I was born and raised in Arlington, Texas. I had a pretty normal childhood, a loving family and a younger brother. I was told by most of my teachers that I was smart but needed to apply myself more and talk less! I was outgoing, loved to make people laugh, played Optimist football and Little League baseball, had several friends, and did all the things that kids my age did. One thing that always bothered me was that by the age of ten, I was always a little heavy, which made me very self-conscious, but at the time, I didn’t really process it in that way. I just knew I didn’t feel like I measured up. My Dad was a police officer, a bow hunter, a bow fisherman and his part-time work was paint-and-body repair out of our garage. He was also a car buff. He was very good at everything he did and I idolized him. My mom sang and taught piano out of the home, and eventually went back to school and got her music degree from UTA. Then she went back to work and we all lived a fairly normal, conservative life. My brother and I never went without too many things that we really wanted. My parents were very busy but were very attentive— attended all our games and school activities. So, I tell my mom over and over, “This is not on you!”
The most stressful times I remember were when my parents separated, which happened a couple of times, and when my grandmother on my mother’s side passed away. She lived with us the last couple of months of her life, and that loss affected me, deeply. My parents eventually worked out their problems and just recently celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary, so that’s a good thing.
Now to the darker side of my life. I started drinking beer with my buddies around the age of fifteen. My dad fixed up a Blazer and my mom and dad gave that to me for my sixteenth birthday. I then had the freedom to do all the things I shouldn’t have been doing, including street racing and going to parties with lots of alcohol. And because my dad was a police officer, I used that connection many, many times to get out of traffic stops and other types of mischief. I almost didn’t graduate from high school because of my reckless behavior. I moved out on my own around age eighteen and eventually, started experimenting with drugs. I would take an occasional Xanax or Hydrocodone that friends would have, and found I preferred that to drinking. My true addiction may have started after a knee injury when I jumped off the second story balcony of an apartment building while drunk. The doctors prescribed muscle relaxers and a few pain pills which I took readily. I liked the zoned out feeling and continued getting anything I could get from friends, whether it was Adderall, muscle relaxers, anti-anxiety or pain pills. During this time I went through several jobs, some of them very career type jobs, losing them because I was high, or just wasn’t doing my job.
Then the doctors discovered I had a Chiari Malformation and a neurologist had to perform a procedure to basically carve out the base of my skull so it would relieve pressure on the brain. More recovery… more pain pills.
My son Matthew was conceived a little before that time and after he was born, I decided to get my life back on track. I moved back in with my parents, worked for a roofer for awhile, then started my own company repairing fascia and soffits and eventually expanded to all types of home repair. I got primary custody of my son and continued to live with my parents, and thought I had everything under control. But… I continued to use every once in awhile. Then I had a serious, nearly fatal roll-over car wreck coming home from work one day. I swerved to miss a car that had stopped in the middle of a country road, swerved back to miss a guard rail, caught the lip where the gravel met the pavement and proceeded to roll my SUV five times, where I was ejected. I broke several bones, crushed my ribs, had internal bleeding and had to have thoracic surgery, had head injuries, had to have a rod inserted to replace a broken femur, had to have blood transfusions and was in the hospital for quite some time. I was a mess. This time, after a few months of recovery, I was taking over thirty hydrocodone pills a day. Then, one day the doctors cut me off, and I didn’t miss a beat. I went right out and bought them on the street. I was able to hide my addiction for awhile. But the expense was so great I felt I had two choices. I wasn’t going to stop the drugs, (bad decision), so I could either steal from people to get the money to buy the drugs, or start selling some here and there to replenish my own supply. I was convinced in my drug induced stupor that I had the perfect solution. Eventually my parents confronted me, made me move out and leave my son with them, and I actually thought I could survive living out of a storage building, selling a little and buying a lot.
My mom and dad didn’t even know how extensive my addiction was or how I was surviving, but they knew I was in over my head. They tried to talk to me, but I honestly thought I was completely in control of my life, and no one could tell me anything. Then… I was arrested with a bag of fentanyl on me. Due to an enhanced charge of “ghost-dope”, that bag of pills turned into 220 kilos of pills in my charges, and I am now serving a 300 month sentence, and that is with a compassionate judge that showed me leniency. I was told I could have been sentenced forty years to life for the “ghost dope”.
It’s now been two and a half years since my arrest, and I wish I could say things are getting better, but I have made some really bad choices in prison, as well. But, I continue to pray, lean on family, and now that we have found Michael Santos and Justin Paperny, and joined their group Prison Professors, I feel I might just have a chance to change the direction of my life.
