‘Trap houses’ a symptom of Valley drug epidemic hidden in plain sight

PALMER — In the wake of the November murder of Palmer teen David Grunwald, more people have become familiar with an obscure drug-culture term: trap house.

In mid-December, the father of one of the teens charged in the murder, Erick Almandinger, told the Alaska Dispatch News that his son had been staying at trap houses. In the wake of the first charges, Frontiersman staff scoured social media pages of the accused and their friends, and found chatter relating to trap houses and trap boys, terms entered in online slang dictionaries as referencing hard-drug houses and dealers.

“I didn’t even know what a trap house was until all this mess,” David Grunwald’s mother, Edie Grunwald, said in an interview with the Frontiersman on Friday. “That’s where we need our law enforcement, where legislators can support our law enforcement to clean this up. Apparently they’re sucking in other kids to these houses.”

Serena Espinoza, vice president of REAL About Addiction and a board member of Fallen Up Ministries—two home-grown movements dedicated to ending the opioid epidemic in Alaska— is herself in long-term recovery from opioid addiction.

Espinoza, who was first prescribed Oxycotin pain medication at age 17 before becoming addicted to opioids, said she remembers many trap houses in the Mat-Su Valley, pre-2009.

“I’ve been in trap houses of drug dealers, addicts, and, of course, places that were abandoned,” she said. “I’ve been into beautiful homes that you’d never think was a trap house, but inside, there were needles everywhere, tons of people getting high together. But then, I’ve also been to places that were decent homes, well-kept, but also trap houses.”

Espinoza said she always wondered where the term came from, but for her, it makes her think of a place that “traps addicts and dealers.”

Espinoza said shutting them down probably wouldn’t have much impact on users’ behavior – they’d just go somewhere else.

She also talked about another, larger type of congregation spot for drug dealers and users, called compounds.

“A compound is a big piece of property,” Espinoza said. “You’ve got a house, a trailer, a shack, another trailer, someone’s got an RV. It’s almost like a hippie village of drug addicts, but they call it a compound.”

Compounds tend to look scary on the outside, she said. But many trap houses do not. She remembers going to a trap house in Settlers Bay, which she’d always thought of as an upper-middle class neighborhood.

That is, until she went to a trap house there, a beautiful two-story house with a nice yard on the outside, and “ripped apart” on the inside, with nearly a dozen people lying around doing drugs.

“Who knows how many there are?” Espinoza said. “But it’s a term to be used loosely, because Grandma can have a trap house in her house and not even know it. There’s a lot of people out there, that their homes become a place where people use drugs right under their noses, and maybe they don’t understand and deal with the problem.”

Alaska State Troopers Sergeant Patrick Nelson, supervisor of statewide drug enforcement in the Mat-Su Valley, said, from a law enforcement perspective, shutting down trap houses is a difficult proposition.

“It’s manpower intensive, and it’s time-intensive,” Nelson said. “We have to do surveillance. We have to watch people coming and going, make contacts, do research. So it takes a considerable amount of man hours to gather enough information to apply for a search warrant.”

And once a warrant is served, Nelson said, it’s been his experience that the yield on the resource expenditure is low.

“Rarely do we come away with any significant if any quantity of narcotics,” he said. “Drug users typically don’t have large quantities. So we are trying to focus our efforts on the shotgun shell before it leaves the barrel. When you shoot a shotgun, the BBs scatter all over, and they’re hard to clean up. If I can stop the drugs at the larger source before they get out, my efforts and finite resources are much better spent.”

Nelson said he does understand that trap houses present a public safety problem for neighbors who live next to them. He said that troopers do examine every call or complaint about trap houses in the valley that come in.

The term “trap” in hard-drug dealers’ parlance was originally used to apply to any person or place where a dealer could stash his or her drugs to hide them from cops, Nelson said.

Over time, the term has evolved to refer to drug activity in general, and trap house has come to have a meaning interchangeable with “flop house.”

The similar-sounding crack houses of the 90s are largely a thing of the past, Nelson said. Cocaine and crack cocaine are not something law enforcement comes across very often in the valley, he said, and never in large quantity. Meth and heroin are the hard drugs drawing in addicts, he said, with heroin-related arrests down somewhat in the valley for 2016, and meth-related infractions up.

Nelson said the smartest thing parents can do to ensure their teens stay away from trap houses, is to do their best to know where their teen is, who they’re with, and what they’re up to.

“I have a 19-year-old son and a 15-year-old daughter, and I’ve had those conversations more than I can count with both of them,” Nelson said. “My daughter gets upset that I question her, look at her phone, always want to know where she’s going and what she’s doing. But you have to do that. And you have to educate your kids on the dangers of these behaviors, and know who they’re hanging out with.”

Edie Grunwald said she’s had parents reaching out to her who are just learning about trap houses for the first time, and that she thinks it would be good for parents to have access to some educational tools to help them understand what red flags to look for when it comes to keeping teens away from them, and how to educate their kids on staying safe.

“Some of these guys and girls who think this is cool,” Grunwald said, “and they’re trying to be a part of this subculture, the parents need to be aware so they can take action.”