MOTHER TRIES TO SAVE DRUG-ADDICTED SON, BUT MUST SAVE HERSELF

LAS VEGAS - Mary Lou Gordon was unable to save her four marriages. Or her
first son. But this son would be different. There was hope for Keith.

He was handsome, artistic, a natural at landscape design. He liked animals,
cooked meals for his mother and tried hard to be a good son.

Mary Lou, now 71, tried hard to be a good mother, always bailing him out of
trouble and trying to get him off drugs.

When he was a boy, his blond hair and eager grin always got attention.

"He was adorable. He was so beautiful," his mother said. "I'd go to the
market and the clerk would say: 'He's too pretty to be a boy.' "

That was long ago. In recent years, he was a shell of the man he used to
be. His teeth were rotting and his good looks had faded. He was dirty, used
up at age 39. Drugs made him say things he didn't mean and turned him into
a thief and a liar.

Mary Lou lived in fear, never knowing what her son would do.

But she knew what she would do.

She would save him.

Unfortunate Choices

Mary Lou always chose the wrong husbands. They would drink, just as her
father had, and they often were violent.

She had married her first husband to get out of the house where she grew up
in North Hollywood, Calif. She didn't love him, but they had gone to junior
high together and she thought he was nice enough.

In 1952, their blue-eyed, brown-haired son was born. John Carl Burns Jr.

The marriage ended, and Mary Lou met husband No. 2. It was the same story
- -- drinking and arguing -- and the couple came to Las Vegas in 1960 to get
a quickie divorce.

Mary Lou stayed and bought a small house.

She got a job as a hostess at the Hacienda hotel-casino and soon fell in
love with a pit boss. They married and nine months later, in 1963, Keith
Fletchall Jr. was born. His father left three months later.

For a time, it was just the three of them. She worked two jobs, as a
secretary and at a golf course, so she could put Keith in a private
preschool and John in braces. She joined the Mormon church, taught Sunday
School and was a Cub Scout den mother. The boys struggled in school, so she
got them tutors.

She tried marriage No. 4, but it ended after five years.

Keith won perfect-attendance awards, sports honors and was president of the
weightlifting club. Friends nicknamed him "007" because he was handsome and
liked to imitate James Bond. He spent his free time working on his faded
olive green 1967 Mustang.

Lora Susca, his high school girlfriend, remembered his charm. "He could
schmooze his way into anything," she said.

"Keith was so animated when you met him," said family friend Julie
Gialketsis, who attended junior high and part of high school with Keith.
"And his brother was like a better-looking Dennis Quaid."

Mary Lou's marriages had not worked, but her sons were a different story.
She could do this, raise them on her own. Get a good education, and you'll
have a nice job, she told them.

Fatal Overdose

But something happened to John.

When he returned from a three-year stint in the Navy after high school, he
was drinking a quart of vodka a day and had turned to drugs. Mary Lou wrote
him a letter when he checked himself into a rehabilitation center.

"You come from a long line of alcoholics," she wrote, remembering her
father and grandfather. "It's the road to destruction. It's in your genes,
and you're going to have to really fight it."

In 1985, John overdosed on morphine. He was 32. His younger brother was a
pallbearer at the military funeral.

Mary Lou blamed herself, just as she had for the failure of her marriages.

She told Keith then: "Be careful. Look what can happen to you."

Keith drank and took drugs in high school. But he was just experimenting.
Wasn't he?

His mother told herself life would be better. Keith was different. He was
the son she spoiled rotten and doted on, always giving him everything he
wanted. Cars, trucks, stereos.

When his brother died, Keith already was running with a fast crowd in
Beverly Hills, Calif., where he had moved after graduating from high school
in 1981. He worked various jobs -- landscaping, construction, security --
and told his mother he and his friends would drink, do cocaine and carouse
into the early morning.

With Keith gone, Mary Lou decided she needed a gun for self-protection. She
took a shooting course at the North Las Vegas Police Department and bought
a .25-caliber pistol.

Then she got a phone call from Keith. Could he come home? He needed to dry out.

Mary Lou, knowing she could save him, said yes.

Slipping Away

But Keith soon was using cocaine, marijuana, methamphetamine. His new
friends were drug dealers and users.

