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Mike Jones prayed every day that his 19-year-old son would stay alive long enough to go to jail.
“I wanted him to go to jail,” says Jones, owner of Granite Knitwear. “I hoped jail would be a safe haven where he could air out and think about what he was doing.
“I didn’t know what else to do.”
Tommy Jones didn’t go to jail.
He died three days before he was scheduled to appear in court on a probation violation, where his father had hoped the judge would incarcerate him.
He died after completing three treatment programs for drug abuse, including a month-long stay at a facility to fight a heroin addiction.
He died alone in the parking lot of a Charlotte gasoline station, a needle still protruding from his arm when police found him.
Three years later, the story of Tommy Jones is still hard to believe.
How did a popular honor student at South Rowan High School end up overdosing on heroin?
Jones wrestles with that question and all its possible answers.
It wracks him with guilt. It keeps him up at night. At one time, it even made him consider suicide.
“Right after Tommy died, a little thing that I read stuck with me: ‘The only reason that evil triumphs is because good men do nothing,’ ” Jones says. “That was almost my epitaph there for awhile.”
Jones thought about all the good men who did nothing while Tommy slowly killed himself with a three-year drug habit.
The neighbors who silently watched a notorious drug dealer get him hooked.
The friends who said nothing while Tommy fell deeper and deeper into his dark hole.
The law enforcement officials who, Jones believes, could have put the dealer out of business before he lured Tommy into his illicit world.
Then, Jones saw the quote from Edmond Burke in a different light.
Perhaps Jones was a good man who could prevent evil from triumphing. Perhaps he could do something while others did nothing.
“Now, it’s my reason for being,” Jones says.
Personal crusade
Jones has become a crusader in the war on drugs, or the war on substance abuse, as he calls it.
When he’s not working at Granite Knitwear, he lives and breathes drug abuse prevention. For about three hours a night and six hours on the weekend, he reads, researches, writes, speaks and prays about the plague that claimed his first-born son.
“It would have been easy to just walk off a cliff,” says Jones, who has three other children. “This has helped.”
His greatest achievement so far may be the web site www.tommyjones.org, an exhaustive source of information on drugs for parents and teen-agers.
“I hope I’m doing some other parent a favor,” he says.
He wants to repay the parents who also lost a child and shared their stories, inspiring him with their strength in the face of tragedy.
And he hopes to encourage those grieving parents still immersed in anger, guilt and despair after losing a child to drugs.
“We can make a difference,” Jones says. “People react in different ways. Some help in their own way, not publicly. Some just crawl up under a shell and are waiting to die. There is no worse thing for a parent, but you’ve just got to fight it.”
‘It’s everybody’s child’
Jones readily admits the mistakes he’s made and will share the heartbreaking story of his son’s demise with anyone who will listen.
“If I have to be the poster child for parents who lose a child to drugs, then so be it,” Jones said.
He’ll do whatever he can to keep other children and their parents from falling into the trap that took Tommy and left his family devastated. “Everybody is at risk,” Jones says. “I know before Tommy got into drugs, it was, ‘Not my child.’ ”
Then, as Jones discovered more about his son’s addiction, he realized, “It’s not only my child, it’s everybody’s child,” he says.
Three other South Rowan students became addicted to heroin with Tommy, Jones says.
One is sober now. The other two have been in and out of treatment programs, he says.
Since only one in 10 heroin addicts can kick the drug that’s more addictive than cocaine, Jones fears the odds are against Tommy’s friends.
“Parents are very naive, but having been there, I know why it’s hard to face,” Jones says.
Shortly after Tommy died, Jones flew to Texas on business. He picked up a newspaper and saw his son staring at him from the pictures of seven white, well-off teens who had recently died from heroin overdoses.
The story told of drug dealers moving into small Texas communities to peddle highly addictive heroin to young adults with money. Small communities where grieving parents never expected to find a drug they considered only a problem of the inner-city poor.
To Jones, it sounded all too familiar.
