Heroin ruins, then takes, life of Tuscarawas winery heir

Sunday, March 5th, 2006
Canton Repository
By Ryan Karp

At 4:30 p.m. Nov. 12, 2005, the driver of a car dropped Zachary Davis off near his cottage on the grounds of Breitenbach Winery, his family's Tuscarawas County business.

Employees and family members watched. One said Zachary "looked the worst anyone had ever seen him." But no one said anything. They knew heroin was in control. There was no point in trying to talk to him.

He stumbled the few hundred feet to his cottage, where later he would telephone his girlfriend, Lindsey Lewis, and feed his dog.

At some point, he made his way to the front porch.

That's where Lewis found him the next morning, dead of an overdose.

He was 24.

CREATIVITY AND TROUBLE
Family members remember Davis as an artist.

"He was in Little League and collected baseball cards and would make drawings of the baseball players," said his mother, Anita Davis.

Anita described his artwork as "fantasy that looked so real." He drew designs for wine labels and gift certificates for the winery.

Zachary Davis was a Boy Scout; then again, his mother said, he always was "ornery".

Anita's Father, Dalton Bixler, took the boy on frequent skiing trips. On a trip to Switzerland, the then-10-year-old Davis wanted to ski off the trail.

Bixler followed him and the two ended up in Italy, without passports. They had to walk back up a mountain into Switzerland.

Davis first brushed with the law at 13. He was sentenced to time in the Multi-County Juvenile Attention System when he and a friend stole bicycles.

It was at the juvenile lockup that his artwork started to flourish, Anita Davis said; "I guess he just needed an outlet."

She thinks her son started abusing marijuana, cocaine and Ecstasy, a stimulant, when he was a teenager.

When he was 17, Davis and friends broke into his parents' house and stole family antiques, which they sold to buy drugs.

The family pressed charges. "It was really hard, but it was the right thing to do," Anita Davis said.

He spent his 18th birthday at the Mohican Juvenile Correctional Facility in Perrysville.

It appeared that Davis was scared straight. When he got out, he applied to the Art Institute of Pittsburgh and was accepted into the commercial arts and graphic design program.

"He was ready for a new start and new friends," said Anita. "I helped with the financing and everything. He was excited to go someplace new."

But a few months into the program, he was seriously injured in an automobile accident. The crash broke his femur and vertabrae, collapsed a lung and damaged other organs.

Davis returned home in a wheelchair. Family members took care of him while he stayed at their bed-and-breakfast inn.

Doctors prescribed the highly addictive pain killer OxyCotin. His mother believes that started his second foray into drugs.

"We even told the doctor,'You know, he has had trouble with drugs in the past,'" his mother said. She said doctors assured her the drug would be controlled.

Money from a large insurance settlement from the wreck went for drugs.

THE PITTSBURGH SUPPLY
Davis returned to the art institute in the spring of 2002, a few months after the accident, and stayed for the next year.

It was then that he started using heroin.

His mother said he visited Tuscarawas County only on holidays and that the family couldn't discern his heroin use.

"But he knew people in Pittsburgh," she said. "he told me that in Pittsburgh you can go to any street corner - anywhere - and get drugs."

Davis lived in Pittsburg's Allegheny Center and elsewhere on the north side. While he was there, in early 2002, police arrested Donal Lyles, another tenant of the Allegheny Center. Former U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft called Lyles' arrest the largest cocaine and heroin bust in western Pennsylvania history, according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

During Christmas break that year, Davis was charged in Tuscarawas County with 17 counts of criminal damaging for "tagging" businesses and other locations in Dover and New Philadelphia with graffiti. He was sentenced to community service and ordered to pay restitution.

A year later, he told the New Philadelphia Times-Reporter that anger over police killing gunman at Union Hospital in December 2002 spurred the spree. ""I was just trying to let the city know there was an angry person," Davis said.

His mother was alerted to Davis' heroin use whe she got a phone call one day while working at the winery. One of his friends told her that her son had a serious problem with heroin and was going to kill himself.

"I just dropped everything and drove over to Pittsburgh," Anita Davis recalled. "I convinced him to leave, and we packed up his things right then."

He admitted to his mother he was injecting 10 bags of heroin a day. "Even the doctors couldn't believe how much he was doing," she said.

Finding treatment was difficult.

The closest detoxification porgram, in Canton, had a waiting list. The family also investigated programs in Akron and Cleveland.

Davis had no medical insurance, and "everywhere we went, we heard excuses," she said.

From 2003 through 2004, Zachary attended programs in Michigan, two in California and one at Mercy Medical Center at Canton.

