run to you, but I still have these prison clothes on, and I’m afraid they’ll shoot me!” he shouted, only half joking.
“That’s OK,” Ginger hollered back. “I’ll run to you.” There was almost no weekend since Spencer began his prison sentence, in 2012, when she hadn’t visited him in federal prison and/or put money on his commissary account, almost no month in which she had not tried to coax prosecutors, lawyers, politicians, probation officers, and even judges to grant her only son an early release.
That August, exactly a year after my prison interview with Ronnie Jones, Ginger left her Roanoke jewelry store, located on the fringes of Hidden Valley, and drove to a North Carolina halfway house to pick up Spencer, who had been living there for six months since his prison release. He was free to finally leave his confinement, all exquisitely toned 165 pounds of him, with a body that could deadlift five hundred pounds, in sets of five reps.
Sober for seven years, Spencer had replaced his heroin and methamphetamine addiction with martial arts even before he’d left for federal prison. The jujitsu practice had sustained him throughout his incarceration—even when his girlfriend dumped him and when his former martial-arts teacher and onetime father figure was arrested and jailed for taking indecent liberties with a teenage female student.
Spencer stuck to his recovery and to his prison workouts, ignoring the copious drugs that had been smuggled inside, and he read voraciously about mixed martial arts. Using the Bureau of Prisons’ limited email system, he had Ginger copy articles about various MMA fighters—laboriously pasting in one block of text at a time—so he could memorize pro tips and workout strategies and, eventually, through her, reach out directly to fighters and studio owners for advice.
If all goes well, Spencer will be taking the geographic cure when he moves to another Virginia city, which he doesn’t care to name, to work for one such studio—once his probation officer signs off. While he was enjoying his new freedom, the reality of life after prison was also settling in. Prison had given him post-traumatic stress disorder, he told me, and his transition to the outside world was proving to be far harder than he’d imagined. Sleeping in a room without the lights on or anyone else nearby made him nervous, as did driving a car. Ginger drove him to the gym most days, or he took an Uber, which didn’t exist in Roanoke when he left for prison in 2012. To help with his PTSD, he planned to get a service dog.
*
Scott Roth’s mom, Robin, still texted me regularly with pictures of sunflowers, along with images of Vanilla Rice pretending to cook with a sword, and another jokey one of him donning her fur coat the Christmas before he died. She texted a picture of an eighth-grade Scott, blond and bespectacled and wearing a classy black tux to his Catholic-school dance. He’d insisted she buy him a dozen roses for the dance, not just for his date but also for the girls who didn’t have one, she wrote; a trail of sunflower emojis decorated her note.
Still engulfed in her grief, Robin Roth had been mourning her son’s death now for eight years, and she was occasionally asked by his old friends for help getting into treatment, which she happily extended. She wanted me to convey both the depth of her grief and the ways in which she believed she had failed her son: “I wish I would have built him a stronger support system. I thought I could do it all as a single mom. I made a mistake. Find at least four adults your young adult can trust and turn to. Know their names and let them know that you are counting on them to help you assist your child to make good choices.
“Whatever rules you make, you better stick to them. Your son or daughter depends on it. They will call your bluff on everything. Don’t you budge. Changing the rules only confuses a young, developing mind.”
Two years earlier, Robin had moved into an apartment, downsizing from the suburban split-level where she’d raised her only child. It had been hard to leave the Hidden Valley home: the place where she’d removed all the bathroom doors, thinking that might keep Scott from shooting up; the yard where she’d grown the massive sunflower field after his death.
Occasionally, stray sunflowers still sprout up in the yard of her former home—eight feet tall, some of them,