This content was originally published by the Longmont Observer and is licensed under a Creative Commons license.
Recovering meth addict, J.J. Zepp, and Detective Steve Desmond, have become lifelong friends through the unlikeliest of circumstances. They are an odd couple of good guy and bad guy, an unusual harmony to say the least, but together have found a natural high in hopes for influential improvement with criminal rehabilitation in the Longmont community.
Since their friendship started, Zepp has become sober and doors of opportunity have opened that neither one would have ever foreseen. It all started when Zepp received a voicemail from Detective Desmond, asking him to come in and interview in reference to a case.
“I got a video surveillance of J.J. and another woman passing counterfeit money, so I got all excited because I really like arresting people,” Desmond said. “And I called J.J. up, tracked him down.”
The wheels were turning furiously in Zepp’s head after listening to that message. He could be prosecuted for something he did years ago, being charged and arrested for other offenses that happened years prior. He couldn’t think of what Desmond could be calling him about. Then he had a moment, he knew his son Judah was always watching him, and he needed to be held accountable, not to run away from his problems, but to face them head-on. He made the decision to pick up the phone and talk with Desmond.
“That’s pretty unusual in law enforcement, when people say ‘I’ve got nothing to hide,’” Desmond said. “There’s an old adage: ‘People who have nothing to hide, hide nothing.’ And J.J. was like, ‘I got nothing to hide. Let me tell you everything that happened.’ And that kind of took me off guard because I wasn’t expecting that.”
Zepp walked into the police station on his own accord and told Desmond he had relapsed on meth, that he was in drug court, on probation, and had already told his probation officer. Zepp’s side of the story was that this woman offered to buy him cigarettes, and the money turned out to be counterfeit money. Sure enough, on video surveillance, he had nothing to do with it because she presented the cash. Desmond was impressed at the fact that Zepp was so incredibly honest.
“I’ve been doing law enforcement for 25 years, since I had a full head of hair, and you know,” Desmond recalled, “people aren’t typically that honest about the mistakes they make in life, especially with the police. Maybe they are with their friends, but they don’t tell police.”
Essentially, Zepp came in because he was looking for a place to tell his story. He didn’t have much family left, the people in his life were still using, he didn’t have any friends, and he had destroyed a marriage. “She’s the most beautiful, amazing individual I’ve ever met and even that wasn’t enough for me to stop using. So, I just took that opportunity to just let it out,” Zepp said. “I didn’t want to live, but I didn’t want to die. I just wanted that confessional: This is where I am at from childhood to that moment.”
While his innocence was perfectly clear to Desmond, Zepp had no idea he was off the hook when he told Desmond about a woman who stood up at a 12-step meeting and gave her testimony. She had been texting back and forth with Deputy Chief Jeff Satur, that he had been communicating with her throughout seven months, and that she attributed some of her successes to having that positive influence in her life.
“That’s a barrier. That you don’t talk to cops if you are a convict or an addict, you just don’t talk to the police. You don’t do it. Yeah, that’s a huge wall or a barrier. It’s us against them or them against us. Totally see the uniform, not the individual,” Zepp said. “We all have our roles, you have your role, he has his role on this spaceship of life going around the sun. Nothing good comes from us against them. Nothing benefits an individual or a community when it’s us against them.”
Zepp asked Desmond if he could text him his gratitude list every day. Desmond thought it over and agreed. “I thought he gave me a fake number to text originally, just because that’s what my brain does,” Zepp said. “We ended up having coffee once a week, or lunch once a week.
Desmond’s initial thought was, “Hell, no! Are you kidding me?” He realized the initial “Hell, no,” was just a little bit of cop paranoia, a paranoia that was just a heightened sense of awareness. Then his Christian code of ethics wondered why he couldn’t invite Zepp into his life. He knew other people in his church would invite Zepp into their life.
“I was like, ‘I need to do this,’” Desmond said. “I’m really going to help J.J. And I’m really going to do all these great things for J.J. And it’s just been a slap in the face, because J.J. is the one helping me out. I’m not doing anything for J.J. except being a cheerleader. A strong male, manly cheerleader. I’m getting these daily tidbits of life lessons.”
Desmond’s strong Christian morals jolted his decision to let Zepp text him regularly, but so did something else. It seemed like everyday he would read about meth addicts committing crimes and that he needed to keep everything confidential and locked down. There were still some other police officers that might not have wanted to get involved in something like that. But, Desmond had a chance to help somebody.
“I really like helping people out and sometimes when you help people, you’re the one that normally benefits the most from it. Just that feeling of being able to help someone out. I think I said, ‘Yes,’ right away, but there’s that moment. Just like J.J., ‘You don’t talk to cops.’ And cops don’t talk to meth heads. I mean, we do all the time, but you don’t treat meth addicts with respect,” Desmond said. “But, the line we crossed, it was great to cross it.”
Despite all his run-ins with the police, Zepp didn’t hate the police. He had been battling a real demon on meth. Desmond could see that, and how many times Zepp was arrested, and how nothing worked because the drug was so overpowering. “Wouldn’t it be a great crime prevention model,” Desmond said. “J.J. and I will be friends probably forever, but if I can invest in J.J. for one year, and if we have 145 cops in Longmont, if we could all just take one person under our arm, our wing, and help them, within one year, that’s 145 people, but in ten years, what does that look like? And how would that change our police department?”
