Since the first week that Henry was hospitalized in late April of 2010, our family has been as brutally honest as we have known how to be about the fact that Henry was struggling with a serious drug problem. Our teenager’s addiction to drugs led him to people, places and activities that were dangerous, unethical and yes, illegal.
In the last period of Henry’s all-too-brief life, he was breaking the law and endangering others not only by his own drug use, but specifically in the fact that he was selling and trading pills to others. We make NO excuses for this illegal activity on Henry’s part. It was wrong. Period. And to be as clear as we can be, as Henry’s mother, I tried every way I could think of in the last few months of my beloved oldest child’s life to get him arrested for drug activity.
I spoke to local law enforcement and asked several different officers if they would come to my house and arrest him. I offered to follow him and then call them when I saw him doing something potentially illegal. I offered to turn his cell phone and computer records over to them if the documentation might help get Henry arrested.
But everyone I talked to in law enforcement told me that that wasn’t how it worked.
I then consulted directly with professionals working within the local criminal justice system to get advice on how to get Henry arrested. I was told that an arrest would not be in Henry’s best interest, and that as a parent, I should seek to avoid Henry being in “the system.”
When Henry WAS arrested (his first and only brush with the law, ever) a few weeks before his hospitalization – after a law enforcement officer saw him and his girlfriend parked in a subdivision – he was charged with public indecency, public intoxication and drug possession. At that time, we were hopeful that jail was the right place for Henry to be. He needed to be held accountable and he needed help that we were legally unable to force on him once he’d turned 18 a few months earlier. When Henry was arrested in the spring of 2010, our family stood together, refusing to bail him out. Henry’s uncle, an attorney, began the process of trying to get the court to order Henry back into the inpatient drug treatment we all knew he needed. But then, after only a few days, Henry was released from jail due to what he was told was overcrowding and the fact that he was a first time, non violent offender.
Is there something more I could have done or should have done to get Henry arrested in those last months? Maybe so, but I sure did try everything I could figure out. I might not have succeeded, but I did not stand passively by as he broke the law. I did not try to minimize or make excuses for what he was doing. I knew that his drug activity endangered others and no one in our family was okay with that.
Yes, Henry was a young drug addict. We have been as open as we can POSSIBLY be about this fact because he want to help other families and other addicts. We explicitly mentioned addiction in Henry’s newspaper obituary, something that’s almost never done. Henry’s father spoke directly of his son’s drug addiction in the beautiful eulogy he gave at Henry’s funeral. Not long after Henry’s death, when it would have been easier to stay silent and avoid discussing what addiction did to our boy, and to us, we all participated in the creation of a painfully honest 30 minute TV documentary about Henry’s struggle with drugs, designed to educate other parents and teens about drug addiction. We also have founded a non-profit foundation in Henry’s memory to raise money to pay the costs of drug addiction treatment for other teenagers.
In other words, no one in our family is denying or minimizing Henry’s drug addiction. We’ve done just the opposite, and will continue to do so.
However, Henry’s status as a drug addict and even as a teenager who was involved in selling and trading drugs does not mean he wanted to die, deserved to die, or is not worthy or entitled to the same protections under the law as every other citizen.
If Henry had sold drugs to someone who died as the result of Henry’s criminal act, our family would be devastated, but we absolutely would expect Henry to have been held fully accountable under the law for what he had done. Period.
But that’s not what happened. What happened is that much older adults proactively encouraged and activated and incentivized Henry’s drug use and the selling, and then they illegally distributed drugs to our 18 year old son, grandson, nephew, brother, cousin and godson. And as a result,Henry is the one who died.
Death resulting from illegal drug trafficking is clearly defined as homicideunder both state and federal criminal statutes.
It’s certainly possible – or even likely – that the individuals responsible for Henry’s death are suffering from drug addiction themselves. But being a drug addict does not give anyone a free pass under our legal system to commit felonies of any type, particularly felonies that hurt people. And if someone dies as a consequence of an addict’s commission of a felony, our legal tradition clearly recognizes that death as some form of homicide or manslaughter.
