MESSED UP

Chase Kirtley, a Botetourt County teen, describes how heroin wrecked his
life.Chase Kirtley, a Botetourt County teen, describes how heroin wrecked
his life.

The decision that wrecked Chase Kirtley's life wasn't hard for him to make.

He was 16, riding along Williamson Road in Roanoke with a friend of a
friend, bored and looking for his next high.

"We were going nowhere," he said. "Just riding around, looking for
something to do." The man he was with asked him, "You want to try something
different?"

Kirtley agreed. They drove to a house, Kirtley's friend went in and
returned with a small bag of heroin. They pulled the Jeep into a parking
lot. The acquaintance produced a syringe that was still in its wrapper and
taught Kirtley how to inject the drug into a vein in his arm.

Kirtley said he didn't hesitate. "I just thought, 'I haven't tried heroin
yet. I might as well try it.' "

The moment set Kirtley, now 19, on the path from talented high school
athlete who made the all-district football team to recovering addict with
five felony convictions. Heroin is known for being highly addictive,
because it creates a physical dependency that increases over time so that
an addict needs to use more and more to achieve the same effect.

"Your whole body warms up and you just feel real numb, you feel real good.
It's like the best you've ever felt. It's like the ultimate high," Kirtley
said.

But that high had an ugly downside. Kirtley would wake up feeling horribly
sick, unable to function at all unless he shot up. "I didn't think I was
addicted," he said. "But it had me."

Last year, during Kirtley's senior year at Lord Botetourt High School, he
began purchasing heroin for a man who worked at a local motel. What he
didn't know was that the man was working as an informant for Botetourt
County investigators.

But even after Kirtley learned he'd been recorded several times on
videotape selling heroin, he couldn't keep away from the drug. "Every day
.. I'd say this was the last time I'm going to do it. Then I'd wake up and
do that same thing over and over."

Kirtley pleaded guilty in March to drug distribution charges that carried a
maximum possible punishment of 200 years in prison. He agreed to tell his
story in hopes of warning others away from the path he took.

"It's not worth it. You get addicted too quick. You say you're not but you
really are."

A major fumble

Terry and Francis Kirtley, Chase Kirtley's parents, have many years'
accumulation of photos of their only child playing rec sports: baseball,
basketball, soccer, hockey, football. For many years, Chase was one of the
biggest boys on his team, and as Francis Kirtley points out, he shows the
camera a wide, winning smile.

His father and mother sometimes helped coach the teams he was on.

"That's all we ever did, was go to ballgames," said Francis Kirtley.

In his teenage years, her son's smile disappears from the photos, replaced
by a glower.

In a room on the third story of their brick house in Blue Ridge, there's a
tall glass case filled top to bottom with sports trophies. Across the hall,
Chase's room is decorated with typical teenage paraphernalia: a big stereo,
posters of rap star DMX and heavy metal bands Limp Bizkit and Korn. Francis
Kirtley said she's keeping the room preserved for when her son comes home.

"I hug on his towel and I don't want to make his bed," she said.

Kirtley's parents believe that his size may have led to his introduction to
drugs at a young age, as he hung around with friends much older than he was.

"Every kid's different," said Gail Burruss, director of prevention,
assessment and counseling at Blue Ridge Behavioral Healthcare.

Lack of maturity can make it easy for a child to become involved in drug
addiction. Some teenagers might come to believe that "the only normal way
to socialize is in environments where there's drinking and drugging going
on," Burruss said.

Uncovering heroin use among rural Botetourt County's high school students
was disturbing, said Botetourt County Commonwealth's Attorney Joel
Branscom. "I think most people in the county would just be a little bit
shocked," he said. "We don't have the kind of problems that urban areas
have in the schools."

Kirtley said that at 15, he had regular experience with both alcohol and
marijuana. He would go to parties with other teenagers, or go camping, or
ride around with friends, and drink and get high on weed or pills.

"Getting high was fun," he said. "Everybody around me was, and I thought it
was all right."

'Addictive behavior'

At home, Kirtley spent most of his time in the den downstairs, where he
could simply step out the back door and hop into the sport utility vehicle
he drove. His parents found it hard to have conversations with him.

"Everything was a big secret. Even the good things were a big secret," his
father said.

His parents noticed he was coming home high. They'd punish him by taking
away privileges such as his cellphone or car, but he would wait them out
and repeat the behavior. A DUI conviction while he was still under 18
caused him to lose his driver's license.

Terry and Francis Kirtley attended Families Anonymous, a support group for
relatives and friends of people with alcohol or drug problems. They
agonized over what responsibility they bore for their son's substance
abuse. Were they doing too much for him? Were they not being lenient
enough? Eventually they came to the conclusion that their son had to be
held accountable for his own choices.

"Bottom line, he chose his friends and he chose to do the drugs," his
father said.

"We've never been able to figure out why he can't say no," said his mother.
She said he's easygoing, not likely to argue when a friend proposes
something to do.

Burruss said that parents shouldn't necessarily be blamed when a child
becomes a drug addict. While communication is essential to steering
teenagers away from drugs, there's no magic formula for preventing drug
addiction, she said. Even if a parent does everything by the book, there
are no guarantees, she said.

In court, one of Kirtley's attorneys, Tom Roe, said that Kirtley has a weak
personality, somebody "who can be easily influenced and easily led."

Kirtley can't seem to articulate in any great depth what caused him to try
heroin without hesitation. But he acknowledges his problems with addiction.

"I have an addictive behavior," he said. "Anything probably could turn me
back."

