05.A.Descent.Into.Hell.2008 (9 page)

Throughout her coming of age, Jennifer made it a habit to pick the wrong friends. At times, that had gotten her in trouble. Now, as she neared adulthood, she had another new friend, Colton Pitonyak. Perhaps Jennifer didn’t see who he really was. Or perhaps she thought she saw more in him than others did. “Jennifer looked for the good in people,” says a friend. “She was just that way. And on one side, Colton was this tortured genius, this brilliant but troubled guy.”

Caring about Colton Pitonyak wouldn’t turn out to be a good thing for most young women. No matter where their lives were when they met, if they got too close, he pulled them into his world, the seedy underside of Austin, a netherworld fueled by drugs.

So it would be for Jennifer, beginning that spring 2004, when they met at a party. “There was an immediate attraction,” a friend of Colton’s would say. “He was drawn to her.”

Justin Walters met Colton that same spring. He was introduced to him by a friend, as a potential connection for drugs. Justin, an affable, bright, scrub-faced, preppy UT student, looked like a someday lawyer, but he was hooked on cocaine. He’d tried repeatedly to quit, but couldn’t. “The drugs get in your soul. The first time I used cocaine, I went on a three-day binge,” he says. “It grabs you and won’t let you go.”

When he met with Colton at his apartment, the place was in disarray, and Pitonyak was disheveled and dressed like a rapper. He’d heard about the brilliant scholarship student, but saw little of that in the kid with the ready supply of drugs. “The National Merit Scholar ship had sailed,” says Walters. “At that point, Colton Pitonyak was a thug.”

Still, Colton was funny and bright, and he and Walters hit it off. From that point on, Walters sometimes hung with Colton’s circle of friends. At times they talked, and Walters saw a glint in Colton’s eye, an understanding about what the drugs could do for him. “Colton had a real entrepreneurial side,” says Walters. “The profit margin selling drugs was ridiculously high. By the time I knew him, Colton realized how much money he could make and how it could pay for things he wanted. Colton was in.”

That spring, Jennifer and Sharon talked two to three times a day, as they always did. Sharon was still paying for Jennifer’s cell phone and car, but not her apartment or expenses. At first, Sharon thought little of the Colton references Jen made. But then, one day, something caught her off guard. “What did you say?”

“Colton went through one of those alcohol programs, Mom,” Jennifer said. “It didn’t work for him. He just came out worse than before.”

“Who’s this Colton?”

“He’s a friend,” Jennifer replied. “He goes to UT.”

Sharon accepted Jennifer’s explanation, and thought little more of it.

Amy Pack liked Colton, too. They met when she began dating one of his friends, and Amy, reed-thin with long blond hair, thought Colton was a rare kind of guy, the type who could be friends with a girl and not want anything from her. He let her borrow his car when hers was in repair. When she didn’t want to go out, she called him and ended up at his apartment, watching television and smoking pot. “Chilling,” she says. “He was my boy.”

On those nights, Amy, who’d spent all twelve years through high school in parochial schools, swapped stories and laughed with Colton about the priests and teachers. Some nights, they headed to Sixth Street. The music in the clubs had a heavy hip-hop beat, and Colton loved to dance.

But there was that special thing about Colton, the thing so many young women seemed to latch on to. “He listened to me,” Amy says. “He didn’t turn me off.”

When she was stressed, Amy found she could go to Colton to explain what was bothering her. “He didn’t just say, ‘I don’t care,’ and turn on a sports game,” she says. “He talked to me, told me not to worry, that it would be all right. He was reassuring.”

It was Colton who, at times, became the voice of reason in the group, like the night Amy fell asleep in a bedroom during a house party. A boy wandered in, didn’t know she was there, and also fell asleep on the pile of coats. When they woke up and realized they were in the bedroom together, they laughed, but Amy’s boyfriend was furious. He wanted to beat the kid up, and enlisted his bros to help. “Colton was the one who talked him out of it,” says Amy.

Another night, one of the group contemplated suicide. It was Colton who talked him into living. “He stayed with me,” says the guy. “He was a friend.”

Amy met Jennifer at Colton’s apartment, hanging out, “talking bullshit, like we did all the time,” Amy says. At first, she didn’t like Colton’s friend Jen. The girl with the long red hair seemed almost too friendly. “I’d met girls like that, fake,” says Amy. “But then I started to realize that Jennifer was just being herself. She really was that nice.”