It was happening again. Another son. Another life slipping away.

He could not hold a job and had a series of driving citations and wrecks.
His mother made his car payments, paid his fines and hired an attorney to
get drug possession charges dropped.

She wrote him a letter, like the one she had written her first son. Please
get help, she told him.

Years passed, and Keith slipped further into addiction. Mornings were the
worst, when he was having withdrawals. He would scream, throw things and
beg for money. Once he took a crowbar to his mother's car.

Still she'd say that wasn't Keith: It was a monster the drugs had created.

Mary Lou read books on codependent children and drug addicts. She went to
Al-Anon and Tough Love meetings. She learned she was an enabler. She was
letting Keith treat her badly.

Finally, she got a restraining order against him and had him arrested.

But when he was released, how could she turn her son away?

"He'd come back and say, 'I'm hungry,' and I'd let him in."

That is the cycle of codependency. It allows both persons to act in sick
ways, said Lawson Bernstein, a Pittsburgh neuropsychiatrist and expert in
addiction medicine.

"It allows the addict to forgo responsibility for his or her actions, and
it allows the other person to exert some degree of control over the
individual," he said.

"The only way you're ever going to save an addict is to not save them."

Friends who had seen Mary Lou with a black eye and a bad ankle told her:
Stop helping Keith. Kick him out. Those were accidents, she said. Her
friends knew better.

"I feel like that she'd just been in hell for the last 20 years,"
Gialketsis said. "She always felt like he was going to start anew."

Another friend, Joe Beth Cassell said: "How far do you go to get involved
in other people's business?" She wanted to report Keith for abuse, but Mary
Lou refused.

Paranoia Takes Over

Keith kept trying rehabilitation programs -- acupuncture, counseling, yoga,
exercise -- and his mother kept hoping.

But things got worse. Keith became paranoid. He was convinced Mary Lou was
putting scorpions in his clothes and microphones in the doorknobs. He
ripped the doorknobs off and cut up the clothes with scissors.

He sold his mother's clothes, shoes, furniture and television for drugs. He
even traded toilet paper.

Mary Lou often spent nights with friends or sat in her car for hours,
afraid to go in her home.

"God, just make him well," she said she prayed.

"He'd cry and say, 'I don't want to be a drug addict, because I know I'm
going to burn in hell for what I've done to you,' " she said.

There was a good side of Keith. He called the Humane Society when he
thought a neighbor's dog was being mistreated. He cooked dinners for his
mother.

He told her he wanted to try another program. Mary Lou took him three times
to enroll in a Salvation Army drug center, but he never returned for an
evaluation.

On May 31, after Keith pawned the title to his truck for drug money, he
told his mother he needed $75 to get it back.

"He said: 'It's over. This is it.' So I wrote a $75 check," she recalled.

The money went for drugs. And the next morning, June 1, he wanted more.

No, Mary Lou said. She was standing her ground. This time she meant it. She
had no more money. She had written the check against her Social Security
money that was not even in the bank yet.

Furious, Keith started breaking furniture, throwing things and cursing.

She had never seen her son like this. She knew she needed to get away from him.

Keith was holding a baseball bat, chasing her down the hall with it.

She went into her bedroom. Her son followed with the bat.

"I knew when he came at me with a bat, that was it," she said, sobbing as
she recalled the scene. "I really knew he was out of his mind and going to
kill me."

A violent end

The overnight case on her bed contained the gun she had bought years ago.
She always kept it loaded.

He started to come toward her with the bat.

She reached in, pulled out the pistol, and lifted it.

She fired.

Once. Twice.

Keith fell to the floor at the foot of her bed, shot in the head and shoulder.

Mary Lou's knees buckled and she fell.

It was so fast, a blur. What had she done?

"I heard him gasp. I had to step over his body to call 911."

Her friends were stunned, but not completely surprised that the
relationship had ended violently.

Sitting in the house she used to share with her son, Mary Lou repeated that
she had tried, and added: "He really did love me. I always hoped against hope."

Police and prosecutors determined it was justifiable homicide.

Mary Lou was saving herself.

She is still trying to sort out how she sees it.

Keith was the one she was supposed to save.