his father, commuting ninety miles one way to the D.C. suburbs, where they worked on a government contract and Jesse earned $1,000 a week.
He was a good worker. He was pleasant to be around. And he lived rent-free with his mom. And so Kristi was stymied, later that summer, when the overdraft notices from Jesse’s bank started piling up.
“I can’t stop,” he finally admitted to his mom. He was spending $200 a day on black-market opiates, he told her, and asked for help returning to rehab in Florida. He was so high then that she refused to allow him to come home, to protect his younger sisters. But she arranged for him to stay in a nearby town with her sister, who made him hamburgers that night and let him sleep on her couch. He used what she believed was the last of his money to buy an airline ticket to Jacksonville. He was forty-eight hours away from a do-over, the insurance and admissions paperwork already arranged.
And yet Kristi still didn’t comprehend the depth of her son’s addiction. “I hate to even say it, but I thought he was going back to rehab for ‘just pills.’” Jesse still looked like a linebacker, after all. He was handsome and tanned. He hadn’t missed a day of work at his construction job. “They’d leave at four a.m., and that’s not easy work,” she said. He had plans to start community college in January 2014, then transfer to a four-year university. His goal was to become a phys-ed teacher, coach, or sports medicine trainer. He hungered still for the football field.
The idea that her son was shooting up heroin hadn’t crossed her mind, she said, then corrected herself: The truth was, the thought had crossed her mind; she just hadn’t let it roost. Despite evidence to the contrary. Despite having already padlocked her bedroom door, to keep Jesse from stealing money for drugs.
Only later would she learn about the spent syringes found on the Porta-John floor at the construction site where Jesse worked. Only later would she understand that Jesse lied about his dismissal from a warehouse job a year earlier. He swore he had nothing to do with the syringes his boss found in the bathroom, and Kristi believed him. How could someone who looked that robust be addicted to heroin?
It was late September 2013, and news of Jones’s heroin ring hadn’t yet appeared in the local press, though several arrests had already been made, and federal agents were working with local police from seven counties to target the leaders of what they were privately calling one of the largest heroin rings in the state. The region’s pill problem had become a full-fledged heroin epidemic in the span of just a few months.
But the only ones to know about it—other than the addicted—were a handful of cops.
*
That Friday night, two days before Jesse was scheduled to fly to a Jacksonville treatment center for his do-over, Dennis was deep in the throes of dopesickness when he and Jesse stole insulin needles from Jesse’s grandmother and bought heroin.
“I was puking,” Dennis recalled of their last day together. “I told him, I was like, ‘I gotta gotta get this dope.’”
“I’m not trying to do dope,” said Jesse, who’d spent the summer injecting black-market Roxys. But the pills had worn off, and he, too, had been throwing up off and on all day. He tried eating his two favorite foods—McDonald’s chicken nuggets and macaroni and cheese—but couldn’t keep them down.
As soon as Dennis made the buy, Jesse relented, deciding it would be his final hurrah before returning to rehab. They hosted a going-away party at a friend’s house. Late that night, a mutual friend broke down crying when she saw Jesse shoot up in front of people; he’d never before been so open about his heroin use, she told me.
But Jesse assured his friends that he liked the rehab he was returning to. Even though he missed his mom and twin teenage sisters, Jesse said, he liked being with people his age going through the same struggle as he was. He hugged Dennis’s girlfriend, Courtney Fletcher, and told her, “I promise, I’m gonna be OK.”
*
The next morning, as several friends left to go four-wheeling, Jesse came out of the spare bedroom complaining of a headache. Courtney offered him Tylenol from her purse, but Jesse declined and returned to the bedroom, she said.
Two hours later, Dennis saw that Jesse’s door was cracked open and went in to