THE MUSKEGON CHRONICLE Sunday, July 31, 2005
….. and Death
“We have learned a lot … and learned it all too late.”
-Pam Montambo, mother of Keith Montambo
By Jeff Alexander
Chronicle Staff Writer
The unwelcome visitor arrived at Bill and Pam Montambo’s house just after midnight on a cold night last November, a sheriff’s deputy sent to deliver the worst possible news.
There had been an accident, the deputy said, and the Montambo’s 19-year-old son was dead.
Their first thought: A traffic accident, probably involving alcohol, had claimed the life of their son. Keith Montambo. He was a clever young man, raised in a small farming community by a tight-knit, loving family, whose life veered wildly off course during his junior year at Ravenna High School.
But the way Keith died was worse than losing a child in a fatal traffic accident, according to his parents. That’s because his death revealed a secret, destructive lifestyle that rocked his mother and father to their emotional core.
“Keith had a secret life. We didn’t learn about it until after his death,” his mother said.
Keith Montambo was a heroin junkie, a hard-core drug addict whose body surrendered Nov. 13 to a lethal mix of eight different drugs coursing through his bloodstream. He was one of 17 people who died of accidental drug overdoses in Muskegon County in 2004, and the youngest, according to health department records.
The Montambo’s first glimpse into their son’s fatal dance with drugs came two days after Keith was found dead. While searching his apartment for the suit Keith would wear at his funeral, the family discovered hypodermic needles and a rubber tourniquet – the tools of a heroin addict – scattered about the place along with an assortment of other drugs and paraphernalia.
The harsh reality that her son was a heroin junkie launched Pam Montambo on a gut-wrenching quest to unravel her son’s deadly three-year descent into a life of alcohol abuse, drugs, crime, and Muskegon’s hard-core punk rock scene.
In the days after Keith’s death, his mother demanded answers from the authorities.
How did her son, the boy who was supposed to go to college and carry on the Montambo’s family name, get hooked on smack, the street name for heroin?
How could someone who was being tested twice a month for drug use as part of his probation for cashing stolen payroll checks – and tested clean every time – die of a drug overdose?
When did the boy who loved sports and feared needles start injecting one of the world’s most addictive and dangerous drugs into his veins?
Why didn’t Keith’s friends, several of whom knew he was using heroin twice a day and feared he would overdose, save him from self-destruction?
There were no immediate answers. The police wouldn’t release the results of their investigation for several weeks, until the medical examiner’s autopsy report provided a definite cause of death.
Keith’s mother couldn’t wait that long. She launched her own investigation. What she uncovered forced her family to confront Keith’s secret life and face the memory of a young man who boasted to his friends that he was a “functional junkie.”
“I had to know who he was…This was not my son, the kid who gave me hugs.” Pam said. “More than anything, I tried to find out when he started using heroin and why the hell didn’t we see it.”
This is the story of one mother’s painful journey of exploration into the abyss of adolescent substance abuse. Pam Montambo hopes her son’s story will alert parents to the reality that any child can slide into the pit of drug abuse.
“The drug addicts of today aren’t skid-row bums,” Pam said, “They are the faces you see around your dinner table every night.”
The photograph is a slice of Americana: A 15-year old boy in a baseball uniform, kneeling on one knee and holding a bat while looking into the camera. That was the Keith Montambo his parents thought they knew, a good student who played third base for the Ravenna Bulldogs’ junior varsity baseball team in 2001 and led the team with a .533 batting average.
That seemingly idyllic childhood started to crumble by the time Keith turned 16. He quit playing baseball and focused on a new passion: punk rock music.
Given the freedom that comes with having a car and a driver’s license, he started hanging out with a different crowd of kids during his junior year in high school. Keith began getting tattoos and body piercings and wearing long-sleeved shirts to hide the needle marks on his forearms.
In the summer of 2001, Keith reconnected with Rachel Way, an Orchard View High School student he met years earlier in elementary school. They began making regular trips to the Ice Pick, a private club in downtown Muskegon that has long been the epicenter of the area’s punk rock scene.
It wasn’t long before Keith formed a punk band with Way and another longtime Ravenna friend, Dirk Neinhouse. They taught themselves how to play guitar, shared booze and drugs and got into trouble together, according to Way and Neinhouse.
“It was really fun for a while,” Way said. “Keith liked to party and he liked his drugs; if somebody handed him something, he would try it.”
Keith’s parents said they suspected their son was drinking alcohol and smoking pot while hanging out at the Ice Pick with a group of adolescents known for sporting wild hairstyles and provocative tattoos, using vulgar nicknames and challenging societal norms.
Keith would leave home for days at a time, occasionally returning intoxicated. On one occasion, he was rushed to Hackley Hospital after drinking nearly a fifth of whiskey.
The Montambo’s tried to rein in their wayward son, with little success. They took him to psychologists, talked with drug abuse counselors and followed the experts’ recommendations to be more strict with their son.
