Visual Stories

Video: A beautiful mind lost to heroin addiction

It has been two months since the January afternoon when Jared Smallwood got a strange feeling while eating a bowl of cereal in the Arctic Boulevard trailer he shared with his older sister.

He hadn't heard anything from the bedroom for a while. He wondered what she was doing.

Inside, he found Summer Myers slumped over on a bed strewn with clothing, a needle next to her. A tourniquet sat on the bedside table, along with an overflowing ashtray, prescription pill bottles and a bottle of chocolate milk.

He lifted her up. She was stiff. Her face was contracted, as if she'd had a seizure.

The 19-year-old tried to resuscitate his sister as he called 911.

When medics arrived, they dragged her into the kitchen and declared her dead.

Police descended on the scene to take photographs and compile reports.

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Later, they gave the investigation files to Myers' mother, Jackie Smallwood.

The pictures taken by police are hard to look at: a young woman's lifeless body, crumpled on the linoleum floor. She wears a polka-dot sundress, her skin blotched purple and white.

Don't turn away, Smallwood says: See what heroin did to my child.

Read more: After a daughter's heroin overdose, a mother's grief

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