Scott and Spencer were the only two exposed. Hidden Valley was the perfect name.
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Scott Roth bought the heroin that ended his life in an apartment in Roanoke’s Grandin Village, a retail hub fifteen minutes from the Hidden Valley split-level where he was raised. A neighborhood where locals dine on regionally sourced produce, take yoga classes, watch subtitled movies, spend thousands on Stickley sofas, and crowd the weekly farmer’s market, the village is full of tree-lined streets and solid 1920s-era brick homes with expansive carports.
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.