As Spencer Mumpower prepared for prison for handing Scott Roth the heroin that resulted in his life-ending overdose, I spent the summer of 2012 trying to make sense of how two young men with educated, caring mothers and movie-star good looks could keep the severity of their drug habits hidden for so long. I wanted to alert readers to the growing scourge of heroin in our community, and with two teenage sons still at home, I hoped to inoculate my own family, too.
After all, information is power, I told myself. I talked to my older son about heroin so much that one of the last things he said to me when we dropped him off at college that fall was “I know! Don’t do heroin!” He rolled his eyes with an annoyance reserved for the exceedingly daft.
*
In the photo Robin Roth chose for her only child’s obituary, Scott Roth looked like one of the Backstreet Boys. Blond and breezy, he called his mom Rob and wore madras shorts and Izod shirts. He went by the nickname Vanilla Rice, from a cooking job he had at a Japanese steakhouse where he stunt-cooked tableside, juggling knives and shrimp, rapping as he chopped.
He was a likable young man, polite to strangers, nice to his single mom. He loved the sunflowers she grew on their spacious lawn. She was only mildly annoyed when he invited his friends home to cook for them, using up all the food she’d bought to last them the week.
He’d been using drugs off and on roughly since the age of seventeen, in 2006. The first time he came home clearly impaired, his mom decided to respond boldly. A registered nurse, she wanted to scare him a little, so rather than give him a take-home drug test from CVS, she took him to the emergency room.
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.