Many – possibly most – of those individuals who are charged and convicted when they drive drunk and kill someone are alcoholics themselves. That these drunk drivers are alcoholics themselves does not obviate their criminal culpability in drunk driving deaths.
The fact that Henry may have voluntarily ingested the illegal drugs that killed him is also not relevant under criminal law. To return to the drunk driving analogy, if two alcoholic buddies get into a car together after leaving a bar, both willingly, and both of them knowing that the other is extremely intoxicated, the drunk driver will still absolutely be charged if he runs into a tree at high speed and kills his drunk passenger-friend. No one is going to argue that because the dead victim was also drunk, and he climbed into the car without being coerced to do so, and he should have known the risks he was assuming, that the drunk driver is absolved in any way of criminal liability.
Prostitutes who are raped or murdered might have been voluntarily engaged in illegal activity with obvious risks when they are raped or murdered, but that doesn’t mean that the man who commits the crime should not be arrested or prosecuted.
A woman who continues to return again and again and again to a boyfriend who beats her badly and regularly threatens her with a gun – even after everyone she knows has begged her and warned her about the risks she’s assuming every time she returns to his home – is no less a murder victim when that man does finally beat her to death. No one argues that because the victim knowingly and voluntarily put herself into a clearly dangerous situation over and over again, she is responsible for her own death.
It also does not matter whether the drug dealer or dealers whose criminal activity caused Henry’s death intended to kill him. Returning to drunk driving laws, the intent of a drunk driver who kills someone is totally irrelevant under the law. Drunk drivers almost never MEAN to kill anyone, and in lots of cases, these individuals are even legitimately remorseful for what they have done. But lack of intent on the front end and remorse after the fact don’t equal a free pass when drunk driving kills someone.
Similarly, the criminal statutes on the books in virtually every state and under our federal law which define death resulting from illegal drug dealing as homicide do not concern themselves with the matter of intent on the part of the dealer. As with drunk driving laws, drug induced homicide laws define a specific category of strict liability crime in which the fact that the drug dealer did not INTEND to kill his victim is utterly irrelevant.
Henry – a teenager with a serious drug addiction – is no less a crime victim because he might have “asked for it” in the sense that he voluntarily ingested drugs. And in fact, in Henry’s case, there is significant information that suggests that he was not mentally alert enough at the time to knowingly assume the risks of ingesting the drugs that actually killed him. That’s one of the things that a proper criminal investigation would determine.
We are not minimizing Henry’s status at the time of his death as a drug addict. We are not denying the fact that those responsible for his death are very likely drug addicts themselves. We are not asking to change the law as it already exists, and we are not asking for exceptional or special treatment for Henry’s case. We are simply asking that Henry receive the consideration and rights he clearly deserves as a crime victim.
Henry was only 18 years old. In the last period of his life, Henry was addicted to drugs. He bought drugs, which is illegal. He used drugs, which is illegal. And he sold and traded drugs, which is illegal. But he didn’t deserve the death penalty at age 18 for these crimes – crimes for which he was never even charged or convicted.
We have great compassion for the families of the individuals whom we hope will be charged and prosecuted for their criminal liability in Henry’s death. We know what it’s like to love and live with a family member in the grips of drug addiction. It’s absolute hell. And we can only imagine the pain of realizing that someone you love may end up in jail for a long time. That’s its own special kind of hell.
But we can tell you right now that we would give ANYTHING if Henry were in jail today rather than dead.
Advocating for justice in our son’s case does not make us irrationally vengeful. It does not make us deniers of Henry’s own drug problem. It does not mean that we blame others while refusing to admit how Henry’s own addiction played a role in his ending up in that house trailer on Tarklin Valley Road.
It makes us a grieving family who will never get our own loved one back. Henry is gone, and no arrest or prosecution of anyone will ever change that. But we are more than a grieving family. We are also a group of responsible citizens who have agreed together that we simply could not live with ourselves if another family were to suffer the loss of a child in the same terrible way because we did not do everything we could to see that drug traffickers who deal to teenagers are held as fully accountable as they should be, and CAN be.
