Spencer Mumpower
DopesickSpencer Mumpower is both a participant in and a measure of Roanoke’s suburban heroin epidemic: a former Hidden Valley student whose part in a fatal overdose led to federal prison, and a recovering addict who built a disciplined life around martial arts. His story links a specific act of responsibility—the deal that preceded Scott Roth’s death—to a wider account of addiction, family grief, incarceration, and the uncertain work of returning home.
Background and the Suburban Epidemic
The epidemic’s movement into affluent suburbs did not make it visible at once. Heroin had reached subdivisions near Roanoke by the mid-2000s, but its presence was not widely acknowledged until Ginger Mumpower, a prominent jeweler and civic leader, drove her addicted son to federal prison. Spencer’s transition from private-school student to inmate became one of the stories through which the crisis entered public view. After his conviction made front-page news in 2012, worried parents began coming to Ginger’s jewelry store, some driving two hours because they could think of nowhere else to turn.
Spencer’s history did not begin with his arrest. His mother sent him to fifteen rehabilitation facilities, yet for eight years he managed to use and sell drugs before his name appeared in a police blotter. In 2009, local police took his drugs during a bust and, as Spencer recalled it, threatened to wait for another mistake so they could charge him with more offenses. The police account was more qualified: officers said the purpose was to keep a lower-level dealer available while building a case against someone higher in the supply chain. Spencer stopped selling, but concluded that he could continue using heroin without being caught. He let his dealer live with him in exchange for drugs—a decision that left the supply inside his home and helped set the stage for what followed.
That pattern belonged to a larger cycle described in the book: some users moved from prescriptions to heroin and sold part of what they bought to finance another purchase, while dependence made avoiding withdrawal an urgent priority. Across the region, heroin moved through social networks and along I-81; one investigation later mapped thousands of messages between a New Jersey source and young users in Cave Spring and Hidden Valley. Those broader networks do not erase Spencer’s individual choices. They place them in a landscape where drug supply and addiction spread through familiar routes, friendships, and transactions.
Scott Roth’s Death and the Sentencing
When Scott Roth came to Spencer’s apartment to buy heroin, the two had not seen each other since high school, about three years earlier. They had never been best friends. They were drug buddies who had spent time in the basement of another partygoer’s home, where the father allowed them space to get high and, according to Spencer and Scott’s mother, routinely injected heroin in front of them. Spencer was already deeply addicted when Scott arrived.
Spencer acted as the go-between in the deal. Scott died of an overdose in April 2010; Spencer and his roommate, the dealer who supplied the drugs, went to prison. Spencer pleaded guilty and helped prosecutors catch the dealer. The dealer received a twenty-year sentence; Spencer received a reduced sentence of eight years for his role and cooperation.
At Spencer’s March 2012 federal sentencing, Scott’s mother, Robin Roth, carried a framed portrait of her son to the witness stand. She addressed Spencer with a series of questions about the ordinary acts of care Scott would never be there to perform: visiting her when she was old, mowing her lawn, sharing dinner, or holding her hand when she was dying. Her grief and anger were so evident that Judge James Turk encouraged her to meet Spencer before he left for prison. The judge, described as an affable octogenarian who shook defendants’ hands and brought his dachshund mix, Baby Girl, to court, had already sentenced the supplier to twenty years. Robin declined the meeting, saying she was not ready.
The distance between accountability and forgiveness remained visible even after the courtroom encounter. Spencer later drafted an apology to Robin with his mother’s help and mailed it to Robin’s therapist, leaving the therapist to decide when she might be strong enough to read it. He offered to mow her grass after his release and, while in prison, to give her the inheritance he received after his grandmother died. The offers did not undo Scott’s death, and the book does not present them as reconciliation. When Spencer’s mother later helped him report to prison, Robin said that knowing he was behind bars brought her no comfort.
What Spencer Revealed About Addiction
In the summer of 2012, the reporter followed Spencer as he prepared for prison, with his permission recording conversations during rides to karate classes. At a KFC lunch buffet, Spencer cheerfully demonstrated a jail recipe made by mixing packets of ketchup, Tabasco, and barbecue sauce. At his drug-court graduation he wore a suit that was too large for him. On a Saturday, he volunteered to speak with teenage first-time drug offenders and their worried parents, who listened closely for clues about what had gone wrong in his family.
