A father walks into his son's room. He looks around at the stuff teen-age boys collect - tickets to a Reds game, posters of cars and rock stars, abandoned toys, little plastic sports trophies. The dad breaks down in tears.
"I would walk into my son's room and see the pictures on the wall and I would just sit down and cry," he says months later, still choking up over scrambled eggs at a Big Boy. "I felt like my son had died and I was in mourning."
It was close. His son was leading a secret life as a good student in the marching band, "a joy to have in class," the teachers said.
But while his parents slept in their upper middle class suburban home, he would sneak out and drive his father's SUV to the inner city to score drugs. "He didn't even have a driver's license," his father said. "He told me later he had guns and knives pulled on him more than a few times."
One day the kid took a gun to school, intending to shoot himself in the head because he was so lost in the lightless pit of ink-black despair.
This is a horror story. But it's also a story of hope.
The dad still has a hard time talking about it. But now his tears are tears of joy that he has his son back. "If you could see the kids who are in treatment, you would never guess they were on drugs," he said.
He never guessed, either, until a friend of their son called to tell him where to find his hidden stash.
Other kids are not so lucky.
The soul-snatcher witch heroin is making a comeback. On Wednesday, the Enquirer carried a story about three dead teens in Northern Kentucky. "Suspected heroin deaths push fear into the suburbs," the headline said.
Anyone who walks the streets where drug pushers do their bold business can spot the white kids in mom's SUV, buying dope. But most families never believe it can happen on their street, in their neighborhood, in their daughter's classroom, in their son's bedroom.