Las Vegas, Nevada

Las Vegas, Nevada, is the destination Tess Henry turns to while trying to find treatment, but it becomes the setting of her final months and death. Her story there is marked by repeated efforts to reconnect with care, uncertainty about where she is, and a family that remains willing to bring her home even when it cannot locate her.

A Destination for Treatment

In fall 2017, Tess’s mother, Patricia Mehrmann, heard that grant-funded medication-assisted treatment was becoming available in Virginia. When she called the community services board, she was told that the program was then accepting only pregnant women. The narrow eligibility left Tess without the kind of local treatment access her family was seeking. Soon afterward, Tess contacted the book’s author from someone else’s phone at four in the morning. She said she planned to enter another rehabilitation program in Nevada and asked whether the author could send her books.

Tess had no address where a book could reach her, and she had not yet checked into a facility. Her elderly grandfather nevertheless agreed to pay for another treatment attempt. Patricia later learned that Tess had recently persuaded him to wire her $500, ostensibly for a friend to drive her back to Roanoke. Patricia suspected the money had instead been for drugs, but took some encouragement from Tess having contacted her family and the author and from her renewed Facebook pictures of her son. Unknown to them at the time, Tess had applied for Medicaid in Nevada, where the Affordable Care Act expansion had widened access. The application offered evidence that she was seeking treatment, though it did not establish that she had entered a program.

A City Where Her Family Could Not Find Her

By November 2017, Patricia did not know where Tess was or who might be influencing her. During a phone call, Tess seemed to Patricia to be under the influence of crystal meth and was frightened by what she believed were gang stalkers. As she walked through the city, she interpreted passing cars’ lights and strangers’ voices as directed at her, including as signs that people knew her son’s name. Patricia’s response was practical: if Tess would tell the family where she was, treatment workers could come and pick her up. The obstacle was not a lack of people willing to help, but their inability to reach her without knowing her location.

Tess remained in contact intermittently. In December, she responded to a Facebook post about an early reading of the book and asked to see an advance copy. She also said she wanted to work on it, though it was unclear whether she meant her recovery or a return to Roanoke for another rehabilitation attempt. These brief exchanges linked Las Vegas to the possibility of renewed treatment without confirming that Tess had secured a place in care.

Precarious Survival and Family Ties

The account later reconstructed a life of severe instability in Las Vegas. Tess walked the streets at night, sometimes slept in casino corners, and had an abandoned minivan in a parking lot as her last known residence. During a winter freeze, she appeared at a friend’s home wrapped in a blanket. A friend from rehabilitation recalled that she often stayed awake walking through the night and missed both her son and her mother. He offered to fly to Nevada and drive her back in a rental car, but Tess told him not to worry because Patricia was arranging to bring her home.

That proposed return remained a possibility rather than a completed rescue. Shortly before Christmas, Patricia said she had peace of mind because Tess’s grandfather was ready to help when Tess was ready, and that she hoped she would be watched over. The family’s willingness to finance treatment and arrange transportation persisted, but it depended on communication with a daughter whose whereabouts were uncertain. Las Vegas, in this part of the narrative, is not presented as the cause of Tess’s addiction; it is the place where the family’s distance from her became especially difficult to overcome.

Death and Identification

On Christmas Eve, a homeless man searching for cans found Tess dead in a dumpster at a central Las Vegas apartment complex. The next morning, Patricia received a call. Police had identified Tess through her fingerprints and tattoos, including a Tree of Life on her shoulder and another tattoo bearing a religious inscription. The identification ended the family’s uncertainty about where she was, but only by confirming that efforts to bring her back for treatment could no longer succeed.

Tess’s death became national news. Patricia spoke with reporters who contacted her because she wanted the public to understand addiction and her daughter’s strength; some relatives were uncomfortable with the attention. The loss also reopened disagreements within the family about help, enabling, and tough love. Las Vegas therefore occupies two sharply opposed positions in Tess’s story: it was where she continued to seek, or remain connected to, the prospect of treatment, and where her family learned that its efforts to find and support her had come too late.