Police Officers like Desmond want to change the community for the better. He is constantly arresting people, hunting down meth addicts, chasing criminals, and is hyper-focused on stopping crime. Through his experiences with this though, he has come to notice that when everyone is focused on helping, learning, and growing in a relationship, it makes everyone a much better person.
“Hopefully, instead of solving crime by arresting people, it would be solving crime by picking someone up, believing in them, investing in them, encouraging them, and benefiting from that,” Desmond said. “How much would that change our community, our police department, and people like J.J.? I think that’d be cool.”
Desmond loves playing cops and robbers, and he also really loves helping people out, helping the victim through the worst day of their life. Being a comfort to the victim. But, he has always treated people that he has arrested with respect. “I was told early on that our job is to enforce the laws, not to punish people. That’s up to the judge,” Desmond said. “I started off in the jail, without a taser, without a gun, without a stick. It was me and 64 inmates. As a 21/22-year-old college graduate, I learned quickly about respect. Maybe they made a mistake. Who hasn’t made a mistake in their life? I’ve certainly made my mistakes. I’ve always looked at it as a way of, just do your job and don’t pass judgement. Be polite. Be respectful.”
Desmond truly thinks that Zepp is a special person and that it all lies in his honesty and determination. Someone in Zepp’s situation has plenty of obstacles to fight through with finding housing, getting a job, regularly finding time to go to 12-step meetings, drug court, probation meetings, and so on. The easiest way out for criminals is to abandon those priorities and return to drugs, but Zepp has stood strong despite the struggles in his new journey, and Desmond admires that.
“You know, when God picked his apostles, he didn’t pick the powerful, the people in charge, he didn’t pick the richest, the most educated, but he picked the important people. The fishermen, people who hated the tax collector,” Desmond said. “And I think that God’s picking J.J. and he’s going to change lives. And, it’s really cool to be able to be a part of that, to see how J.J.’s going to flourish and how he’s going to go on and change lives and I’m excited to be a part of that.”
Zepp has had a hard time finding housing and a job, but he didn’t give up and retreat to the comfort of his old ways. The recent convictions along with a felony on his record and a lack of recent job experience turned out to be a serious speed bump. “Because they’re going to take in the women, they are going to take in the single families, mothers, they’re going to take in people who have had a job for six months, they’re going to take in people who haven’t had a conviction before they even consider me,” Zepp said.
Zepp has his hands full with managing his time and money as well, paying $468 a month in child support, he still has $28,000 worth of fines, attends group meetings and therapy sessions. He’s required to go to probation meetings every other week, has drug court every other week, and has twelve UA’s a month. “I have an eight year DOC sentence over my head,” Zepp added. “If I don’t complete drug court I go to prison for eight years.”
Zepp has been sober for five months and during his struggles with sobriety, he eventually found a job and housing through other support systems other than Desmond. “I tried to help him. But none of my contacts, none of my letters of reference helped. You know I told people, ‘Hey, you hire J.J. and I’ll come in every week and shake him down. Whatever it takes to get him a job. If he ever gives you grief, you just tell me. I’ll come in and I’ll straighten him out.’ Nothing that I did as Steve Desmond, really, did anything for him.”
Desmond isn’t the only one handing out phone numbers to help reformed drug addicts. Zepp also has Mayor Brian Bagley’s phone number. He didn’t vote for him, but he did talk to him twice, and the second time he talked with him for an hour. He also spoke with City Manager, Harold Dominguez, and recently had lunch with Longmont Public Safety Chief Mike Butler.
“Yeah, I’ve got Mike Butler, Public Safety Chief Butler’s [phone] number. I have all the resources I need in front of me because I’m willing to put forth the effort. If I meet the universe halfway, the universe will meet me more than halfway,” Zepp said. “Harold Dominguez pulled me aside and said, ‘Dude, I want you to come in my office. I really would love to talk to you.’ And it just showed me again I have a gift, and I’ve been blessed with an opportunity to use what I have as an instrument for the benevolence of the world around me.”
Before all these gracious helping hands in the Longmont government gave Zepp a hand, he had traveled on a broad and bumpy road. The day he turned 18 he went to jail, has been to prison twice, has lost track of the dozens of times he’s been arrested and has never been arrested without being high or drunk.
“I’ve never been arrested clean, not once. And it was just real uncomfortable separating myself from the convict mentality into an intrapersonal relationship with an individual in the community, regardless of any uniform or how I’ve projected that barrier to be,” Zepp said. “I’ll be sharing with friends that are recovering addicts, who I’ve known in the joint, and saying that, and how uncomfortable it is for me to say it, in my gut, because I am separating myself from who I once was into the person I want to be.”
Shame and guilt have burdened a hardened man who came from a rough unloved past, but Zepp is determined to form a new mindset by looking out on a bright horizon. The past has impacted his constant present, but he pushes to keep a positive mindset and continues to make a significant change for the better in the oncoming future. Zepp truly believes addiction and drug abuse is stronger than a mother’s or father’s love, and his past shows a chilling parallel.