'I am honest'

At the end of his sophomore year, Kirtley was suspended from Lord
Botetourt. That summer, he tried heroin for the first time in that parking
lot off Williamson Road and was hooked.

In an effort to straighten out their son, his parents enrolled him in
Hargrave Military Academy in Chatham, where he had no access to heroin or
any other drug. At the start of the school year, he went into withdrawal,
though at the time he didn't understand what was happening.

"I'd just stay up in the middle of the night, sweating," legs aching, he
said. "I thought it was from football camp."

He stayed clean his entire year at Hargrave and in 2003 returned to Lord
Botetourt. At the end of football season, he made the All Blue Ridge
District football team as a second team linebacker.

Two years later, prosecutors and Kirtley's defense attorneys would argue
about how Kirtley fell back into the clutches of heroin addiction.

Kirtley maintains that he stayed clean until February 2004, when he met a
man working as an informant for the Botetourt County Sheriff's Office.

The man worked at a Travelodge in Botetourt County. When sheriff's
investigators noticed Kirtley, then 18, and his then-girlfriend, 17,
sitting in his SUV in the parking lot when they should have been in school,
they asked the informant to talk to them. The informant returned, saying
Kirtley and his girlfriend had told him they knew where to get heroin.

Over the next few weeks, Kirtley and his girlfriend took money from the
informant and brought back heroin, and their transactions were recorded on
tape. Twice he brought friends with him and sold the informant oxycodone
and marijuana.

According to Kirtley, he didn't start using heroin again until he began
buying it for the informant. He and his attorneys have said that he and the
informant did the drug together at the motel, out of view of the police camera.

Botetourt County authorities dispute Kirtley's version of events. Branscom
says that the informant was closely monitored by investigators, and that
they could find no evidence that he ever interacted with Kirtley outside
their observation.

The dispute caused a heated exchange between Branscom and Kirtley during
his sentencing hearing Aug. 11. Branscom told Kirtley that according to his
girlfriend, the two had done heroin together before meeting the informant.
The prosecutor suggested that Kirtley made up the story to retaliate
against the informant. Kirtley denied that on the stand, telling Branscom,
"I am honest."

One thing both sides agree on: As investigators watched the transactions
between the couple and the informant, they noticed both Kirtley and his
girlfriend scratching repeatedly at their arms, legs and faces, a sign of a
user whose heroin high is wearing off. Faced with the choice of allowing a
minor to continue to use heroin or intervening, the authorities stepped in
and contacted the girl's parents.

'I'm on heroin'

Kirtley had turned 18 in December 2003, an adult in the eyes of the law.

Investigators met him at school and explained that he had been taped
selling heroin. They didn't tell Kirtley's parents, and neither did he. He
was not arrested, because authorities planned to handle the charges in the
massive undercover sting through grand jury indictments.

But he continued to buy heroin, any way he could, even stealing from his
mother. He hid hypodermic needles in the cassette player of his stereo. He
became so adept at shooting up that he could do it while driving, he said.

A purple welt the size of a quarter rose in the crook of his left elbow,
where he inserted the needle. He told his parents it was a bruise.

Finally, in July 2004, it all came to an end -- almost.

"I couldn't find heroin for four or five days and I was sick," Kirtley
said. He swallowed Xanax -- "just something I found out on the street" --
then, the next day, asked his parents to take him to a rehab center.

Though Kirtley's memory of confessing to his mother is foggy, as is much of
his memory from the time he was on heroin, she recalls the event vividly.
She asked him that morning what was wrong with him, and he replied, "Mom,
I'm on heroin."

"That day he wanted to go to Mount Regis was the first time he wanted
help," Francis Kirtley said. "That stuff was eating him alive."

After her son spent a week in rehab, she began to see the smile she'd
missed for almost four years.

The Kirtleys moved their son's favorite chair from the basement den to the
living room, and he started joining them rather than staying in the
basement. The family started attending church together, and he volunteered
to be an usher.

"He'd be upstairs whistling and singing, and we'd say, 'Now we have Chase
back,' " his mother said.

'State property'

During that time, Kirtley was indicted on 12 felony charges. He pleaded
guilty to four charges of distributing heroin and one of distributing
oxycodone and paid $1,275 restitution with money he'd earned laying bricks
for his cousin.

But his fight with addiction wasn't over. In July, he tested positive for
cocaine, and his bond was revoked.

"I just went to a party and got real drunk and somebody offered me
something and I did it," Kirtley said.

At the sentencing hearing, when deputies led in Kirtley dressed in a
black-and-white striped jail uniform, his mother began to weep.

Botetourt Circuit Court Judge Malfourd Trumbo ordered Kirtley sent to a
youthful offender program in Chesapeake. He could be released after a year,
depending on how he fares in the program. But he'll also have a 25-year
suspended prison sentence hanging over his head.

Trumbo told Kirtley that he needs to admit to himself that he can't beat
his addiction on his own.

"Whether or not you're honest with yourself, these things are not easy to
do," the judge said.

In an interview at the Botetourt County Sheriff's Office, Kirtley said he's
heard rumors that the Chesapeake program is a "gladiator school," a place
of hard knocks.

"I don't know if it's true or not. I just want to get it started, get it
over with."

He said he believes he can beat the addiction, but he seemed resigned to
the mess his life has become. When pressed, he said he does want something
better.

"I do want something else. I want a regular life, to work and have friends
again and do what I was doing before I got into all this trouble. 'Cause
this ain't no life right here. I'm just state property."