Jensen, the dealer, was quiet, introverted and brainy. The danger, too, was significantly greater, but once Schwandt tried the powder, he was hooked.
Ten milligrams of the powder - 100 times more than the patch - cost $10 and kept you high all day. Some medicinal patches held 100 micrograms and cost $300-$400.
The powder Jensen sold was cheaper and more potent, and a small amount lasted a long time. Schwandt experimented with fentanyl before he began buying from Jensen, but it was in the form of a medicinal patch, a legitimate pharmaceutical product diverted from its intended use as a pain reliever. Schwandt’s fentanyl connection was a friend of a friend, a local teenager named Ryan Jensen. Living together, they both used more and more, until they found something even stronger. Bailey told his friends that he had tried heroin a few times over that summer. By the time they became roommates, Schwandt was using heroin multiple times a day. His drug habit became worse in the fall of 2014, when he dropped out of community college after only a few months of classes and moved in with one of his best friends, Kain Schwandt, in Grand Forks. She said he had to stop, and he was apologetic, embarrassed, not defiant. When Bailey was a junior in high school, Laura caught him smoking pot in the basement. He was the type of kid that teachers remember, that they keep talking about for years. His teachers teased him about his “clown car,” because so many of the other students wanted to pile in to join him for lunch break. She was the person he talked to when he had his first crush, and when he started dating his first girlfriend she knew that he loved wearing Halloween costumes on random days throughout the year because it reminded him of playing dress-up as a kid she laughed at the funny accents he practiced, at the dorky jokes only the two of them shared. What was there to say?īefore that knock on the door, Laura was certain that she knew everything about Bailey. They spent the dark hours sitting on the couch, waiting for the storm to clear, moving in and out of spasms of inconsolable crying. A heavy snowstorm had closed the roads, leaving Laura and Jason unable to reach Grand Forks that night.
Laura had never heard of fentanyl she wasn’t even sure how to spell it.Īfter a few minutes, the officer and the pastor left. She called and wrote down what he said: overdose, fentanyl. The officer gave Laura the phone number for a detective in Grand Forks. Bailey Henke was living in Grand Forks, three hours east of his parents’ home in Minot, and the police there were working the case. Then he told them that their 18-year-old son, Bailey, was dead. The officer asked to see Laura’s ID to confirm that he was at the correct address. At the door, in the early morning shadows, they found a police officer and, behind him, a pastor. 3, 2015, Laura and Jason Henke awoke with a start at their home in Minot, N.D.