Zepp had an unquestionably tough upbringing. There were constant variables in his life that happened that caused him to snowball into a negative belief system. That belief system kept perpetuating itself. “From ‘I’m no good,’ from my mom telling me, ‘I wish you were never born.’ She died of alcoholism,” Zepp said.
Around eight-years-old Zepp got drunk for the first time and ended up getting heavily inebriated. His neighbors had a party the night before and left six-packs of Coors Light and a couple of wine coolers out in their front yard, so he grabbed them. “At the time it was still attractive to kids, all colorful and they are so delicious, oh my god. And I loved the way it made me feel,” Zepp recalled. “Everything about it just made me... I need to feel like this all the time, first time I got drunk.”
The first time Zepp smoked weed he was around 10 or 12-years-old, started smoking weed daily by the time he was 14-years-old, and continued smoking largely throughout his adult life. The first time he did acid, ecstasy, and cocaine were right around those same teenage years. The first time Zepp did meth he was 18-years-old, and that had been his drug of choice ever since.
“I have had periods of clean time before, either locked up or in recovery, but I’ve always had that reservation ... that, it’s just that drug is so demonic and evil and seductive. It lies to you, man. The things that people do for dope, man. It sucks. It’s really, not cool,” Zepp said. “Here’s a story of how this... I truly believe addiction and drug abuse is stronger than a mother’s or father’s love.”
Zepp’s son, Judah, is the most amazing person he has ever known and he loves him more than anything. He states that meth addiction is stronger than that kind of profound love. When his son was over a year old he came home high one night after being up for four or five days and passed out on the couch.
“When I woke up, there was a note on the table telling me, ‘J.J., get your stuff, leave. Our innocent son now has grabbed a meth pipe.’ It fell out of my pocket, I guess, or he ended up finding it and was probably playing with daddy and it came out of my pocket,” J.J. recalled. “He grabbed it, started smashing it on the ground. My wife heard it and she was yelling at me, ‘J.J., wake up, wake up. I threw away the meth pipe.’ I got about halfway down the note and all I cared about was where was the pipe at? I didn’t care about her leaving, I didn’t care about her taking Judah, she was all, ‘I’ll call social services.’ I didn’t care about any of that. All I cared about was that pipe because I needed to get high.”
The shame and guilt haunts Zepp to this day, to remember that at one point in his life all he cared about was when the next hit was going to be, and the same scenario happened only four or five days later. The destruction of the crumbling house that he built was falling down on him and he was too sick to do anything about it.
“I look back at that and I’m like, ‘Jesus.’ It’s intense. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for my kid. I would jump over… I would take a bullet for him. But to recall that moment, those moments, what I was willing to do, and times when I was just totally neglecting,” Zepp said. “It truly is stronger than a parent’s love, that disease, and you gotta have something stronger to separate that.”
Zepp completely destroyed his life because of his love for wanting dope. Fortunately, his life has done a complete 180-degree turn. With people who came together at the right time, Detective Desmond, the courts, his treatment team, P.O, therapist, he is learning not to beat himself up over something that happened in the past and is finding self-forgiveness.
“I am a projection of whatever I think I am. So, I think, one of the coolest things I have learned in recovery is shame and guilt,” Zepp said. “I’ve always thought they were synonymous. There’s some power between separating those things. It’s important for me to take accountability and responsibility for my recovery in my life. I messed up, but I’m not a mess-up. So, that’s been huge.”
After all of his mistakes, and with all the people who have helped him on this new path, it has shown Zepp that he is worthwhile and worthy to be alive today. “I’m worthy to have all the goodness the world has to offer as long as I own up to the stuff that I have messed up on, make amends for those things. It’s showing me at least that you can have anything in life that you want if you help others,” Zepp said.
Zepp can see that there is a domino effect for him, doing the next right thing for the right reasons, that it benefits the world around us. People like Desmond and Zepp are passionate about improving and impacting the lives of others. Zepp knows the only way that he can do that is by improving and impacting his own life first. He has been writing lists to imbue a positive vision, including ten things he’s thankful for, his goals, and a to-do list.
“So, my goals are: end of year, to have a Sportster motorcycle, and have better handwriting because I have had horrendous handwriting since I was a child,” Zepp said. “In a year, I want to get paid to speak in front of thousands. In five years I want to play a show at Red Rocks, be on the Ellen Degeneres Show, and be debt free. And I’m going to help a stranger. I don’t know who that stranger is, in my day-to-day there’ll be a stranger that I am gonna help.”
With Zepp and Desmond, two completely different worlds have collided. The result has been the exact opposite of a natural disaster, and it’s only going to continue to get better for the both of them. Detective Desmond already has plans for next year, when he will help out another recovering drug addict like Zepp in the same way. He knows he will be proud to have Zepp by his side in the process.
“As long as I continue to improve upon myself, incrementally better than the day before I can’t help but have a massive impact on lives around me a year from now,” Zepp said. “The old adage is dead. We do recover. Addicts DO get clean, we do recover, but we can’t do it on our own.”
