Series: Four Lives, One Last Chance - A Year In Drug Court: Part 2 Of 41

ACT I. JENNIFER

Jennifer's children are everywhere in her tiny two-bedroom apartment.

Their sweet, slightly chubby faces look down on every room and hallway.

One portrait rests on the entertainment center. Other photos hang on the
walls and sit in frames. Snapshots fill two bulging albums beneath the
coffee table. A plastic bag overflows with Polaroids that never found a place.

That one shows Jennifer posing with her two young daughters on her lap.
This one captures the oldest in her cheerleading uniform. Then there are
the girls opening Christmas presents and visiting their grandparents.

It looks like any mother's apartment, the home of a woman intensely proud
of her offspring.

But while the images of the children are here, the girls, now 13 and 6, are
gone.

Jennifer has become a mother without her children because of crack cocaine.
Because she would rather hit the pipe than change a diaper. Because she
would leave her kids in the car, wearing urine-soaked clothes, while she
went to score drugs. Because she would disappear for days at a time,
leaving the girls with anyone who would take them.

The reason, Jennifer says, is hard to explain.

Jennifer grew up with two brothers on a patch of York County land handed
down through her male-dominated family. She rode motorcycles and go-karts,
played in the woods and learned to work on cars. As a tomboy, she never
could relate to the more "sensitive" world of women.

She liked hanging out with rough-hewn men and, by the 11th grade, she
dropped out of school and began hanging out in tougher neighborhoods,
playing around the edges of the drug culture. She sold pot and crack for
years before tasting her first crack-cocaine high.

That high then became her top priority.

Years later, the profound effect of the street can still be seen in
everyday aspects of Jennifer's appearance and personality. She is the
epitome of urban cool, with a closet full of the latest fashions, rings on
every finger and countless gold chains and bracelets weighing down her neck
and wrists.

She has bleached-blond hair, short on top and longer in back, and
occasionally she sports an eyebrow ring and a tongue piercing. Her cadence
is straight corner banter, full of attitude and often laced with profanity.

That harsh edge of the street, however, is tempered by a generosity that
has few outlets without her children. Visitors rarely leave her apartment
without taking some food, and Jennifer has been known to pay for a
disheveled Drug Court newcomer's haircut.

Despite this maternal side, Jennifer knows her children suffered through
her addiction. And their pain did not go unnoticed by others.

For seven years, Jennifer battled with a social service system that
repeatedly took her children away - at least until she could get clean or
convince them she had stopped smoking crack.

"I was beating the system," she says now. "I still had it in my head that
it was all right to use."

When she had the girls, Jennifer would put them to bed early, so she could
go out and buy drugs, never thinking twice about leaving them alone. When
she came back, she would go into the bathroom and run the shower to mask
the clicking of her lighter and the crackle of the burning cocaine.

Once, after the girls had been taken away from her, Jennifer actually felt
relieved. Then she could go out and smoke crack and do what she wanted
without worry. Yet another time she raced the social worker to her older
daughter's school so she could say goodbye before the social worker could
take her child away.

Usually, Jennifer was able to get the girls back. She thinks it was because
through it all, she kept a spotless house and a clean car, and she dressed
her children immaculately. Even now her apartment is a showpiece of
cleanliness, everything in its place, the bed made with military exactness.

The last time she had the girls, Jennifer managed to stay clean for several
months, finding a new job and buying a new car. But her addiction still
lurked beneath her seemingly normal exterior.

It boiled over one day - for reasons Jennifer doesn't understand - when she
missed a plane on her way to a vacation. Exploding with anger, she went to
a pay phone and called her dealer.

"I'm in Norfolk," she said. "I'll be in Williamsburg in 20 minutes. Have me
an 8-ball ready."

Within a month of burning through that 3 1/2-gram bag of crack, everything
she accumulated had disappeared in the putrid smoke rising from a glass
tube. At the end of the binge, she called social services and admitted that
she had no idea where her children were.

This time, the social workers had seen enough. They took the girls for good.

Without her children, Jennifer continued her descent until she was arrested
for shoplifting in Newport News. Police found a crack pipe on her, leading
to the possession charge that landed her in Drug Court.

A few months later, a York County judge terminated Jennifer's parental rights.

Now the girls exist only in the photos. And all of the pictures are at
least two years old.

So Jennifer sits in their room, amid untouched videos and board games, and
she cries and screams and bangs on the walls until the neighbors complain.

Jennifer's story is not uncommon for parents addicted to drugs. In fact,
local child advocates estimate that up to 80 percent of the cases of
neglect and abuse involve parents who are addicts.

In the past decade, drugs have been the driving force behind a rise in
these cases. In Newport News, the number of children placed in foster homes
has nearly tripled in the past 12 years to more than 550 in 2002, according
to local experts.

Now that the damage has been done - and Jennifer and her children have
become another number in a long list of child-abuse statistics - all she
can think about is redemption.

Although she often struggles with the constant temptations of recovery,
Jennifer has stayed clean for one mission: getting her children back.

She has pinned nearly all her hopes on a case pending before a Virginia
appellate court. She prays that the judges will overturn the lower court's
decision and restore her parental rights.

Winning back custody is the reason Jennifer has fought so hard in the past
eight months to keep a job, a car, an apartment. She wants desperately to
show her girls - and the courts - that she can be a good mother.

"I just want to be able to tell them I'm sorry," she says, "and all this
stuff they went through, it's not their fault."

Jennifer knows her girls are living with a woman in Virginia Beach, a woman
who might adopt them. Once, Jennifer drove to Virginia Beach and walked
along the oceanfront for hours, tears streaming down her face, hoping and
praying to catch a glimpse of her girls swimming in the ocean or building a
sandcastle.

She imagined herself scooping them up and running off. She thought about
breaking the law one last time, this time to reclaim her children.

Her only contact is through a social worker, who passes on the occasional
letter.

In one note, her older daughter wrote: "I hope that you still love me."

Now, as Jennifer racks up clean time and the drug fog lifts from her brain,
the awful reality of what she did has started to sink in. Her emotions well
up quickly at the sight of all those pictures and artifacts from her former
life. Sometimes the mere mention of the girls is enough to start a cascade
of tears.

In one outburst, Jennifer stands in front of a portrait of her lost
children, railing against the drug that took it all away, her voice rising
higher and higher, the tears coming faster and faster.

"That drug turns you into a beast. Can't nobody tell me about this drug.
It's sick. I feel for people that's on drugs and has kids," she says. "You
don't care about nothing. All you want is to get high."

Almost screaming now, Jennifer's tears run down her cheeks and create
little puddles on her shirt. But those pools of regret can't change what
has happened.

"That wasn't me. That was a totally different person," she says.

"Now these two kids gotta suffer because of what I did."