Sometimes Amy wondered about Colton, thinking about how he wasn’t really the way he appeared, a thuggish drug dealer. Part of Colton was still the Ralph Lauren–dressed kid from a well-to-do family with Wall Street dreams. He had a gentle smile and a soft laugh, and “he was into being true to his friends, not being stupid.”

One night, when they were “chilling,” Colton pulled out an old VHS tape, from his bodybuilding days. He popped it into the player, and Amy saw him pose in a competition, muscles bulging, his body tanned and shaved. Bodybuilding wasn’t something Amy thought particularly well of. It seemed a bit smarmy to her, but Colton was so proud of the way he looked, she started to think of it more in terms of his dedication, the work it had taken to get in shape to compete.

Of course, the Colton Amy knew looked markedly different. On the drugs, he’d become increasingly thin, his face strained, anxious. It wasn’t just his looks that had changed from the fresh-faced kid from Little Rock. High and drunk, he screamed at others, even his friends, getting in their faces, threatening. At times Pitonyak and a friend ended up wrestling until the others pulled them apart. There were nights on Sixth Street when Colton’s temper flared and he picked a fight with anyone available. “When he was messed up, Colton could be really aggressive. He gave people things, and wouldn’t remember. Then he’d accuse them of stealing. Someone would have to hold him down,” says a friend.

To Amy, a UT student majoring in communications, Pitonyak’s demeanor wasn’t unusual. “It was the typical post-adolescence thing,” she says with a sardonic smile. “Sure Colton got angry, but the other guys acted the same way. None of it was a surprise. Mostly what they did was just walk around talking bullshit.”

The one part of Colton that remained a mystery to Amy was Jennifer.

“I knew he adored her,” says Amy. “But I didn’t know if she was his girlfriend or what. I couldn’t define their relationship. When I asked him, he didn’t want to talk about it. All I knew was that he was crazy about her.”

Eight

“Tell me about your friend, Colton,” Sharon asked Jennifer one day on the telephone, when her middle daughter was in a particularly talkative mood.

“Well, he’s from Arkansas,” Jennifer said. “And he goes to UT.”

“Is he a boyfriend?” Sharon asked.

“He’d like to be, but he’s not,” Jennifer said. “I don’t think of him that way.”

In hindsight, if Sharon had known what was truly going on with Jennifer that summer 2004, she would have gotten in the car, picked her up, and taken her somewhere to get help. But living 217 miles away in Corpus Christi, she had no way of judging for herself. Jennifer had all new friends, most people Sharon hadn’t met, and a life separate from Sharon and Jim. If Sharon had interceded, would it have made a difference? Therapists and counselors say unless a patient wants help, there’s little they can do. Jennifer was twenty years old, and Sharon was in a quandary familiar to tens of thousands of parents across America and the world every year, powerless to make an adult child do what she should.

On the phone, Jennifer sounded well, and when Sharon saw her, except for being thin, Jen looked the same, a beautiful, young girl without a care in the world. Sharon didn’t know how the drugs were eating away at Jennifer, taking over her life, and making things she never would have done in the past seem all right.

That summer, Jennifer worked at Nordstrom’s junior department as a clerk. She lived with Michaela Sloan, a friend who worked in the misses dress department. Like so many others, Michaela was drawn to Jennifer, and they quickly became close friends.

Much of the time, Jennifer went to Colton’s apartment. For most drug users, money controls how much they can consume. Once Jennifer hooked up with Colton, she no longer had that cap on her desires. “Jennifer would disappear for days, over at Colton’s,” says Michaela. “I knew Colton was using and selling. He was heavily into the drugs. Once Jennifer got involved with him, he took her down with him.”

Financed by his drug sales, Colton flashed a bankroll and gave Jennifer all the drugs she wanted, bought her food, took her out. They meshed well together. They both hungered after good times, never missing the opportunity to party. Jennifer enjoyed the frenzied and exciting Sixth Street scene and Fourth Street, where Austin had a burgeoning, more sophisticated bar scene. The Light Bar was one of her favorites. At the trendy, minimalist bar with a wall-size waterfall, the DJs played fusion or techno club music, layering recordings on top of each other, matching beats, for a heavy, hypnotic sound. She liked the lyrics strong, soulful, evoking emotions. As she had in high school, Jennifer spent the nights on the dance floor, her hands in the air, swaying her body, losing herself to the music, her enjoyment fueled, at least in part, by the drugs. Colton appeared to enjoy the club scene as much as she did, and they danced, drank, and indulged in his bounty of drugs. He took cocaine, Xanax, and a variety of drugs, while Jennifer took ecstasy and meth.

