Two weeks later, Kristin approached the dealer who’d sold the meth to her friend. It was easy. She bought some, and little by little, she began using it more frequently, smoking it, and always alone. Soon, Kristin was spending less time with her friends. She lost a few pounds, and her grades began to suffer. She couldn’t focus as easily on her schoolwork, and during her second semester, her usual A’s fell to B’s.
The first family crisis Kristin caused occurred in early 1993, after Ralph and Constance went on an anniversary cruise in the Caribbean. The Rossums asked some adult friends to check on the children during the day, but they left Kristin in charge overnight. They also left Kristin some money for pizza or any emergency. Instead, she used it to buy drugs. She threw a surprise birthday party for Pierce on St. Patrick’s Day, but word leaked out at the high school that Kristin was having “a rager.” Older kids started showing up. Seniors and football players. With beer.
“It kind of got out of control for a little bit,” Kristin admitted later, saying she didn’t remember whether she’d used meth that night, but it was possible. Kristin let a group of girlfriends stay over, and sometime during the same week, Kristin’s dealer came by with some friends.
A couple of weeks after her parents returned from their cruise, they discovered that some credit cards, personal checks, and a video camera were missing. On March 21, they called the police and reported a burglary. Constance also found a suspicious package of white powder in the mailbox. When she asked Kristin about it, her daughter said she had no idea where it came from, so Constance turned it over to the police. The lies were starting to pile up, and Kristin’s parents began to think the worst: Their daughter was using drugs.
Kristin knew she had a problem. She felt tired and worn out, but she couldn’t stop using. In the beginning, she’d smoked crystal because it made her feel so good. But it had become a necessity. She needed it just to feel like herself.
Methamphetamine is classified as a psychostimulant, just like amphetamine and cocaine. Methamphetamine and cocaine are structurally quite different, but both result in an accumulation of dopamine, the neurotransmitter that produces an unnatural level of euphoria in the brain. While cocaine is quickly metabolized by the body, methamphetamine stays in the system twelve times longer, and so it creates more lasting effects. Meth can produce a high that lasts eight to twenty-four hours, compared to a rush of twenty to thirty minutes with cocaine. Even in small doses, meth can decrease the appetite and keep people awake for hours. High doses can raise the body temperature to dangerous levels and cause convulsions.
On the street, methamphetamine has many names, including speed, meth, crank, ice, crystal, and glass. It can be inhaled, smoked, snorted, or injected. Chronic users can have episodes of violent behavior, anxiety, confusion, insomnia, hallucinations, delusions, and paranoia that can result in homicidal and suicidal thoughts. Psychosis can persist for months or years after a person stops using the drug. Experts say the continued use of the drug also tends to heighten the desire for sexual gratification and prompts users to seek increasingly high levels of sexual stimulation.
On March 30, 1993, around 7 P.M., Kristin said she had to go to the library to study for a class. Her parents, who’d been making calls to try to figure out what happened to their credit cards and checks, decided they needed to settle a few things with Kristin before she went anywhere.
Kristin decided otherwise and tried to leave. Ralph told her he wanted to look in her backpack, but she refused. Ralph tugged the pack away from her and unzipped it. He pulled out a white box and demanded to know what was in it. Kristin said it was a present for her mother. But when Ralph opened the box, he found a glass pipe, a plastic pen casing, and some razor blades inside. He demanded to know how she could have lied to him like this. She had betrayed his trust.
Ralph became enraged and started yelling as he hit her repeatedly on the upper arm, hard enough to leave a bruise. Then he grabbed one of her sandals off her bedroom floor and hit her on the butt with it. Constance yelled at him to stop, but she did nothing to pull him away. At some point, Constance slapped Kristin in the face.
Kristin ran into the kitchen, picked up a knife, and tried to cut her wrists with it until Ralph wrestled it out of her hands. She turned and ran back upstairs, where she locked herself in the bathroom and made superficial cuts in her wrists with a razor blade.
“I’m worthless,” she cried through the door. “You’d be better off without me.”
Because the cuts weren’t deep, Constance and Ralph determined she didn’t need medical treatment.
Sometime in the next few days, Kristin showed the bruise on her arm to a couple of girls at school and told them her parents had “beaten on her” during an argument. She started banging on the lockers and talking about committing suicide.
The two girls, concerned about Kristin’s recent odd behavior, went to the office to talk to a counselor, Leopoldina Abreu, a Cuban mother and grandmother to whom the high school yearbook staff dedicated their 1993 edition. School officials immediately reported a potential case of child abuse to the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services and to the Claremont Police Department.
Larry Horowitz, a police officer who was working on a master’s degree in social work at the time, got the call around lunchtime on April 2, while he was out on patrol. When he arrived at the high school, Kristin and her two girlfriends were sitting outside the office of Barbara Salyer, the dean of discipline, waiting for him. Horowitz went into Salyer’s office and closed the door. Given the bruise and Kristin’s lack of disciplinary problems, Salyer was concerned her story might be true. Horowitz called the girls in one at a time and interviewed them.
The first girl told him that she and her friend had grown very worried about Kristin because her behavior had changed so much over the past week. So they talked to their counselor about it, and she decided to bring Kristin in for some help.
Kristin’s parents didn’t like the two girls, one of them told Horowitz. Describing Constance as “very curt” with them, she said that Constance wouldn’t “allow Kristin to talk with us or do anything with us. They don’t seem like very friendly people.”
Horowitz sent the two girlfriends on their way and spent the next forty-five minutes talking to Kristin. She seemed flat, numb, and depressed. She wouldn’t look him in the eye, and he had a hard time establishing a rapport with her. To him, all of these indicators pointed to a problem at home. He spent a few minutes asking for basic information, such as which grade she was in and where she lived, before proceeding to the hard questions.
Kristin told him that she had confided in her girlfriends, but she said, “I guess they wanted me to get into trouble, so they went to Mrs. Abreu and told her what was going on. I was brought into the office, but I didn’t want to bring up family matters with the school.”
This was the first time her father had hit her, she said. Most of the problems with her parents stemmed from their complaining about her friends. But this time, she said, it went further than usual, and her mother called her “worthless” and “a slut.” She said she didn’t want to see her parents get into trouble over their fight; she thought they could work the whole thing out over spring break.
Horowitz examined her arm and wrote in his notes that she had “pronounced bruising to the upper arm.” He took photos of the area but decided the injury wasn’t serious. He did notice, however, that she had fresh wounds on her knuckles—apparently from punching the lockers—and appeared to have picked at sores on the back of her hands. He figured drugs were involved.
She told him she felt safe going home because things had already improved.
“My dad even welcomed me back into the family on Thursday night,” Kristin told him.
Horowitz told Kristin to inform her parents about their conversation and to warn them he’d be calling that night to set up an interview. Back at the station, he followed police procedures by notifying the child abuse hotline of the incident and preparing a written report of suspected child abuse.
Around six o’clock, Kristin called to clarify her story.