Ticket to a new life
Facing multiple warrants for his arrest, an Olympia man was given the option of drug treatment in Spokane. He completed the program and found a job, a wife and home.

By Julie Sullivan
The Spokesman-Review

After going through drug rehab, Ken Larson, with his wife Lori, has turned his life around. Larson now has a good job, is buying a house and has most of his restitution paid off.

To an updated Victorian on the lower South Hill: 24 hours of schedules, counseling and the sheer physical shock of doing without.

That last morning in Olympia he'd caught sight of himself in the mirror, 6-foot and 135 pounds, and saw the future with perfect certainty:

Prison or death.

He was wanted in two counties for drug use and had judges in both who could send him to prison for three years. But with court dates pending, he was diverted to a drug treatment program in Spokane. A state employee handed Ken Larson a ticket voucher east. One way.

"I knew this was my chance and I could never go back," he says. "I was leaving behind that life."

He knew no one. He met Lori at the coffee pot at a Narcotics Anonymous meeting in Peaceful Valley. Walking home he picked a single flower, pressed it and three weeks later, mailed to Isabella House where she was in treatment.

The flower crumbled when she opened the envelope.

But she wrote back.

Cards turned into letters, which she took to her mother, an amateur handwriting analyst in the Spokane Valley.

"A perfectionist," her mom concluded. "A true friend. He has little sense of self."

He had, in fact, almost none. His mother died at 3, his father went to prison for property crimes to support his drug use. By 5, Larson began to understand the loss and its unbearableness nearly swept him away.

"I'm a junior, so my father's name carried onto me. The first time I was in court the judge knew my dad. It was a losing battle. There were times I would cry out. I wanted to die to see my mother."

He slid into crime, to dope deals and speedballs of heroin and cocaine. Living on the run, living out of cars. At 30, he was divorced, with almost no work history.

Until Spokane. From the bus ride nearly two years ago, he went to inpatient treatment, to outpatient treatment, to long walks downtown applying for nearly 50 jobs.

He lied to no one. He said he was facing felonies, that he was in recovery.

Employers thanked him for his honesty.

He buffed cars at Gentle Touch Car Wash, then got on at the steel mill, Vic West. Full-time work, full benefits, "my dream job."

He moved up from mill tailor to equipment operator. He moved in with Lori, to a corner lot in the Spokane Valley shaded by birch and ponderosa, generously rented by her relatives. They married 15 months ago in Coeur d'Alene, in cowboy boots and jeans.

She brings him coffee every morning, packs his lunch. She writes notes on the napkin, "Roses are red, violets are blue, this lunch sucks but I still love you."

"There are times I have to step back and just look at what changes have occurred," he says. "I'm just now figuring out why I ever existed and how much time I wasted.

"It wasn't even a dreamable dream to be living this life."

They have a puppy, a kitten and her children, a boy and girl, who protest both his chicken soup and his frugality. "He'd drive anywhere for a 99-cent burger."

Money is tight. He's paid back $1,000 in court costs and fines, but still owes $1,800. They both work and want to buy a house.

"We're doing everything we can and that's something," says Lori, 35. "But it would take one little thing to put us under."

He keeps going. He pours coffee at a shelter on Sunday mornings for community service. Reports monthly to the state community corrections officer. Attends "moral reconnation therapy" - a CCO-taught class that tries to change how offenders think. How much his thinking has changed is obvious.

Weekends, he takes seven-mile walks with his father-in-law. He fixes things around his in-laws' house and they let him, knowing he cannot repay their kindness.

Each morning, he and Lori read the Bible and pray. When he is about to tease someone, or smile at a racist joke, he stops. He works at decency.

"I am where I am because I did give my life to God. It all comes down to choice. And mine is to never be that person I was."

In an Olympia courtroom, where he'd gone to face numerous warrants after his treatment, a judge who'd known him nearly 20 years took one look and saw that change. He sentenced Ken Larson not to prison but to state supervision and 240 hours of community service in Spokane. Where his life started at 32.

"Everything that happened, happened to me here."

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