More than a decade earlier, Jennifer had been a little girl in love with
The Wizard of Oz
. Perhaps the drugs transported her to an Oz of sorts, much as the tornado had Dorothy. With the drugs, her nagging self-doubts were calmed, the world was more beautiful, there was nothing to fear, no one to disappoint, no future to fret over, only the immediate moment to enjoy.

Yet all wasn’t well. Jennifer and Michaela once went to a house with Colton for a party. Drugs were scattered throughout, and people sat all over shooting up and snorting coke. “It was the scariest place. We couldn’t believe we were there,” says Michaela. “When we went out with him, Colton was touchy-feely with Jennifer. He rubbed her back and they talked. They were close. At times, he seemed possessive of her.”

If Jennifer left, Colton got angry. He wanted to be with her. “But she didn’t want to be with him, not that way,” says Michaela. “If we went out together and didn’t include him, he got upset because she was doing things with someone else.”

“I don’t believe Colton,” Jennifer complained at such times. Even when Colton grew petulant, Jennifer never looked overly concerned, certainly not fearful.

“Jennifer was the type of girl who tried to look like she could take on the world. She never let on if she was worried or afraid,” says Michaela. “And she had this really big heart. We’d fight, and she’d say, ‘You’re right. I’m sorry.’ She couldn’t tolerate it when people argued. She just couldn’t fight or have anyone mad at her.”

When Jennifer came home to Corpus, she appeared to be relatively well. She liked her job at Nordstrom’s, and she talked about enrolling at the community college again in the fall and getting back on track. She earned extra money helping Sharon, and by the time Jennifer left, she’d worked around the house, organizing Sharon’s closet, grouping the clothing by season and color, and lining up all Sharon’s shoes in boxes marked on the outside. Sharon worried about Jen, but didn’t know what to do. She didn’t give her money for rent, but Jen’s car was failing, with one breakdown after another. Not knowing about the drugs and the parties, Sharon thought Jennifer seemed to be doing better. So Sharon and Jim arranged for Jennifer to buy a new car, a 2003 black Saturn Ion. It was her first car in her name, her first car loan, and Jennifer was proud.

When Sharon took her shopping for clothes, Jen appeared grateful and happy, and Sharon hoped yet again that perhaps her middle daughter was finding her way. “Now, leave here with that new car and your new clothes and do something,” Sharon told her. “Prove to me that you’re serious, and I’ll send you to any school you want to go to.”

“I will, Mom,” Jennifer said hugging her. “I love you. I’ll make you proud.”

“I love you, too,” Sharon said. “And I am proud of you, Jennifer. I always have been.”

Jennifer drove off in her new car bound for Austin, and Sharon hoped her daughter meant it, that she’d refocus her life. Sadly, as they had so many times before, Jennifer’s good intentions evaporated in her self-doubts and now her growing reliance on drugs. Before long, she’d lost the Nordstrom’s job, and Sharon ended up making the payments on the black Saturn Ion.

Along with Michaela, there were other like-minded girls Jennifer met at parties and at clubs. Friends introduced them, or they simply started talking and never stopped. Eva Taylor spent much of the summer with Jennifer, doing drugs, mainly meth, pot, ecstasy, coke, or mushrooms. They wore little dresses with straps or T-shirts, shorts, and platform sandals, all the rage, and went to the bars, where middle-aged men bought them drinks and they danced long into the night.

“Everyone was doing meth that summer,” says another of the girls Jen hung with. “It was like the drug of choice. Smart people with good jobs were doing it. It didn’t seem like a dirty drug. So many people were doing it that meth felt like drinking a cup of coffee.”

Within days of hooking up with a new friend, Jennifer introduced her to Colton. “She didn’t like going to his apartment alone, because he’d try to keep her there. It made her uneasy,” says Eva.

Before they arrived, Jennifer explained to her friends that they couldn’t get drugs unless they stayed and used them with Colton. He was more than willing to supply whatever they wanted, but his recompense was time with Jennifer. It would have been easy to believe that Jennifer used Colton simply for free drugs, but it wasn’t true. Eva and others noticed that Jennifer and Colton had a special connection. They laughed and talked, finishing each other’s sentences. “They were cute together, silly, giggling and stuff,” says Eva. “They were rolling around on the floor, hysterical, telling jokes only the other one got. Jennifer liked going there, being with Colton.”