One family's purchase of a drug house started a year of bizarre experiences, and opened a door into another family's hell. One family's purchase of a drug house started a year of bizarre experiences, and opened a door into another family's hell.
'But where shall wisdom be found?/And where is the place of understanding?' Staggering numbers of American parents lose their children to drug overdoses: legions of children their parents. Top right is the late Devin Roberts, son and father, and below is the Maryland manor in which his death was peddled.
The house on Sly Fox Lane needed cosmetic repairs, the listing said, and was being sold as is, which to Darren meant seeing past a few blemishes to its good bones and thereby score a great deal.After looking at the wildly overgrown lawn and finding the front door conveniently, if unexpectedly, wide open, Darren, Michelle, Gunnar, 16, and Maia, 13, stepped inside . Off to the side of the foyer was a stash of ATV parts , and ahead beckoned the main staircase.
“I’m standing on the front porch,” says Michelle, “and these two guys pull up in a Corvette. One guy gets out and he’s wired to the car.”“Wired to the car. With wires. He can’t move away from the car because he’s wired to it for some reason.”“He says: ‘Do you have my mail? We used to live here,’” Michelle tells me. “So I tell him that I do have some things, and I hand him mail—scared to death, because he is a big guy. They are two big gentlemen.
“Ma’am,” said the Marshal. “We’re looking for some people who used to live here.” He pulled out photos of the gentlemen who had stopped by for their mail.“No ma’am.” The Marshal said that her residence had been a convenient layover for the Corvetteers on their drug runs up and down the New York-Florida corridor, but word had spread that the house had changed status. “So don’t worry about it. You’re safe.
One day a group of four appeared. “They look like a couple Amish kids coming up with no hair on their lip—just a beard—and they had two girls. They were like, yeah, ‘Uh, where’s J.T. at?’ And I’m like, ‘JT doesn’t live here anymore.’ So he goes, ‘Well, he told us to come here.’” , who hadn’t known what went down at Sly Fox Lane until she started following her son. “I was a hypervigilant mother.”
“I didn’t realize how far into drugs he was , but he started going and getting Percocets and other pills for the pain,” says Tracey. Their insurance with Kaiser Permanente only covered so much, and after two weeks she told Devin he was going to have to get off the meds. But by then—and even well before then, as she came to understand—his priority was his habit. And at $25 a bag, heroin was cheaper than pharmaceuticals.
His mother was chewed at by a constant expectation of the end. “Every day, you never knew when it was the last that you’d see your son,” she says.“Oh yeah. I was like, ‘Look, Devin, I’m your mother. I love you. Whether you’re good, you’re bad or ugly, and at this part of the game here, it doesn’t matter. You need to let me know what is going on so I can help.’”
Much harder to get than dope: methadone. Cutting Devin’s hair one time she found herself wanting to save a lock—as a future relic. “I knew I was gonna lose my son,” Tracey says. “It wasn’t a matter of whether I was or wasn’t. I knew without a shadow of a doubt—it was a matter of when am I going to get that call.”“I lived every single day worried. I was always tracking him. Calling people and asking, ‘Have you guys seen him?’ ‘Yeah he just left here.
“About a week before he died he looked at me and said, ‘Mom, I have burned all my bridges and now I’m not sure how I’m gonna come out of this.’ He knew it. He knew that he had exhausted all jobs, all money, cars. Financially we were just buckled trying to keep this kid moving forward—trying to keep him in different programs to get clean.”
From left in 2013: Devin’s father, Marty; his son, Kayden, Devin himself, his firstborn son, Levi; his mother, Tracey. , shaving down what was an hour’s drive under normal conditions. “My husband was trying to be very optimistic, but I knew—I was like, ‘He’s dying. He’s dying.’” It also allowed time to call more family in to farewell the stricken young man. Furthermore, Tracey says the transplant team treated her with much more respect than the regular crew at the hospital, to whom she supposes Devin was just another addict exiting.“I had to make the call,” she says. “They had a tube down his throat and it was filling up with blood. At that moment, you have to decide whether you want to see your child suffocate on his own blood, or to let him go.
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