanted from her dealer. In the beginning, she snorted five pills a day, usually Dilaudid, Roxicodone, Lortab, or Opana. Then, several months into the routine, almost overnight, the pill supply dried up. Tess b
lamed it on the DEA’s reclassification of hydrocodone-based drugs into a more restrictive category. “That made it harder for my dealer to get pills,” she said.
In October 2014, hydrocodone-based painkillers such as Vicodin and Lortab were changed from Schedule III drugs to Schedule II, the same category as OxyContin. Regulations now limited doctors to prescription intervals of thirty days or less, with no refills permitted, and patients who needed more had to visit their doctors for a new prescription, as opposed to having it automatically called in to a pharmacy. Before the rule took effect, patients could have their pills refilled automatically as many as five times, covering up to six months—one reason narcotic prescriptions quadrupled from 1999 to 2010, and so did deaths.
The so-called upscheduling had been controversial, with public opinion weighing in pro (52 percent) and con (41). Chronic-pain patients complained loudly about the added cost and inconvenience. “Just because the DEA cannot figure out how to control the illegal use of these drugs should not be a reason to penalize millions of responsible individuals in serious pain,” one critic wrote in a published letter to pharmacist Joe Graedon, The People’s Pharmacy columnist.
On a website set up by the DEA for public feedback, several patients warned that rescheduling the drugs would limit their availability and drive people to street drugs—particularly heroin.
Tess’s dealer adapted swiftly to the switch. “He said, here, try this—it’s cheaper and a lot easier to get,” she told me. Tess took her first snort of the light brown powder, same as she’d done with the crushed-up pills. He was a serious dealer, she said, an African American who sold the stuff but was strict about never using himself. “Not to sound racist or anything, but typically black opiate dealers do not use heroin. Good dealers don’t use what they sell because they know they would just use it all,” she said.
