In a seven-year period, the Washington Post reported, 74 million potent pain pills flooded Norton in Southwest Virginia and three surrounding counties, or “enough for 106 pills per resident every year.” That tsunami of prescription opioids wrecked lives and stunted the economic potential for parts of Appalachia.
University of Virginia student Sarah King works with cities and counties in the region to help residents enter recovery and find jobs.
“Recovery is economic development,” she said. “When we invest in recovery and in our communities, folks are able to meaningfully contribute to society.”
She could be talking about herself.
King poses outside the White House in 2016, when she joined other college journalists for a briefing from then-President Barack Obama. Not long after, she was watching Obama on television, but from a jail cell in Richmond. (Contributed photo)
King, with her 3.9 GPA, is preparing to graduate in May with a master’s degree from the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy. But she isn’t spouting theories from a textbook.
She lived that life. It nearly killed her.
‘Help me.’
King’s breaking point came as she flopped naked onto a bare mattress in a dirty Richmond apartment.
“I had no purpose. I had no identity left,” she said. “I was completely substance dependent, and I just, I really wanted to die. I didn’t have any fight left in me.”
She wondered, “Is this it? This can’t be it. I was just pleading: ‘Help me.’”
In high school in Northern Virginia, King wasn’t a star student. She loved the learning, just not school itself. She was frequently truant and ran with an older crowd.
Still, her grades got her into Virginia Commonwealth University. King has always had a talent for writing, and there she fell in love with storytelling. The student newspaper, the Commonwealth Times, became her sanctuary.
For a school assignment, she joined other students on trips to the Richmond City Jail as part of a creative-writing project to help inmates tell their stories.
One of the inmates took a liking to King. When he was released shortly after, they started dating.
She was 19. He was 36.
Alarm bells
Plenty of people sounded alarm bells over the relationship, including professors who called it “unacceptable.”
“It speaks to a little bit of my nature at the time,” King said. “I was pretty smart, but also impulsive. I’d been partying and was exposed to all kinds of things growing up, running with an older crowd.”
The warnings, she remembers thinking, “didn’t apply to me.” The relationship was “certainly risky, but I liked to take risks.”
Over the next three years of her college career, the relationship lived up to all the warnings. The couple started using and selling drugs, racking up arrests that included federal drug charges. Once, while arguing with her boyfriend in a car, he punched her in the face and broke her nose.
Her first semester of straight A’s gave way to barely getting by. Looking back, the only thing that kept her enrolled was writing for the school newspaper. In 2016, and received a press briefing from President Obama. She thought she might one day report for the Washington Post.
King poses with a Virginia Press Association award in 2018, naming her Outstanding Young Journalist of the Year. She thought she might one day work for the Washington Post, but her substance use led to her losing her job and, she says, her identity. (Contributed photo)
She graduated – with help from VCU staffers who intervened in her spiraling life – and got a job at Richmond Magazine. There, she showed promise, winning the Virginia Press Association’s “Outstanding Young Journalist of the Year” in 2018. The judges wrote: “Regardless of the subject, Sarah displays an ability to both explain complicated policies and reflect the stories of ordinary people.”
But while her professional life looked like it was on track, the rest of her life wasn’t.
“I never showed up to work drunk or high,” she said, “until I did. That was a cliff, and I fell over it.”
An intervention
By day, she fueled her body with increasingly high doses of amphetamines. In the evening, she needed drugs and alcohol to bring her back down. “I closed the bars almost every night,” she said.
She lost her job at the magazine. Feeling disconnected, she started calling her reporting contacts and just rambling on with incoherent and paranoid stories. Her unhinged calls went to, among others, the communications directors for a mayor, a police chief and a congresswoman. That’s how she was when she ended up on the bare mattress in the dirty apartment, calling for help in an empty room.
But someone, somewhere, was listening.
“I kid you not, within 72 hours there had been an intervention,” she said. “I was on a plane to California to get treatment.”
‘I didn’t have anything to lose by applying.’
Months later, now sober, she returned to Richmond and took a series of jobs helping people who had been in her circumstance. Several coworkers had master’s degrees and suggested her career prospects would widen if she got one, too. One person recommended UVA.
With her criminal and academic record, that sounded preposterous. Even so, she visited the Batten School and became convinced she might fit in.
“I felt this synergy with Batten, the mission, the values and the community,” she said. “They didn’t require standardized testing, and there was no application fee. I didn’t have anything to lose by applying, so I did.”
But she needed to write a letter explaining her uneven record at VCU.
King, now sober since 2019, says she didn’t think 鶹ƽ Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy would even consider her with her checkered academic and criminal history. The admissions team took a chance, and she will graduate with near-perfect grades. (Photo by Matt Riley, University Communications)
“I am writing to address my academic record, which is clearly marred with aberrant grades after my first three undergraduate semesters,” she wrote. She told the Batten School admissions committee about her previous addictions and added: “I was also in the midst of an abusive relationship that ushered me into emergency rooms, warranted numerous welfare checks at the behest of concerned faculty and finally found me in a federal courtroom as a cooperating witness.”
The Batten School also wanted to know about her arrests, not just convictions. There had been so many that she scoured the Richmond area court websites to make sure she didn’t miss one.
“If I am accepted, they know what they are getting,” she said. “If I’m denied, that’s OK. I gave it what I had.”
The Batten School admissions team took a chance and provided King a scholarship.
By all accounts, that chance has paid off. King said it was far from easy – and there were times when she wondered if she could succeed – but her grades are near-perfect, and she earned a prestigious Tadler Fellowship to work in Southwest Virginia.
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