In a world addicted, opioids first cultivated in ancient Mesopotamia and now distributed by both dealers and doctors in the United States, bright red poppy flowers crushed powder white during 5000 years of use and abuse, there exists no ghost more incessant than Brittany Smith. Brittany is the name I know her by, but I’m sure this must be different for everyone. Some know her as Brit, or cuz. Maybe, for some, she doesn’t have a name. She could be the image of a hand, flattened on the wall of a cave in Patagonia, red dust blown over it in one breath so as to create a shape through its own negative space. Or maybe, more simply, others know her as Lisa, Uncle Gary, or the lady who used to collect coins on the stairs of CVS.
In 2017, opioids killed more people in the United States than guns or car accidents; there were over 15,000 gun deaths, 40,000 deaths due to cars accidents, and 42,000 deaths caused by opioid overdoses. More bodies destroyed than during the entirety of the Vietnam War. New Hampshire is tied for second in the nation, just behind West Virginia, for drug related deaths per capita.
I grew up in Greenland, New Hampshire, a small town of 3,500 near the sliver of the state’s short coast. It has always been for me a peculiar place of overlap. Frustratingly incongruent in its boast of historic charm and its active role in the opioid crisis. It’s not a town of alleyway deals or a major drug trafficking hub like Manchester or Nashua, but instead, of handoffs in houses and Narcan-trained police. I am no stranger to stories of addiction in my town, to stories of death. But no protagonist has returned to me over and over again like Brittany.
When I was thirteen and she twenty-six, when I was still riding the bus to school and she selling prescription painkillers, Brittany was murdered during a drug raid in my hometown.
In most stories, there is a villain. In this one, on a large scale, it is Purdue Pharma, who some say are the quiet creators of the current opioid crisis in the United States. In 1995 Purdue began producing OxyContin, a controlled-release drug that turned opioids from “niche” cancer drugs to those that could be used for less-acute, longer lasting pain. They wanted it to be a drug for everyone. Thus, Purdue created the perfect formula for disaster; a drug that was both easily addictive and easily perscribable. After almost twenty years and increased accounts of addiction to OxyContin, Purdue switched its formula to one that could only be crushed to a gummy substance rather than a powder. That way, users could not inject or snort it. But this did not stop the older population from continuing to take it orally, nor the younger from turning to black markets.
I go back with Brittany to April 12, 2012, about six in the evening. She hides in the basement of her boyfriend Colin Mutrie’s home on Post Road, just a mile and a half from Greenland’s only elementary school. The sun will not begin to set for another half hour and a block of light is forced through a small window. She isn’t in the dark, not fully. The front door busts open upstairs. Shots are fired from Colin, whose .357 Magnum revolver peeks out from behind an air hockey table. One bullet hits a policeman right in the soft spot of his throat. Maybe it came from the gun that Brittany bought him. But it could have been another. He kept one on him, one in his car, one on the coffee table, and a few in his bedroom.
The ceiling thumps above Brittany, the fallen bodies of four police officers. There’s yelling. Colin runs down to the basement and maybe there is an exchange of words between himself and Brittany, or maybe not, and Colin shoots her. Next he shoots the Greenland police chief, Michael Mahoney, one bullet through the basement window. Then he shoots himself.
Pathologists were able to trace the line of the bullet through Brittany’s head. Colin shot her at a downward angle. She was shorter than he was. The bullet ripped from left to right. She had no other wounds. Traces of opiates and marijuana were found in her system. She had been using at the time of her death.
I heard the first pieces of this story on the television in my kitchen. It was nighttime. My memory of that night and the following weeks is mostly collapsed into whispered school bus conversations, the way in which the dead are usually discussed. “The chief was supposed to retire in a week,” we lamented. “It happened practically right at our bus stop,” we told the other kids at school. That’s what was important to us at the time. I know that I felt, maybe still feel, an artificial possessiveness for Brittany. Brittany, who was not even the star of the news segment. The media reserved their sympathy for Chief Maloney and his family.
But I was fascinated by Brittany’s death and the strange way in which it seemed to have gotten tangled together with my life, tight knots in thin string. I had never met her, but the small places that we overlapped felt significant to me. I had passed Colin’s white-shuttered home on Post Road many times on the way to my gymnastics gym. There’s a small driveway with a one-door garage to the left of the house and a lonely tree to the right. Stairs lead to a front porch,
just big enough to fit a grill and a chair or two. Now, the house is painted yellow, the doors, green.
Colin’s house is only a few minutes down the road from the Greenland police station, which also served as my bus stop from kindergarten until eighth grade. My dad drove me and my sister there every morning. On Fridays he always brought a thermal pitcher filled with hot chocolate for the other kids who waited at the stop. Sometimes he brought chocolate crepes.
Brittany grew up in Berwick, Maine, where, in a way, I also had also grown up. I went to a preparatory school there, Berwick Academy, and spent over an hour every day riding the bus north, the reverse of her commute to Colin’s house. I imagine that we passed each other on the Pisquataqua Bridge. During the summer we took our motor boat under the bridge, so I liked to look out the window and watch the water below, remembering how it sounds to hear the rumbling of cars and trucks above. I can imagine seeing Brittany driving her pink Jetta to Colin’s house, her dog Diesel in the passenger seat. Everything that I knew about her seemed to collide with me.