Boardman mom recalls daughter's deadly transformation

First of a five-part Vindicator series exploring the opiate-addiction crisis and its impact on our community. For warning signs, support groups, sources of help and more from the parents, read our print or digital editions.

RELATED: Boardman couple paint tragic portrait of son's addiction

By JORDYN GRZELEWSKI

jgrzelewski@vindy.com

BOARDMAN

When someone knocked on Jennifer West Roupe’s door April 6, she almost didn’t answer.

Cassie

Video

Jennifer Roupe remembers her daughter Cassie and discusses her daughter's battle with addiction.

“I heard somebody knocking on my door, and I’m like — do I want to answer this, or do I just want to kind of pretend I’m not home?” she said.

When she did answer, she found a Boardman police detective — an old childhood friend — standing in the driveway of her modest Salinas Trail home.

“Hey Jen, are you alone?,” he asked.

“He goes, ‘I’m so, so’ — and I’ll never forget — ‘I’m so, so sorry.’ I’m like, what?,” Roupe said.

“We found Cassie,” he said.

“I’m like, ‘Where’d you find her?’ And then he says, ‘No honey she’s dead.’”

Cassandra Nicole West, 19, hanged herself earlier that day.

About a week later, Cassie’s mom sits in her tidy living room — now a makeshift memorial to Cassie, with dozens of pictures of her smiling from around the room, surrounded by flowers — and described Cassie’s transformation from the girl that she raised.

Roupe’s mother and some friends sit nearby, quietly offering support, while Cassie’s beloved dog Charlie cuddles up to her.

“She was always smiling,” Roupe said, fondly recalling their frequent trips to a cabin in West Virginia. She remembers Cassie’s closeness to her brother, Nicholas, describing them as best friends.

“She was very free-spirited; she was a tomboy. She was like me a lot,” she said. “She was always playing in the dirt; she didn’t worry about being dressed up. In fact, there were a lot of times I’d have to force her to wear a dress.”

She describes Cassie as artistic — she’d often find notes and drawings that Cassie left for her in notebooks left lying around the house. That day she had a friend buy her a new notebook, scared of opening an old one and finding an unexpected piece of her daughter.

“I just don’t know how to explain my daughter. We don’t have enough hours today. I don’t think you want to sit here for days, and I don’t know how many years I could tell you about how special she was. There’s no words to say what Cassie was,” she said, her voice breaking.

About four months ago, however, that Cassie began to disappear.

“That’s when I started noticing these changes,” Roupe said. “Cassie was argumentative with everybody — very rude, very disrespectful.

“I could tell she was on something. ... It started hitting me. She was sleeping all the time. She’d be wide awake. I’d go to work at five in the morning, and she’d be wide awake, cleaning. But then I’d come home and she’d be crashed.”

It started a few years ago, her mom thinks.

“She smoked pot in high school,” Roupe said. “I tried telling her it’s a gateway drug.

“This sounds kind of bad, but how can you stop them from doing that when you can’t be with them 24/7?”

Then, right after high school, Cassie started dating someone Roupe now believes was a drug dealer.

“I didn’t know this. I was so naive. I was so blinded by her. She would tell me I’m staying at such and such, her friend’s house,” Roupe said. “Here she was staying with him, and that’s when she was introduced to the snorting, and the heroin.”

Roupe grew suspicious after an odd trip to the emergency room, and after she confronted Cassie about it, she said, things got better for awhile.

Until it got bad again.

By this point, Cassie was dating the boyfriend who would later commit suicide with her.

“It’s been the last three months that it’s been bad, bad, bad where she was not herself — but sometime in this past year, my wedding ring, my engagement ring, and other jewelry: missing,” Roupe said.

The last “normal” time Roupe recalls is around Thanksgiving, when she remembers waking up to a “winter wonderland” after Cassie decorated their home for Christmas.

After that, it was a downward spiral.

Roupe recalls one incident in February.

“I get a call from my 16-year-old son. I’m at work,” she said. “I come home, I kid you not, it was like a war zone in here. There was broken glass, there were broken jars, there were holes in the wall.”

There, Cassie and her boyfriend reportedly were fighting over pills — who would get how many.

“So I grabbed Cassie, and she’s trying to hit me, trying to beat me, trying to get away from me. And that’s not my daughter,” Roupe said.

A police report filed Feb. 2 details what happened after Cassie escaped from her mother’s grasp and ran outside. Police located Cassie at her grandparents’ house, and then took her to the hospital for evaluation at Roupe’s request.

