DRUG COURT: SOME FALL BACK INTO OLD HABITS

PORTSMOUTH - It is hard to know who will succeed.

They're all felons. They're all hooked on marijuana or cocaine or heroin.
They all say they want to rid their lives of drugs. Every Wednesday, they
troop into a second-floor courtroom to tell a judge about their progress.

In the city's drug treatment court, days of sobriety are rewarded, and dirty
urine tests can be punished with time in jail. Often, the room erupts in
applause. Sometimes, it goes quiet while the judge talks from the bench.

Circuit Judge Johnny E. Morrison tries not to guess what will happen to each
person. But he says he has noticed that those who make it tend to be in
their 30s or older. They value their families. They have faith in God, and
they are willing to break down their old identities and undergo excruciating
makeovers.

Those who fail chafe against structure and discipline, and one lapse can be
so embarrassing that they never return. In three years, 153 people have
entered Portsmouth's drug court. Sixty-three have been asked to leave, and
some were sent to jail. By mid-summer, 32 will have graduated.

Here are the stories of two men, one who made it and one who did not.

Ralph E. Scott Jr. (right) stood before Morrison to be sentenced in
September 2001.

He was 38 and had been ravaged by heroin. His clothes hung on a 130-pound
frame. His cheeks were hollow, his eyes dull.

He had been living in a condemned house that was once part of the Ida
Barbour public housing community where he grew up. His father wasn't around
much, but other men were. They gave him beer and wine when he was 10. By age
11, he was smoking weed.

His mother was on welfare, and to help pay the bills, Scott started
stealing. At 14, he was locked up for the first time. He tried heroin when
he was 16, and it took him to a place he never wanted to leave. His problems
were gone. He was invincible. He could do anything at any time, and it
didn't matter.

Then one day, he felt his whole body burning up inside. His nose was
running, his eyes were tearing and his skin felt like something was crawling
on it. An older drug user told him that more heroin would make him feel
better.

That's how Scott learned that he was hooked. He was 19.

He began selling to support his habit. For a day or an hour, he was Ralph,
The Man, The King of the World on the corner of Lexington and Columbus. The
attention was almost as addictive as the drugs.

Still, he realized that most drug dealers he knew ended up in jail or dead.
He realized that giving free heroin to people who felt sick was like killing
them slowly. He realized that he could end up in the Dead Zone, the streets
where people walk like zombies, with nothing in their heads or their hearts
but the next fix. A few times, he admitted himself to rehab.

When he was in his early 30s, he moved to Norfolk and got a job at a
shipyard. He soon grew bored. One day, he just took off, back to his old
life in Portsmouth. He overdosed twice. The second time, another man left
him . He stayed unconscious for more than five hours, until he was stirred
by a voice that he thought was God: Get up. It's not your time yet.

The addiction woke him every morning, and on good days, he remembered to
sleep with a fix by his side.

In December 1998, he was arrested for possessing heroin, but the case was
later dismissed.

Then, on a March day in 2001, a police officer followed him into a condemned
house and saw him drop two syringes. Scott's belt was wrapped around his
arm, which was spotted with blood from where he had just shot up. A charred
bottle cap with fragments of heroin was on the floor, and the air smelled of
the drug being cooked up.

Scott was charged again with possession. Six months later, he pleaded
guilty, and Morrison sentenced him to drug court. In September 2001, the
same month that Scott was sentenced, a skinny 18-year-old man with no prior
criminal record pleaded guilty to possessing cocaine.

Tiyon T. Brown (left) was sentenced to one year of probation.

He was born in Dayton, Ohio, and moved to Portsmouth when he was a boy. He
grew up in the city's Cradock section with his mother, father, sister and
brother.

At first, he did well in school. But he got distracted easily, and
sometimes, his mother would find him sketching when he was supposed to be
doing homework.

His father, who was in the Navy, moved out when he was young. They continued
to see each other, but Brown started having problems. His grades suffered,
and he began mouthing off more.

He took his first drink when he was about 15 and told his mother it made him
sick. He also started smoking pot.

After being suspended from school several times, Brown got into a fight and
was expelled from Wilson High School. He attended a Job Corps program in
Washington but did not finish.

Often, he lived with girlfriends and returned home only when he had a fight
with one of them. His mother couldn't keep track of him and didn't allow
some of his friends in the house. Still, he seemed to stay out of trouble.

Then, in June 2001, police saw him throw a pill bottle into a yard. It
contained a small amount of crack cocaine. An officer searched Brown and
found marijuana in his pocket.

The arrest surprised his parents. His mother, who works as a hotel
housekeeper, thought she would be able to recognize when someone was on
drugs, yet she couldn't tell with her son. Even sober, his attention
wandered.

Brown was put on probation in October 2001. He told a probation officer that
he smoked marijuana regularly and had tried cocaine but didn't like it. He
completed a substance-abuse program and went with his father to look for
work. He could always find odd jobs, but he had nothing permanent.

Less than two months before his yearlong probation was scheduled to end, his
urine tested positive for cocaine. He went back before a judge and was sent
to drug court. By the time Brown joined the program in November 2002, Ralph
Scott had been participating for more than a year. At first, he was
homeless. On Thursdays, he would go to Holy Trinity Outreach Mission for a
free lunch and then stay for the service. The pastor allowed him to live in
her van and then in the church. For three months, she drove him to his court
appointments.

