Son’s death drives mother to work on drug laws

UPDATE (August 14, 2015): A 30-year-old Wasilla man has been indicted for Seaman's murder. Read more here.

Original story:

PALMER — Christopher Seaman’s final resting place is on a coffee table in a roughly six-inch-tall urn shaped like the Michelangelo sculpture “Pieta.”

“It was beautiful to me,” said his mother, Terria Walters. “It reminded me of my relationship to Christ and Christ’s relationship to his mother.”

Seaman, 23, at the time of his death, was an aspiring rap MC, a collector of baseball caps emblazoned with the logo of the Chicago White Sox, shoes, miniature skateboards, and model cars. Collages of women clad in bikinis and hip hop icons line the walls of his room. He’d intended to join the U.S. Navy, but exhibited type 1 diabetes in his early teens, which quashed his dream, and in turn bred depression, according Walters.

He was a comedian to those who knew him, reserved among people who did not, and something of a neat freak. His tattoos conveyed an overall image of toughness Walters says he lacked. For example, he had plainly visible tattoos, one of them a Bible verse eventually used to identify his corpse.

“He had no toughness in him,” she said. “He appeared to be tough. What I would say is when he (family friend José Valcarcel) talks about someone’s personality, he says ‘soft as a Twinkie.’ That’s a perfect description of my son’s character, as far as tough on the outside, but really soft on the inside.”

And he was found dead, June 23, in an apparent homicide in a silver Honda he had planned to customize, near the fireworks stands in Houston.

Weeks later, law enforcement officials have not publicly disclosed how Seaman died, other than to say that his death is an apparent homicide. And no arrest has been made in the case.

Since Seaman’s death, his mother has faced mourning’s grim mile markers — the death certificate listing his cause of death as homicide arrived about a half hour before a Frontiersman reporter — and turned them into an extension of her crusade begun years earlier, when she says Jesus helped her overcome her own substance abuse problems.

However, the primary focus was on her son.

“He was a typical good kid that got mixed up in what was going on, and in four months, it just took him down,” she said.

The final months

As near as Walters can tell Seaman was introduced to heroin through friends around December 2014, though he was no stranger to drug use, his mother said. A recovered addict who runs a ministry among addicts attempting recovery, Walters said the signs were obvious.

“Because I’m in recovery myself, I noticed his pupils were pinned, and I confronted him, and he did admit to it later on,” she said. “I told him that he needed to stop or he was going to have to move out of my house.”

The attempt at tough love drove him into a downward spiral and ultimately to a hotel, where he was arrested April 22 and charged with weapons and drug misconduct. Prosecutors dismissed the charges a week later on an apparent technicality.

“Now I kind of wish the charges weren’t dismissed because my son would still be in jail and alive,” she said.

In a text message sent shortly after his arrest, Seaman wrote “It’s all for the good, because now I can get clean.”

He was back home in May, and considered fishing, and a roofing job. Shortly before his death, he’d started a new job at a fencing company.

“I was super proud of him,” Walters said. “I suspected during this time he quite possibly might have relapsed. Whenever I looked at him in conversation, he didn’t appear to be using, but after his death, I figured he might have been using within a few days of his death.”

Seaman’s room contained some evidence of drug use, Walters said.

Seaman left to go to his job, and when he didn’t return, Walters started to worry.

“It was normal for him to sometimes stay out with his friends, but usually his phone would be on and he would answer my text messages, and that wasn’t the case,” she said. “His phone wasn’t on and he wasn’t answering texts.”

She called multiple times without a response. The disappearance was troubling, in part because camera crews for the 700 Club were coming the next day, June 22, for an interview.

“I got home, he wasn’t here, and it wasn’t done,” she said.

The silence continued through the 9 a.m. interview and throughout the day. The wrongness of the situation led her to call Valcarcel for reassurance, then Palmer Police, who said they would check to see whether her son was at home. She posted pictures of his car on Facebook, and fell asleep about 12:30 a.m., June 23.