From there, Cassie went to a treatment facility. By this point, Roupe had decided it was time for tough love. When Cassie called from the facility asking her mom to send a package, Roupe said no.

“I said, ‘I’d rather my daughter sit in dirty underwear than come home and find her dead one day.’ Those were my exact words. They let her out three days later,” Roupe said. “I did not know. Cassie never contacted me.”

Cassie went to stay with her grandparents. For a little while, she followed their rules. Her grandmother, Sandra, recalls how careful she was with the medication she was prescribed and how she talked about getting better.

On March 1, Roupe celebrated Cassie’s birthday with her.

“We went to Sawa. She was sober, she was happy, we were having a great time,” Roupe said.

On March 7, Cassie was arrested on domestic violence charges after starting a fight at her grandparents’ house.

“I remember specifically saying, ‘Tell my daughter not to waste her one phone call — I’m not bailing her out,” Roupe said. “Don’t bring her clothes to my house. She doesn’t live with me. I’m done. This was my breaking point.

“And it was breaking my heart, but they were telling me this is what you have to do, this is what this ‘tough love’ is, and it will help her. She has to hit rock bottom.”

For the last few weeks of her life, Cassie alternated between staying with her mom and staying at the Wagon Wheel Motel on

Market Street.

Roupe visited Cassie and her boyfriend there one night at the end of March.

“I sat in room No. 9 at the Wagon Wheel,” she said. “I’m sitting there, and God help me, I was afraid to be sitting there.

“And I told them both, my last conversation with these two: You two need to go get help. ... I’m not telling you this to hurt you, I’m telling you this because I love you and want you back. You guys need to do this.

“That was the last conversation I had with my daughter face-to-face.”

On April 3, Roupe texted Cassie, confronting her about her disrespectful behavior.

“Do you want to know what the last text from my daughter is? That’ll ever read?” she said, scrolling through her phone. “She said, ‘19 years later and you still don’t know how to act like a mom. ... Text me again and I’m blocking you. I’m done.’”

On April 5, Roupe texted her daughter to tell her that an Easter basket and dinner were waiting for her.

“[I] got nothing. Because by that point, she had sold her phone,” Roupe said.

At 3:36 p.m. April 6, Boardman police were dispatched to the Wagon Wheel, where they found Cassie and her boyfriend dead.

“[That text was] the last thing my daughter said to me,” she said, breaking down in tears. “So, tell me I didn’t fail my daughter. Tell me I wasn’t a bad mother. To have her say that to me.”

She stands up to retrieve her daughter’s last gift to her, delivered by her niece: a teddy bear that Cassie had never given her because of a fight they had. Cassie named it ‘Mom.’

Roupe clutches it in her lap as she talks, and presses a button.

“Merry Christmas Mom, I love you,” Cassie’s voice says.

“That’s the last. ... That’s her voice, and I won’t squeeze it again, because I’m so afraid it’s going to die,” Roupe tearfully said.

Cassie left a letter for her mom and brother explaining why she was taking her life. Roupe shared that letter with The Vindicator in the hopes that it might help save someone else.

In part, it reads: “I’m tired of drugs. They won. The drugs completely won me over and that’s never going to change. My demons have turned me into a demon myself.”

At the end, she writes: “You are my world, my universe, forever.” Those words now are tattooed around Roupe’s wrist.

“Somebody told me, ‘Jen, your daughter didn’t commit suicide — the drugs took your daughter.’ And I firmly believe that, because there is no way,” Roupe said. “No way. If you knew my daughter and how much she loved life.”

“She was trying, but I just think that it got the best of her,” she said. “I think that she felt like she was in over her head, and she felt like she was disappointing everybody, and she felt like she wasn’t going to be able to stop. She just couldn’t do it after awhile.”

Roupe plans to set up some type of program to help other people who are going through what her daughter went through.

“I’m going to use her as an example. Because the way that my child lived, and the way that my child loved — it’ll never end,” she said. “I am not afraid to share. I am not embarrassed of my child. I am not ashamed of my child. I am not disappointed in my child. This happened for a reason, for my child to save someone else’s child.”

Roupe said she wants the community to stop judging addicts and to realize that addiction affects everyone.

“It’s not just our neighborhood, it’s everywhere,” she said. “And it’s not a dirty, disgusting person, because my daughter was by far the most beautiful person I’ve ever seen. How I got that lucky to have that girl be my daughter, I don’t know, but I did.”

“I want to save these babies that this is affecting. I don’t ever, ever want another mother to be alone and get that knock on that door and be told that,” she said. “Because this whole thing, it wrecks the whole family.”