His candidness made the sessions unsettling as well as useful. Spencer showed scars from injections, teeth damaged by amphetamines and later restored through forty hours of dental work, and jailhouse tattoos made with a contraband staple and a mixture of Vaseline and VO5 Shampoo. He described taking black-market Adderall, an amphetamine, every hour for eight consecutive days. He also recalled hiding drugs inside computers, emptied Sharpie markers, socks, and the pockets of gym shorts worn beneath his jeans. The ingenuity of the hiding places sat beside his advice to parents: remove medicines with codone in their names from the home, set rules, and hold children accountable when they break them. He explained his own past in terms of consequence: “The problem with me was, the trouble had to outweigh the fun.”
The advice came from a young man describing his own long failure to stop, not from someone untouched by the problem. Spencer said the police encounter had ended his dealing but not his heroin use; in his distorted reasoning, having the dealer live with him seemed compatible with staying out of trouble. When Scott came to buy heroin, the consequences were no longer abstract. Spencer’s public talks therefore carried a tension the book preserves: he could speak warmly and openly with parents, while his history included choices that had helped bring about a friend’s death.
The family burden was also shaped by isolation. In 2012, there were not yet Facebook groups connecting parents across Virginia to exchange rehabilitation advice or practical support. Robin Roth felt branded as a failed parent and carried much of her anger alone. As Spencer’s conviction made Ginger a point of contact for other families, the private consequences of the epidemic became harder to keep hidden, even though help remained fragmented across health care and criminal justice systems.
Prison, Discipline, and Release
Before leaving for prison in August 2012, Spencer was drug-free for more than two years. He had replaced opioid use with kenpo karate, training almost daily and using breathing exercises to manage anxiety about incarceration. His instructor, Rikk Perez, had become a father figure during a period when Spencer was estranged from his own father off and on. Perez also gave him exercises he could continue in his cell, including slow foot taps that progressed up a cinder-block wall.
Prison did not end that routine. Spencer stayed sober despite the drugs smuggled inside, kept working out, and read extensively about mixed martial arts. The Bureau of Prisons’ email system was limited, so Ginger copied articles about fighters a block of text at a time for him to study. Through her, he contacted fighters and studio owners for advice. Martial arts sustained him through other losses as well: his girlfriend left him, and Perez was arrested and jailed for taking indecent liberties with a teenage female student.
Spencer’s physical transformation was striking but did not amount to a simple cure. During an earlier jail stint, he had weighed 135 pounds, with sunken eyes and sores on his face. In a cell, he made weights from water-filled trash bags tied with strips of bedsheets, and used commissary money from his mother to obtain milk by trading ramen noodles and coffee. By the time Ginger picked him up from the Petersburg penitentiary in February 2017, he was exuberant at seeing her. He called out, “I want to run to you, but I still have these prison clothes on, and I’m afraid they’ll shoot me!” Ginger answered, “That’s OK,” and told him she would run to him. She had visited nearly every weekend or put money in his commissary account, while repeatedly asking prosecutors, lawyers, politicians, probation officers, and judges for an early release.
That August, Ginger drove from her Roanoke store to a halfway house in North Carolina, where Spencer had lived for six months after leaving prison. He was sober for seven years and weighed 165 pounds; his training had made him capable of deadlifting five hundred pounds for sets of five. The book records the strength as a concrete achievement, not as evidence that prison had left him uninjured. Spencer said incarceration had given him post-traumatic stress disorder. Sleeping alone in a dark room made him nervous, and so did driving. Ginger took him to the gym most days, or he used Uber, which had not existed in Roanoke when he left in 2012. He planned to get a service dog to help with the PTSD.
An Unfinished Return
Spencer hoped to complete his bachelor’s degree while in prison and, after release, devote himself to helping young people with addiction in Scott’s memory. By 2017, he was considering a move to another Virginia city to work for a martial-arts studio whose people he had contacted through Ginger; the plan depended on approval from his probation officer, and he did not want to name the city. He described that possible move as a geographic cure, but the difficulties of ordinary life outside prison were already apparent.
His arc therefore ends not with a completed redemption but with a conditional beginning. The boy who had hidden drugs from his mother became a man who passed along prevention advice; the middleman whose actions were part of Scott’s fatal overdose wrote an apology and offered practical restitution, while Robin remained unreconciled to his imprisonment. Seven years of sobriety, physical discipline, and a possible job offered real grounds for hope, alongside trauma, probation, and a transition he found harder than expected. Spencer’s story keeps those facts together: responsibility does not cancel addiction, recovery does not reverse death, and release from prison is not the same as freedom from its consequences.