But in April of 2003, after growing increasingly frustrated by his parents’ strict rules, Keith dropped out of high school, drained his college savings and moved into his own apartment in downtown Muskegon. He bounced from one job to another as his passion for punk rock and drugs intensified, according to friends and relatives.
“Keith was the heart and soul of the Ice Pick,” Ice Pick owner Mark Spaniola said. “I think he was so engulfed in the punk rock image that nothing else mattered. It was a beautiful thing, but the downfall was that he thought he was Keith Richards (of the Rolling Stones) and could get away with anything.”
Once he was on his own, Keith Montambo’s drug use increased dramatically, according to his friends. He and Neinhouse began using heroin they bought from a dealer in Grand Rapids known by the nickname “Snotty,” Way said.
Legal problems soon followed.
Keith was arrested in October 2003 for cashing blank payroll checks he and his friends found in a dumpster. He was arrested a second time for painting graffiti on a wall at a Grandville shopping center.
The graffiti incident, which violated his parole for the fraudulent check conviction, earned Keith 90 days in the Muskegon County Jail and 30 days on an electronic tether.
After two years of recurring problems with their son, the Montambos said Keith started to get his life back on track in early 2004. He landed a third-shift job as a welder at Eagle-Alloy Inc. and completed his 90-day sentence at the Muskegon County Jail, during which he was allowed to work eight hours per day.
As part of his probation, Keith had to submit to urine tests twice each month to monitor whether he was drinking booze or smoking pot. Keith passed all 18 of those tests, but he knew how to beat the system: he switched to drugs that weren’t covered by the urinalysis and took over-the-counter medications that purged traces of illegal drugs and alcohol from his system, according to his journal entries and interviews with friends.
Pam and Bill Montambo said they thought Keith was being tested for numerous illicit drugs. “I feel the criminal-justice system failed Keith because it didn’t detect his use of heroin or other drugs,” his father said.
Bill and Pam Montambo said they were disappointed that those who were closest to Keith didn’t intervene when his drug use began to spiral out of control.
“Why didn’t anybody tell us?” Bill Montambo said.
Some of Keith’s friends said they thought he would eventually outgrow his addiction and didn’t think it was their place to lecture him about the dangers of drug use. Way and one of his other girlfriends said they broke up with Keith over his heavy drug use.
Keith often wrote about his addiction and legal problems in an online journal, which his parents did not know about until after he died. There was a sense of desperation in some of Keith’s journal entries.
“I’m gonna write about how I hate everybody,” he wrote in an Oct.2, 2004 journal entry, six weeks before he died. “If you had a button in front of you that you could push and it would blow up the entire planet, killing everybody…would you push it? I would, in a heartbeat.”
His friends and relatives said Keith posted those dark journal entries for shock value, or because he was high on drugs at the time. When he was sober, Keith often talked about his dream of becoming a rock star, according to his family and friends. They dismissed the notion that Keith might have been depressed or intentionally overdosed to escape some sort of emotional prison.
“Keith was so full of life, he had plans,” said his older sister, Jennifer Walenski. “Keith wanted to be a famous rock star; he planned to move to California.”
After Keith’s death, Neinhouse told police he wasn’t surprised that his best friend overdosed.
“Dirk said that they were all trying to live a rock-star-type life, and used to joke about how they would be lucky if they lived to be 30,” according to a police report. “Dirk said Keith would joke back that he would be lucky if he lived to be 20 years old.”
Keith died three months before his 20th birthday.
“We used to laugh about overdosing,” Neinhouse said in an interview. “We didn’t think it could kill us.”
Keith’s sister said she warned her younger brother last summer that his drug use was out of control, and would land him in jail or the morgue.
“My husband and I thought Keith would get over this (drug addiction),” she said. “That’s why we felt so guilty after he died. We were wrong.”
Drug overdoses are nothing new in the entertainment industry. Some of the biggest stars of stage and screen died of overdosing, including Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols, John Belushi and Lenny Bruce.
Several bands have made light of drug use. Perhaps the most famous song about drug use was “Sex and Drugs and Rock ‘N’ Roll” by Ian Dury & the Blockheads. The chorus goes like this:
Sex and drugs and rock and roll
Is all my brain and body need
Sex and drugs and rock and roll
Are very good indeed…”
Keith’s sudden change in personal interests and hanging out with a different group of friends after his sophomore year were clues that he might have started drinking booze and take drugs, said Louis Churchwell, a longtime drug abuse counselor who is the chief executive officer of West Michigan Therapy Inc. in Muskegon. Churchwell never treated Keith.
Bill and Pam Montambo were divided over whether their son’s marijuana and alcohol use could lead to more dangerous drugs. His father though Keith would eventually stop smoking pot, while his mother feared it might lead to something much worse.
Keith’s parents took numerous steps to try to halt his drug use following his first arrest. Still, they could not watch him around the clock now control his actions once he moved out of their house.
