Colton Banks

Colton Banks was a nineteen-year-old student, friend, and family protector whose death from an opioid overdose in November 2012 came days before he was due to see an addiction specialist. His story makes the distance between intending to seek help and reaching it painfully concrete, and shows how a fatality could leave a family grieving without a clear route to legal accountability. The book remembers him not only through the circumstances of his death, but through the friends and family who tried to make his life visible in its fullness.

Identity and Background

Colton was Drenna Banks’s younger son. He had been raised in what his mother described as a good home, and she recalled him as a star athlete who stood up to bullies and looked out for other people. His friend Christopher Waldrop remembered him as exceptionally kind: the sort of friend who would get out of bed in the middle of the night to give someone a ride. These recollections resist the reduction of a young person to the drugs he used or the fatal circumstances in which his story ended.

His mother’s account also complicates the idea that a parent can simply recognize and control the course of a child’s drug use. At seventeen, after learning that Colton was misusing Adderall, Drenna monitored his use. She grounded him after finding marijuana hidden in a briefcase under his bed, and later sent him to a twenty-eight-day rehabilitation program when he progressed to pills. Earlier, she had judged another family whose son had died of an overdose, wondering why the parents could not control their child. She later apologized for that judgment. Her own experience made the limits of parental vigilance, and the shame that can keep families quiet, immediate rather than theoretical.

Pills, Debt, and the Approach to Treatment

By the time he was nineteen, Colton was caught in a pill economy that connected prescription supplies, resale, and drug debt. He was a student at Radford University, where he was selling pills to repay a debt from the previous day. The account describes a middle-aged opioid user who had received hundreds of prescription pain pills from a Roanoke pain clinic only three days before Colton died. A police search warrant showed that all but twelve of the pills were missing. Christopher later described this man as a source from whom he and others obtained pills, including large quantities of oxycodone as well as other prescription drugs.

Colton’s role in selling pills did not mean he had escaped dependence or its pressures. The book places such transactions within a recurring pattern: people who began with prescriptions could turn to dealers and resell part of what they obtained to finance further purchases. In that cycle, debt and the need to maintain access could draw users into recruiting or supplying others. Colton’s particular debt was from the day before his death; the evidence does not establish that any single pill or transaction alone explains the overdose. It does show how quickly a young person’s social and educational life could become entangled with a market built around prescription drugs.

The weekend of Colton’s death was meant to be his last before getting clean. He had arranged to meet an addiction specialist on Monday and had placed two Post-it notes on his car’s dashboard to remind himself of the appointment. The notes are a small, concrete record of an intention to seek help. They also sharpen the tragedy of the timing: the appointment was not a distant possibility but a next step already written down, while the weekend he had planned to get through proved fatal.

Death and Its Unresolved Accountability

Colton died at 11:30 on the morning of November 4, 2012, All Saints Sunday, while his parents were at church. When a police officer came to their home a few hours later and told them that Colton had expired, his parents initially did not understand the word as a declaration of death. The delay between the bureaucratic phrasing and its meaning captures the abrupt break the news brought into their day.

No charges were filed against the middle-aged pill seller. The police chief explained that when an autopsy identifies multiple toxicity, it is difficult to assign responsibility to one particular batch of pills. That outcome intensified the Bankses’ anger: the evidence described a chain of supply and resale, but the legal process did not produce a charge against the man from whose home the missing pills had come. The book presents this not as proof that one person could be held responsible for the death, but as an example of how the mixed substances involved in an overdose could complicate the search for accountability.

Colton’s death also belongs to a period when families affected by addiction were often isolated from one another. In 2012, there were not yet the online parent groups described in the book as later ways to share treatment information, coping strategies, and practical support. Shame could leave families struggling in private, even as the crisis moved through schools, friendships, homes, and local pill networks. Colton’s death therefore marks both a personal loss and one instance of a broader emergency whose effects were often hidden until a family was forced to confront them.

Funeral and Family Remembrance

At the funeral-home visitation, Drenna chose an open-casket funeral and dressed Colton in a flannel shirt she had recently bought him at Kohl’s, pants, a hat, and the boots he liked to wear four-wheeling. His hands were arranged around a silver fish medallion bearing the inscription WWJD, which he had recently borrowed from his older brother. The clothing and necklace were ordinary personal objects, but together they presented him to mourners as a particular young man with habits, family ties, and a life beyond the overdose.

Drenna wanted his friends to see the person they knew: an athlete, a defender of others, and a friend who had been present when people needed him. Her memories continued in the ordinary repetitions of family life. On Colton’s birthday she stopped at Burger King for his favorite meal, a cheeseburger with fries and sweet tea. Making a salad brought back the way he poured ranch dressing, often using far more than he intended. These details do not resolve the loss; they show how grief attaches itself to familiar routines and keeps a loved one’s distinctive presence in view.

Three months after Spencer Mumpower left for prison, and two years after Scott Roth’s death, the Bankses used Colton’s funeral to send a warning to his opioid-addicted friends and their parents. The gesture turned a family ceremony into a public appeal, though it did not erase their private sorrow. Colton’s narrative holds these two realities together: the preventable-seeming closeness of the treatment appointment he was supposed to attend, and the enduring person his family wanted others to remember. It also situates his death within a crisis where pill access, dependence, shame, and the difficulty of assigning legal responsibility could converge before a young person reached the help he had begun to arrange.