“I end up falling asleep, and then I get a phone call around, I don’t know, early dawn, like maybe 3:30, 4, something like that,” she said.

Her phone vibrating on the coffee table next to the couch where she’d fallen asleep was the first sign something was wrong. At first, half awake, she said she thought it must be her son calling.

Instead, it was an Alaska State Trooper calling from his patrol car parked in her yard.

“I let him in,” she said. “At first, I was kind of discombobulated and didn’t recognize him. I thought he was here to get more information.”

They talked for about 30 minutes. The trooper kept asking more questions.

“Did you find my son?” she finally asked.

“Yes,” the trooper responded.

“Is he OK?” she asked.

“No, he’s deceased,” the trooper said.

His words sucked the breath out of her lungs.

“I didn’t know how to react,” she said. “I was completely in shock.”

Her first thought was diabetes, but the trooper told her that was not what killed him. Next she worried if his drug habit had caught up to him, and was told that wasn’t the case.

“Then I said ‘Was it foul play?’ and he said ‘Yes,’” she said.

Troopers were waiting for more light before checking the inside of the car, but told Walters they could already tell that the death was suspicious, and possibly a homicide.

Walters said she suspects it was someone Seaman trusted enough to let into the car, someone close to him that took his life.

It is still the closest Walters has ever come to knowing the exact method of her son’s death. Though, she says she understands sharing the details could compromise their ongoing investigation.

The mission

The weeks since have been extremely difficult. She recently had to relocate Seaman’s picture from one end of the living room to the other, because she would sometimes catch it in the wrong light, and it would crush her.

“The only way I’ve been able to get through this is with Jesus Christ,” she said. She tapped her Bible against the coffee table as a demonstration of its nearness. “I am constantly in my Word.”

However, rather than being defeated, Walters says she’s found new urgency in trying to help improve Alaska drug laws and the treatment of drug offenders in general.

“My big concern is, I’ve been trying to talk to many people in regards to our services from the state of Alaska for people that have addiction issues,” she said. “Individuals are quick to incarcerate for nonviolent offenses when it comes to drugs. Most of them are addicts and petty possession charges.”

Her efforts, and Seaman’s death, come at a time when heroin-related deaths are on the rise across the state. Deaths associated with heroin have tripled in the last five years in the state, as a combination of prescription opioid abuse has combined with a rising tide of cheap heroin, according to figures provided by the Alaska Department of Health and Social Services. Department statistics tally just 17 deaths between 2008 and 2010, which spiked to 55 deaths between 2011 and 2013.

Seaman’s death would not be counted among them, though Walters thinks heroin played a role.

Walters, surviving a methamphetamine addiction, describes a sometimes vicariously harsh mindset directed toward addicts in the Valley, and across the nation. In addition to trying to garner the attention of legislators, Walters is pushing to start her own halfway house for those looking to get clean, as an expansion of a pre-existing ministry started with an Anchorage realtor. They named the planned shelter “Damascus House” after the conversion of Saul on the road to Damascus mentioned in the Bible … the group has a Facebook page. Walters also plans to speak before the Tikahtnu Forum in Anchorage, Aug. 4-6.

The state needs more capacity for rehabilitation, and needs to emphasize treatment over jail.

“Addiction is a disease of the heart,” she said. “You deal with the underlying disease of addiction, you deal with the crime.”

Drug offenders are barred from most forms of public assistance, Walters said.

“You can’t go down to the public assistance office and say ‘Hey, I need to get back on my feet is there any way I can get a couple months worth of food stamps? Can I get some assistance so I’m not hungry?’ Unfortunately, if you have a drug offense, you ain’t got nothing coming, but if you do any other crime, you can get all the assistance that you want.”

She admits that drug addicts have convicted numerous property crimes, but says law enforcement should focus on violent crimes, like murder.

“We’re being treated as criminals rather than patients, or somebody that needs to be treated with dignity and respect for something that they have no control over,” Walters said.

Contact Brian O’Connor at 352-2269, brian.oconnor@frontiersman.com, or on Twitter @reporterbriano.