Bucksport Detective Sgt. David Winchester (right) and his best friend Jared Zimmerman grew up together. Zimmerman spent most of his adult life battling drug addiction.
PHOTO BY DAVID ROZA
Bucksport sergeant helps best friend kick drugs
March 23, 2017 by David Roza on News
Part 1 of 2 Part 2: “You can’t beat being sober“
BUCKSPORT — David Winchester and Jared Zimmerman have been best friends since childhood. They were born two days apart, their mothers were good friends and so were their older sisters. It was almost inevitable that they would spend a lot of time together growing up in Bucksport.
“For me, it was more like being brothers than friends,” said Winchester, now a 40-year-old detective sergeant and 17-year veteran of the Bucksport Police Department. “We were together that much. It was like every day, from the time I can remember.”
“It was either I was at your house or you were at mine growing up,” said Zimmerman, also 40, who works at the Shaw House for homeless youth in Bangor. Zimmerman returned to Maine from Florida four years ago after spending more than a decade addicted to drugs and serving time in prison for drug trafficking.
“Him and I used to talk about being cops and driving to Florida and talking on CB radios,” Zimmerman said. “He became the cop, I became the drug addict. So it’s weird. Everything is connected.”
Though the addiction tested their bond, the pair’s strong friendship eventually helped bring Zimmerman out of his illness.
“If I didn’t have people to come home to, I wouldn’t have gotten to that point of not using drugs,” he said. “I would have stayed in Florida and it would have continued.”
Growing up
Jared Zimmerman, Chris Page and David Winchester.
Winchester and Zimmerman both excelled at sports in high school, but Zimmerman had a temper that he often could not control. (JARED ZIMMERMAN PHOTO)
Winchester and Zimmerman both excelled at sports: Zimmerman was the quarterback on the football team and pitcher on the baseball team while Winchester became a Maine McDonald’s All-Star basketball player. Zimmerman also had an artistic streak: he had a knack for drawing, painting and writing poems and songs.
“He had a hard time focusing on things but he’s incredibly intelligent,” Winchester said. “And unbelievably gifted with art. His mind just works well that way.”
But Zimmerman also had a temper. At times, Winchester would be called out of class to calm him down after arguments with his girlfriend.
“A teacher came and got me out of a separate class and he said ‘We really need you to come, Jared’s having a meltdown,’” Winchester said. “That happened a couple times.”
“I definitely had a temper and didn’t really lock onto a direction,” Zimmerman said. “I couldn’t control things and I didn’t want to be controlled. So if bad things happened in my life, I would get angry about it because I couldn’t fix it or control it.”
One day, a pamphlet about the elite Navy SEAL commandos arrived in the mail at Zimmerman’s house. Despite his resistance to being controlled, Zimmerman realized that becoming a SEAL was what he wanted to do.
“I never wanted anything to do with the military until I saw that pamphlet at the kitchen table at Dad’s and all of a sudden I was like ‘I want to do this,’” he said. “It didn’t make any sense, but that structure was good. I had a goal, I had a set routine and that’s what I needed then.”
After attending the University of Maine for a year, Zimmerman enlisted in the Navy in 1996, went to gunner’s mate school in Illinois, and then started training to be a SEAL in Coronado, Calif. At first, the military was a great fit.
“The military’s rough on you and the training I went into, they definitely don’t take it easy on you,” Zimmerman said. “That allowed me to vent how I felt. The exercise helped, the routine helped, being away from everything helped.”
But Zimmerman injured his back and his Achilles tendon and suffered stress-induced asthma. He couldn’t complete the SEAL training and was honorably discharged in 1998. The 21-year-old went home, but without the structure of the military, things soon took a turn for the worse.
Addicted
While Zimmerman was being discharged from the military, Winchester was finishing up his associate’s degree in law enforcement at the University of Maine. Working on cases allowed Winchester to explore his competitive side, and being a police officer allowed him to work outside and be free of a desk. When he was 22 years old, Winchester started work at his first police job in Bar Harbor.
Zimmerman was also in town, but he wasn’t the same. He had started taking medication to control the pain from his training injuries, and he eventually started taking drugs at parties, including cocaine and oxycodone. The more Zimmerman did drugs, the harder it became not to.
Zimmerman’s drug habit made spending time with his best friend, a police officer, a little difficult.
“We were still close but it wasn’t the same,” Winchester said. “And I think he knew my stance on it so he kept his distance.”
By the year 2000, Winchester had joined the Bucksport Police Department and started working nights. Zimmerman would stop by at random hours to talk about life and shoot the breeze, but generally not to talk about the addiction that was taking over his life.
“It was always good to see him but it was hard to see him when I knew that he was struggling because what do you do with it?” Winchester asked. “He wasn’t prepared to tell me where he was at and I didn’t want to accuse him of anything.”
