In the summer of 2012, I followed Robin and Spencer as Spencer prepared for prison. I gave Spencer rides to karate classes, recording our conversations with his permission as I drove. At a KFC lunch buffet, I watched him cheerfully demonstrate a recipe he’d picked up during his earlier jail stint on state charges: blending packets of ketchup, Tabasco, and barbecue sauce.
I sat near his relatives as he graduated from drug court, looking childlike in his too-big suit. I spent a Saturday with him while he volunteered his time teaching first-time teenage drug offenders and their worried parents, who leaned in intently, trying to divine where Spencer’s parents had gone wrong. I found it impossible not to like the kid, honestly. I could ask him anything my mind conjured up, and he would answer me warmly and enthusiastically. He seemed more concerned about being honest than trying to control the narrative.
In a freewheeling talk full of advice and drug-detecting techniques that was half Scared Straight and half American Gangster, Spencer had parents alternately laughing, wincing, and crying as he displayed the needle-mark scars on his arms and the teeth once ruined by amphetamines, now restored by forty hours of dental work. He showed off his jailhouse tattoos, fashioned by burning Vaseline mixed with VO5 Shampoo and a contraband staple, though he’d since had those neatened up, too.
He discussed the dangers of black-market Adderall, an ADHD medicine and amphetamine he once took hourly for eight days straight. He recited a list of places where he’d hidden his stash as a teenager—inside computers, emptied Sharpie markers, and socks, and in the pockets of gym shorts he secretly wore under his jeans. “My mom made me empty the pockets of my jeans, but she didn’t know about the shorts,” he said.
He shared tips that, in my view, remain among the best prevention advice I’ve seen dispensed to parents of at-risk teens: Rid your medicine cabinets of anything that has codone, indicative of morphine components, in the name. Set rules and hold kids accountable when they break them, even if it means they go to jail. “The problem with me was, the trouble had to outweigh the fun,” he said. Though his mother, Ginger Mumpower, had sent him to fifteen different rehab facilities, for eight years Spencer managed to use and sell drugs before his name ever entered a police blotter.
He described what led to his decision to quit selling drugs after being targeted by local police in a catch-and-release drug bust in 2009. Hoping to convert him into a confidential informant, police had taken his drugs and told him, “We’re gonna wait for you to mess up again so we can catch you again and get you for more things,” Spencer recounted, an oversimplification that police only partially confirmed. The threat was enough to make him give up dealing, but in a case of warped reasoning he believed he could still keep using heroin without getting caught. He allowed his dealer to live with him in exchange for drugs.
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