Anita Davis liked the Mercy Medical program because it involved family counseling. Until then, she said she was ashamed to talk about what happened to her son.

But Davis stayed at the program only for a week.

"He would go through the detox OK," said Anita. "But then after the detox, they would learn these life skills and how to fight against these intense cravings and he would say, 'You know what, I feel really good. I think I can do it on my own.'"

He couldn't.

While he was at one treatment program in Laguna Beach, Calif., Davis' uncle provided him a place to live, a car and a job. The center was on the beach.

His mother "thought he had it all."

"I've had to have hope 'cause I'm the mom."

But after a month, Davis told his mother he was leaving. A few days later, police in Galveston, Texas, arrested him after he met with a drug dealer. He was sentenced to a month in jail.

In December 2003, Davis was driving four others on a shopping trip to Canton. He wrecked the car near Mineral City. One passenger, a 22-year-old Sugarcreek woman, was pinned beneath the vehicle with Zachary. She remains paralyzed.

Heroin was not a factor in the crash, but speed was. No toxicology tests were done, according to the Highway Patrol, because no factor other than speed was suspected in the accident.

Zachary's girlfriend said he did not seak again with the woman until about a month before he died. She said there was peace between them, and the woman attended his funeral.

When he wasn't in rehab Davis lived in an apartment with friends near New Philadelphia High School. He also made frequent trips to Pittsburgh.

During one, police arrested him for possesion of 39 bags of heroin. He was jailed, but quickly released because he was so ill.

His grandfather drove him to Tampa, Fla., for an opiate blocker procedure.

BACK TO BREITENBACH
The year 2005 was a fresh start.

Davis successfully completed the blocker program and followed with rehabilitation in Nahsville, Tenn. The blockers filled his brain with narcotic "antagonists" to fight his cravings.

His grandfather bought him a red Volkswagen, which Davis fixed up, cleaned and waxed. "He just loved it so much and we thought,'He is going to do whatever he can for this car. This could be it,'" Anita Davis said.

Her son moved into his family's cottage and went to work at the winery. He started dating Lewis, a student at Kent State University's main campus. She transferred to the Tuscarawas campus to be closer to him.

"The first two weeks I met him I just knew I wanted to marry him," said Lewis. "We both liked the same things - art and music."

Lewis bought the couple a dachshund puppy named Dexter, and she said he loved the dog.

"But after about eight months, out of the blue, everything just seemed to go down hill," she said.

Davis started on heroin again. This time he added cocaine and prescription pills.

"I just couldn't believe this was my life," Lewis said. "I wanted to move back to what we had. I would think, 'Do I leave or do I stay and help?'"

With the support of Davis' family, Lewis stayed.

She checked his cell phone to make sure he wasn't talking to drug dealers. She made weekly schedules for him.

There were weeks "when everything was fine," said Lewis. "He would say, 'I know your way is the right way. I just get off track.' It was like he was tormented."

He smashed the Volkswagen into a telephone pole when he was high on heroin.

His mother monitored his cash flow, but learned he'd steal checks from her to buy his drugs. He took her car while she was working.

"I had to hide everything. We always had to be watching him," Anita Davis said. "I hated it. I trust people so much, and it was really hard when I couldn't trust my son."

She said he hated it, too.

But he couldn't seem to escape his heroin dealer, who lived in New Philadelphia.

Anita Davis recalled her son saying several times, "'I hate him. I hope I never see him again.'"

'CRY FOR MERCY'
The day Davis died, Lewis said she spoke with him on his cellphone as his dealer dropped him off. She said he could hear the dealer's voice in the background, tell Zachary to get out of the car.

Tuscarawas County Corner Dr. James Hubert said Davis died from a multiple drug overdose that included heroin. Sheriff's Lt. Detective Orvis Campbell said last week no one is likely to be charged in the death.

Lewis said she is shocked at the number of people she knows in the Tuscaraws County area who use heroin.

"He should of have never come back here because of this town, of how the people here do heroin and how easy it is to get it," she said. " But I guess even if he went somewhere else, he would have found people there to get it from."

Said his mother, "He loved his family and he really loved life, but heroin ... he couldn't sleep or eat or do a thing without craving it."

Zachary Davis is buried in Union Hill Cemetery near the winery.

For his funeral, his family passed out a prayer card with a drawing of Jesus carrying the cross on his back.

Davis was the artist.

Next to the illustration, he had scrawled "Remember Psalms: 116."

The Bilble passage begins: "I love the Lord, for he heard my voice; he heard my cry for mercy."