By 2001, Zimmerman wanted out of Bucksport. He wanted to get away from his friends’ houses where these drugs would turn up. He also wanted to go to Florida, where his brother, Lance, lived and where the rock music scene was hot. A young musician such as Zimmerman could make a lot of connections there.
Speedballing
When Zimmerman first arrived in Florida, he did well. He moved into his own apartment in Delray Beach, got a job and started playing with rock and alternative rock bands. But he still had back pain. A prescription for Percocet from a Florida pain doctor sent him back down the path of drug abuse.
“Looking back, I could have dealt with the injuries in an easier way; stretching, going to the gym, watching my diet.” Zimmerman said. “But I went to this doctor, who had good intentions.”
Zimmerman’s story is similar to those of tens of thousands of others whose addictions started with a prescription. He started getting high recreationally again.
“Unfortunately, Florida was saturated with opiates,” he said.
His situation deteriorated: the more drugs he did, the less he showed up for work, the less money he had to pay rent. He started couch-surfing, then living in his truck. Before long he was living in a box.
Every month, he went to a doctor to pick up his prescription of oxycodone and Xanax. He would sell or trade some of his prescription for other drugs, drifting through broken neighborhoods, where he slept on the streets, in crack-houses, or under a tarp in a park.
He tried speedballing — taking a downer (a depressant such as opioids or alcohol) and an upper (a stimulant such as cocaine or Ritalin) at the same time. In Zimmerman’s case, he injected cooked cocaine into one arm and opioids into the other.
“You get comfortable doing the things you thought you never would,” he said. “You’re so far gone it’s like ‘Sure, I’ll try that.’”
At the end of a month, Zimmerman would have enough money from the sale of his prescription drugs to pay for a room for a few nights where he would shower, sleep and eat so that he could look presentable enough to pick up his next month’s prescription from the doctor.
“I was also paying in cash, so everybody knew what was going on.”
“This one time, I was under a tarp with the rain pelting in and I was wet, dirty, broke and hungry with ants and bugs crawling all over me,” Zimmerman said. “After about five minutes I said ‘how am I going to get through this?’”
Back in Bucksport
Of course, all of this was troubling for Zimmerman’s friends and family back home. Though he called Winchester often from a TracFone, Zimmerman was usually incapable of having a normal conversation.
When they did have an actual conversation, Winchester offered advice. He suggested entering rehab and detoxing, but he knew from his profession how difficult it can be to get an addict to listen.
“When you’re doing it over the phone from Maine to Florida, it’s probably not going to work, because I’ve had that same conversation with people face to face,” Winchester said. “Police officer or not, you try to find ‘What do you do?’ Is it tough love? Give them money? Give them support? I could use some of my experiences in law enforcement, but for each person it’s different.”
By 2009, Zimmerman had no money left. At one point he called Winchester asking for more, and it nearly ended their friendship.
“Ordinarily I would give him anything he’d want,” Winchester said. “But I knew where that money was going. So I remember telling him on the phone, ‘Jared I love you and I’ll send you the money. But if you’re ever going to call me again for money don’t call me.’”
Winchester went a year and a half without hearing from him.
“My only way of keeping tabs on him was to talk to his dad,” Winchester said. “I would just hear from him ‘He’s fine,’ whatever fine was. There were periods of time where I didn’t know whether he was alive.”
Arrested
Just as he did every month, Zimmerman was about to sell his prescription of oxycodone and Xanax. He made contact with the husband of a woman he knew and arranged to drop off the drugs under a tree in the parking lot of a Wal-Mart in Pompano Beach.
As soon as Zimmerman dropped off the drugs and picked up the money lying by the tree, he said he was surrounded by eight police officers who emerged from behind a car and behind a tree.
The 32-year-old Zimmerman was arrested, charged with drug trafficking and conspiracy to traffic, and sentenced to a year and a day in the Martin Correctional Institution. But compared to living in the streets, prison wasn’t so bad.
“It was actually the best thing that happened,” Zimmerman said. “I had a place to stay, I had food to eat, I was sober. I got a lot of reading done, I worked out, I was the healthiest I had been in a while.”
He also taught math and English to his fellow inmates. And he started writing letters to Winchester.
“When I knew he had been arrested, I felt terrible guilt but a huge amount of relief,” Winchester said. “That went for his family, too. We’re not going to get a call from somebody saying ‘Jared’s dead.’ We went through probably three or four years wondering if we were going to get that call.”
The two friends used the letters to update each other on their lives. Winchester had gotten married, and was promoted to sergeant the same year Zimmerman was arrested. Zimmerman sent poems and songs that he wrote in prison.
“I would brag to some of the inmates, obviously not all, that I got a letter from my friend who was a sergeant in a police department,” Zimmerman said. “I would brag about that because here I am in prison and I’ve got a best friend who’s still close to me. Knowing that you had a friend and family that were there for you gave me something to come home to.”