Jacob Samter had two ways of relieving anxiety: swimming and heroin.
Swimming led the energetic 22-year-old to coaching jobs at Chattahoochee High School and the YMCA. Heroin led him to his grave.
On Feb. 4, Samter’s parents woke to find him slumped on the floor beside his bed in their Alpharetta home. A powdery white residue, likely the dregs of his last heroin hit, was on the nightstand.
Samter’s death was the culmination of 12 years of dabbling with drugs that relatives said took a turn for the worse when he got hooked on heroin in 2009. The family hired a psychiatrist and a social worker to help him. It worked for a while, but he relapsed over the holidays.
“It’s just been heartbreaking to watch Jacob struggle,” said his mother, Jeanne Samter. “It’s like watching a train wreck and trying so hard to fix it.”
Samter is one of three young men from Atlanta’s affluent northern suburbs to die within a month of each other from a suspected heroin overdose. Justin Shinholster, 21, was found dead in February after an argument with his girlfriend in Roswell. Harry Siebold, 20, died in early March in his family’s home in Dunwoody.
Their deaths reinforced a creeping concern that the powerful opiate is gaining a greater toehold in suburban Atlanta.
Ronald Loula, the head swim coach at Chattahoochee High, taught all three young men at Taylor Road Middle School in Johns Creek. He also worked alongside Samter. Loula was stunned when he learned all three had overdosed on heroin.
“I’m not talking about people smoking a joint, I’m talking about kids finding heroin, apparently readily available,” Loula said. “Very little shocks me nowadays about what kids will do. But this did.”
As high-schoolers, all three experimented with marijuana, alcohol and prescription drugs to relieve stress or to have what seemed like harmless fun at parties. Later they graduated to harder drugs, according to loved ones.
Samter’s parents say the problem is more widespread than it seems.
“We do think that kids like Jacob struggle to find help,” said Jacob’s father, Felix Samter. “And to whatever extent that story can be told, maybe it can save at least one other person.”
A cheaper high
Heroin has long trailed marijuana, cocaine and methamphetamine in popularity locally and nationally.
But a 2010 Atlanta drug market analysis published by the U.S. Department of Justice found the highly addictive opiate is becoming more prevalent in suburban areas where it used to be rare. Forty-six of 62 metro area law enforcement agencies reported heroin was available at moderate to low levels.
Police think part of the reason is economics. At about $15 a hit, heroin is a cheaper alternative to prescription painkillers that can cost $30 to $80 a pill. Both are opiates and have similar effects.
Some who regularly abuse prescription drugs — and among teenagers, such drugs are second only to marijuana use — are switching to heroin when maintaining that habit gets too costly, said Joseph Ranazzisi, deputy assistant administrator of the Drug Enforcement Administration’s Office of Diversion Control.
Law enforcement and drug treatment professionals are alarmed about what the trend could mean for Atlanta teenagers. Heroin is highly addictive. And overdosing causes fatal respiratory arrest, especially when combined with prescription drugs like Xanax, an anti-anxiety medication.
“My fear is we are going to see an uptick in heroin abuse, given the potential crossover from prescription drug use,” said Dr. Brian Dew, a Georgia State University professor who recently served as the Atlanta representative for the National Institute on Drug Abuse.
‘Twice the effect’
Justin Shinholster, 21, was a casualty of that phenomenon. His girlfriend, Paige Bland, 20, said he got hooked on Oxycodone painkillers while living in Florida last year. Shinholster told her he switched to heroin because it was cheaper but has “twice the effect and it hits you faster,” Bland said. She persuaded him to move home and get off the drugs.
He was trying to do it through willpower alone when the pair moved into a Roswell apartment in January. However, Bland noticed Shinholster became bored and frustrated. He yearned to enroll in college and marry. But Shinholster couldn’t afford college, and Bland felt too young to get married.
“He had actually proposed to me the night that he passed away,” Bland said. The proposal sparked an argument. “He was messed up and I knew he was messed up. He got down on his knees and said, ‘Will you marry me?’ And I said, ‘Are you kidding right now?’”
Shinholster stormed out and Bland left the apartment. Later that evening, a friend found Shinholster in the bathroom of their home collapsed from a drug overdose. It was the day after Valentine’s Day.
Roswell police found a spoon with a grayish substance believed to be heroin and hypodermic needles on the bathroom counter, along with a small bag of the prescription anti-anxiety drug Xanax.
Shinholster died in a hospital three days later.
A haunting discovery
Three weeks later, one of Shinholster’s former schoolmates, Harry Siebold, also shot up for the last time.
Siebold led a charmed life among the residents of the Atlanta Athletic Club in Johns Creek. He graduated from Northview High School before his family settled in Dunwoody, his father, Rusty Siebold, said. He grew up playing sports in school and golfing or boating on the weekends.
At age 18, he started experimenting with marijuana, pills and booze. By age 20, he was a full-blown addict who sought inpatient treatment in Phoenix, Ariz. He became a Christian there, and after returning home he tried to straighten out by getting a job with a local sign company, his father said.
His family supported him through several stints of rehab and his father even drove him to addict support groups. The tools they gave him seemed to work for a while. But Siebold also told his dad there were still times he felt an overwhelming, unshakable urge to use heroin.
A drug dealer turned him onto the drug after the OxyContin he had been using got too pricey.
On March 4, Rusty Siebold came inside from doing yard work to find the bathroom door shut. He is haunted by what he found.
“It was locked, I was hollering and nobody was answering,” Siebold recalled. “I broke the door down and he was just sprawled on the bathroom door. The needle was laying on his stomach.”
‘No one wants to believe’
Loula, the swim coach, had no idea that his assistant coach, Samter, was battling a demon. He had missed only one practice since he took the job in August. Family members said Samter had been clean for two years. He was also on the dean’s list at Georgia Perimeter College, where he was studying to become a teacher. His parents clung to the hope that he was finally on the right path.
Samter’s parents now believe he relapsed on heroin again in the fall, not long after he started taking Tylenol with codeine to treat painful kidney stones. They noticed he was becoming more irritable and had started biting his fingernails again — a telltale sign, Jeanne Samter said.
Still, they thought he knew better. His best friend had died a year prior from a heroin overdose. A month before his death, his mother said, Samter had told her: “I’ve got to stay off drugs, because if I don’t, I’m going to die.”
When Loula had to gather the 45 members of the Chattahoochee High swim team to tell them about Samter’s Feb. 4 death, the students were devastated. It was just two weeks before they were to compete in the state championships. Samter missed seeing them win second place.
“It was very difficult for the kids because I’m 44, he’s 22,” Loula said. “He obviously had a little more connection with the kids, because he was closer to them in age.”
Chris Zollman, a 23-year-old Georgia State University student, was a friend of Samter, Schinholster and Siebold. Like his friends, he once used heroin, he said, and said he has witnessed at least 10 people overdose.
He says he quit using after he saw how it cut short his friends’ lives. He now attends Narcotics Anonymous meetings and counsels other young people to avoid drugs. Zollman said he is disappointed nobody has organized a response to the problem after his friends’ deaths.
“All there has been is funerals,” Zollman said. “That’s it.”
He thinks people are in denial.
“No one ... wants to believe that it’s in the suburbs, but it is,” Zollman said.
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