Scott knew many of the participants from the street.

They spent a lot of time in group sessions, and their talks were fiery.
Sometimes, Scott cried. He was angry at his brother and sisters, who let him
steal for them when he was young but cut him out of their lives when he was
older and struggling.

He also attended classes on how to make better decisions and build
self-esteem. He was learning how to be a man, something no one had taught
him growing up. The court required him to get a job, so he cleaned floors
for Food Lion. He spent his first paycheck on an afternoon at MacArthur
Center, where he watched five movies, one after another. Over time, he got
back his taste for food and gained 80 pounds.

He avoided the old neighborhood by going to the public library and reading
the Bible. He started attending church regularly at Portsmouth Christian
Outreach Ministries, where his support group met. During services, he would
stare across the room at a beautiful woman with shiny black hair. It took
him a month to work up the nerve to ask Althea Trotter for a date. Scott
recited to her the poems he had composed during lonely nights on heroin . He
looked at her and realized there was something else to live for.

It was difficult to tell her about his former life. When he did, one
afternoon in May 2002, she told him, "Your past is your past."

They were married that June.

Two months later, Scott's mother died. The people in drug court wondered if
it was his time to fall. But he thought of his wife and his new
responsibilities and kept going.

In December of that year, he graduated from drug court. He had never missed
a session or been late, and not one of 151 urine tests showed a trace of any
illegal drug. He had been off cocaine and heroin for 431 days.

"I stand, and I still stand today, because I have my priorities straight,"
he told the audience at graduation. "This is just the beginning."

Scott kept going to drug court sessions even after he graduated, and he knew
almost everyone in the program, including Tiyon Brown.

The young man said the right things but did not seem ready for a change,
Scott thought. Brown's first drug test, the day after his sentencing, showed
traces of opiates. He would be clean for months after that, though. He
completed a life-skills training course. He got a certificate for 30 days of
sobriety and another for 107 days. He had his picture taken with the judge.

But he was supposed to get a steady job, and he didn't. Problems with his
job search broke drug court rules, and he was sent to jail on three
occasions, for a total of nine days.

In May 2003, after Brown was charged with traffic infractions, his probation
officer gave him an 8 p.m. curfew. He failed to keep it.

Then he didn't come to drug court, and Morrison ruled that he must be taken
into custody so he could explain why he hadn't showed up.

On June 16, police brought him to the detective's bureau. They asked if he
had been doing drugs.

"A whole bunch," Brown said. "A lot. Pile of cocaine and marijuana."

His drug of choice was heroin, he said, but he was paying friends $25 a day
for $50 worth of cocaine.

"I was just doing it 'cause, you know what I mean, I had too much stuff on
me," he said. "I ain't have no habit."

The detectives also asked about a killing. Santos Colon III had been shot in
the head in Brown's neighborhood on March 22. Colon was a 26-year-old civic
league officer who wanted to stop a recent crime wave in Cradock. Police
said they believed he had seen a drug deal in his yard that day and had been
robbed and killed when he went looking for more information.

Brown told the detectives that he and a friend had gone out for blunts to
roll joints that night. Colon had approached them, asking for drugs, he
said. Brown's friend had demanded money and shot Colon. The detectives
walked Brown through his story three times, then put him in jail.

They did not tell him what three others had said: Brown had confessed to the
murder. Two were inmates when they reported it to police, including one who
was a former drug court participant. They were subpoenaed to testify against
Brown. He eventually was convicted of capital murder, robbery and weapons
violations. In April, he was sentenced to life plus 28 years in prison.
These days, Scott has a job, supervising people who do janitorial work at
the Virginia Zoo. He lives with his wife in transitional housing near their
church. They plan to move this month to an apartment near Portsmouth's
Douglass Park neighborhood.

He is 41 now. He hopes one day to own a house, start a business with his
wife and become a preacher who helps drug addicts. Sometimes, he still
dreams that he is using or selling. That's why he now returns to his old
neighborhood, to remind himself of his former life and to show others that
change is possible. He is greeted with smiles and hugs.

He visits drug treatment court three times a week to encourage participants
to continue their fight. Occasionally, Judge Morrison asks him to say a few
words. Morrison calls him "The Preacher," because of Scott's deep faith. He
watched him evolve from a tired, broken-down addict to a proud husband. He
always thought Scott was a natural leader. Morrison also remembers Brown,
though he knew him for a shorter period. He was quiet and aloof at first but
then started opening up. It seemed hard for him to change his life.

When Brown was charged with murder, the judge was not surprised. Morrison
has often seen people on probation go back to their old ways.

Brown is 21 now and at the Hampton Roads Regional Jail, awaiting his appeal.
He declined to be interviewed .

His parents say he was wrongly convicted. He has a 1-year-old daughter. Over
the past three years, Morrison has found that people in drug court decide
their own fate.

"It depends on that individual," he said. "What they want to do and how much
sacrifice they want to make."

The information in this article was compiled from interviews and police and
court records.