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 to 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.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“I know,” she said.
With his mom’s help, he drafted a letter of apology to Robin Roth and mailed it to her therapist, who would decide when she was strong enough to read it. In it, Spencer offered, when he got out of prison, to mow her grass. From his prison cell, he would even donate to her the inheritance he received following his grandmother’s death.
All told, Spencer had already lost twelve friends from Hidden Valley to drug-involved deaths, and every dealer he knew was either dead now or in jail. And he would soon lose several more.
*
He was hale and hearty by the time his mother drove him to a minimum-security federal prison in Petersburg, Virginia, in August 2012. Drug-free for more than two years, Spencer admitted that he’d replaced his opioid addiction with kenpo karate, taking classes almost daily and learning breathing techniques to deal with the anxiety of going to prison. His karate instructor, Rikk Perez, had become a father figure to him; Spencer was estranged, off and on, from his own dad. Perez taught Spencer exercises he could practice in his cell, like slow foot taps that progress up a cinder-block wall.
Being fit brought Spencer a feeling of confidence as he left for prison, where he hoped to finish his bachelor’s degree. After his release, he planned to dedicate himself to helping young people with addiction, in memory of Scott Roth.
I called Robin the day Spencer’s mom helped him report to prison. She said knowing that Spencer was behind bars again brought her no comfort.
“I hurt as much today as the day my son died,” she said, choking up. “I pray for Spencer every day, that he’ll be strong. My heart’s breaking for that kid. But it’s the only shot he has at a normal life—to get some accountability.”
As the months wore on, Robin began to soften toward Spencer. That fall, she started spending her Friday nights with troubled teenagers and their worried parents in a setting similar to the court-ordered Saturday sessions where Spencer had spoken.
She was learning that in her loss, she was far from alone. She and Ginger both were beginning to see that all the sunflowers and speeches in the world would not slow the epidemic’s spread. Ginger, a minor celebrity in town from her own ads for her business as well as from a failed campaign for state delegate, was recognized as a friendly face. At her new Ginger’s Jewelry store, a day rarely passed when someone didn’t show up at her counter wanting advice on something other than gold. Distraught parents might pretend to shop for a few minutes, but before long they’d mention the newspaper articles, and the tear-filled stories would tumble out.
A pastor’s wife with two addicted sons drove from two hours away to search her out. A sixty-three-year-old nurse was struggling to take care of her infant grandson because her twenty-five-year-old heroin-addicted daughter could not.