Cycle of abuse, treatment
Tommy started abusing prescription pills in 1996.
Later that year, a drug dealer from Kannapolis introduced Tommy to a type of heroin that could be snorted or smoked with the promise of no addiction, Jones says.
Soon after, Tommy was hooked.
By May 1997, he wasn’t showing up for work at Granite Knitwear. He stayed out all night and slept all day.
Tommy asked to join his father on a beach trip. There, he revealed his addiction but only to narcotics.
“I was shocked,” Jones says.
They made a father-son pact that Tommy would stay off pills. Now, Jones knows that was woefully inadequate.
Tommy spent five days at Amethyst treatment center in Charlotte, where Jones was not satisfied with his care. The center has since closed.
When Tommy came home, the dealer started calling him, Jones says. Soon, he was using again.
It wasn’t until Tommy went to a second detox program in July 1997 that Jones learned the extent of his son’s drug use. Pot, heroin, Ecstasy, LSD, mushrooms, Ritalin, Tommy had tried them all.
When he was released, Tommy stopped at his mother’s house with Jones to pick up some things. They were on their way to an intensive treatment center in Dobson called Hope Valley.
While Jones and his ex-wife talked, Tommy slipped out of the house.
He was gone all night, then called his father the next morning and said he couldn’t find any drugs.
“He said he didn’t score, and maybe that was a sign,” Jones says.
Tommy entered Hope Valley’s month-long treatment program, his only sincere effort at kicking the habit, Jones says.
And it worked.
“I’ve learned a lot about myself up here. I seemed to have changed,” Tommy wrote to his sister just before coming home. “I’m thinking clearly for the first time in a long time.
“I’ve learned that if I want to be sober, I have to live by spiritual principles.”
But he worried about seeing his friends again and facing old temptations.
“I’m scared to leave,” he wrote. “I don’t want to go back to that life.”
Jones keeps a photo in his office of Tommy leaning on the wooden Hope Valley sign. It was taken the day he completed his treatment, Aug. 27, 1997.
Smiling confidently and looking healthy, Tommy “was alert, clear, talkative, positive and apparently happy with himself,” Jones wrote in his journal that day.
Jones had set many ground rules for his son’s return. He must obey a curfew, hold down a job, do his own laundry and not steal, lie or use drugs.
But within three days, Tommy was looking for heroin.
That’s when Jones prayed for jail.
Two weeks later, his son was dead.
“There is some truth that time heals all wounds,” Jones says. “I know he’s OK. I know he’s with God and when it’s my turn, I’ll see him.”
Symptom of other problems
Jones says he now knows that Tommy had an addictive personality and, like most addicts, his drug habit was a symptom of other problems.
“To cure it, we must address the physical, emotional or spiritual problems that make them want to get high,” he says, “that make them want to decrease the pain.”
Although the drug dealer is dead, shot in the chest in 1998, Jones knows heroin is still available in Rowan County.
So he continues his crusade in the face of statistics that say more teens are smoking, drinking and abusing drugs.
“It is very discouraging, “ he says. “It’s hard to make an impact.”
First, Jones tried holding a drug symposium at the Civic Center.
“That was a dismal failure,” he says. “It just killed me to see so little participation.”
So he tried a new approach, working through the Elks drug awareness program.
He and other Elks members set up a booth at the Rowan County Fair each year to pass out information and buttons that say “Remember Tommy” with his picture and the Web site address. Jones has passed out about 1,000 buttons in two years.
“They ask about the button and they’re a little taken aback, but they appreciate it,” Jones says. “It’s a good way to start a conversation.”
During Prom Promise activities at South Rowan High School, Jones sets up a table display that asks, “Who said drugs don’t kill?”
Covered with newspaper articles about teens who have died after sniffing, snorting, swallowing or injecting drugs, the display gets a quick glance from many students, Jones says. But some take a closer look.
“It makes them think. At least I hope it does,” he says. “Kids think that drugs don’t kill. Well, I can prove to them that they do.”
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