“No matter how good a parent you are, you can’t be with your kids at school, or after school, and it doesn’t matter how good a school a kid goes to,” Churchwell said. “Kids are exposed to other kids, and sometimes adults, who have drug problems.”
Experts believe some people are prone to addiction because of the genetic makeup of their brains. Some people can be satisfied with small amounts of nicotine, alcohol or drugs, while others become hooked on the soothing feeling addictive substances create and need ever-increasing doses.
“No one ever starts out using drugs intending to become a drug addict,” said Alan Leshner, directory of the National Institute of Drug Abuse in a recent article. “The use of addictive drugs changes the brain always in destructive ways that can result in compulsive and even uncontrollable drug use.”
Drug abuse affects adolescents and adults in all social, economic and ethnic groups, Churchwell said. He said heroin use is more common in Muskegon County than most people believe, but added that alcohol and marijuana remain the drugs of choice for local kids and adults.
“The problem is young folks get involved with gateway drugs – alcohol, cigarettes and marijuana – and if they develop that addictive brain they are capable of trying anything,” Churchwell said.
In 2004, two-thirds of all Muskegon County teens had tried alcohol by their senior year of high school and nearly one-third had smoked pot, according to a survey of high school students conducted by the Muskegon County Health Department. Just 2.6 percent of students surveyed last year tried heroin by their senior year, down from 6.1 percent in 1996, according to the survey.
Using heroin is especially dangerous because its potency can vary dramatically from one dose to the next, said Dave Wingard, supervisory of the Crossroads program at Catholic Social Services in Muskegon, which counsels teen drug addicts. “Too much potency and you’re dead,” he said.
Pam Montambo said parents should not rely on “the so-called experts” or the criminal-justice system to expose or halt a child’s substance abuse.
“If your instincts tell you that your child is doing drugs, then search their rooms, search their cars,” she said. “We have learned a lot (about the local drug scene) and learned it all too late.”
Keith;s punk rock band – the name of which was too vulgar to be published here – was scheduled to perform at the Ice Pick the night of Nov.13, 2004. When Keith didn’t show up, the band played a set without their regular guitarist.
After the show, Keith’s band mates went to his apartment at Glen Oaks. They found him dead on the couch, sitting upright with his head tilted back and a tray with tobacco and rolling papers in his lap. His arms were blue.
“There was marijuana all over the coffee table and there were needles by his computer, along with a spoon and residue of cocaine. The apartment was very dirty and unkempt,” according to a police report.
Keith’s friends told police he was a heavy drug user who had been injecting heroin for two years. One of his friends said Keith “used crack, heroin, and just about everything else.”
Keith’s friends knew of his addiction because Keith was very open about using drugs,” said James Marshall, who was quoted in a police report as saying he had a falling out with Keith over his drug use. “James said in the past he saw Keith inject heroin into each arm and then squirt some into his mouth.”
Dr. Michael Markey, the medical examiner who conducted the autopsy on Keith, found eight different drugs in his blood, most of which were derivatives of cocaine, marijuana, nicotine and heroin.
Though he was 6 feet tall, Keith’s weight had dropped to 150 pounds by the time of his death. Needle marks from injecting heroin were found on both forearms, according to the autopsy report.
“Many of the drugs he had in his system were potentially lethal on their own,” Markey said. “The combination of those drugs was very dangerous.”
When Pam Montambo finally received the autopsy and police reports, three months after her son died, she was stunned to learn the details of a lifestyle he managed to hide from his parents.
“It helped me to learn everything about his death, to know the other Keith,” she said. “The hard part of dealing with this type of death is the shame of it. My son was a drug addict and he got to the point where he was dealing drugs.”
Though Pam and Bill Montambo moved to Stoney Lake, a small community in Oceana County, shortly before Keith died, most of their relatives still live in Ravenna. Pam said she fears this article will create some ill will in Ravenna toward her family.
“I know that when this story hits the street, some people are going to say, ‘Look, your kid died of a drug overdose.’” She said. “In my own eyes, I did fail Keith.”
Nearly a year after Keith’s death, his relatives and friends are still battling the emotional demons unleashed by the loss of a young man who was a son, brother, friend, musician, and lover.
The Ice Pick’s punk rock concert scene ground to a halt after Keith’s death – there have been few shows there since he died. Some of Keith’s friends have stopped taking drugs, but other continue to test the limits of human chemistry.
His parents often visit the cemetery where their son is buried next to ancestors who helped settle the village of Ravenna more than a century ago.
Eventually, the plastic wreath Pam Montambo places atop Keith’s grave will be replace by a granite guitar that bears her son’s signature. Until then, the grave of a young man who paid the ultimate price for a three-year binge of sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll is marked by a small blue cross his mother bung inside the wreath.
There is an inscription on the tiny cross. It reads: “Take care of my son.”