Focus on the Family

After that, all she wanted to do was escape, but her mother convinced her to stay close to home. She studied political science at the College of Charleston until she got too restless, dropping out in her junior year to travel around Europe with money her father had left her. Five months later, back in the States, she moved to Winter Park. For seven years she lived the life of a ski bum, hitting the slopes in the winter and spending the summer months following the Grateful Dead. When Tiffany left for Fort Collins in 1994 to finish school at Colorado State University, she was engaged to a longtime friend from Winter Park and was finally ready to look toward her future. Then early one morning, she got the call that he'd hit a dangerous stretch of Highway 287 on his way back from a camping trip. He'd driven off the road and died.

Tiffany found her escape in heroin. "I'd done it. Never very often -- just here and there," she says. "But that's when I decided to have a problem."

She never expected that problem to last -- or to fall in love with a fellow heroin addict.

David grew up in and around Denver, the son of a firefighter. "It's a tough thing to live up to when your dad's considered a superhero, getting plaques and awards for rushing children out of fires," he says. When he was in the third grade, his parents had him tested for intelligence at the University of Denver. He had an intelligence quotient of 128, was reading at a college level and could do math at a sixth-grade level, but he was also having behavioral and emotional problems, so his parents sent him to a psychiatrist. "I was intelligent enough to be like, 'What the fuck? There must be something seriously wrong with me if no one else is seeing shrinks,'" he says.

At thirteen, David got caught shoplifting. At sixteen, he earned his first felony -- for pulling quarters out of a soda machine. "There was no violence, nothing that genuinely hurt anybody," he says. "It was all just teenage angst, just pushing limits. I've always been a limit-pusher."

David started using heroin for the same reason. He equates drugs with extreme sports: "What's the whole point of extreme sports? Pushing limits. Coming as close to dying as you possibly can without actually dying. Why do you climb a mountain? You slip, you fall, you're dead. You're doing dope a little too much, you're dead. And you're getting high. The metaphor is exact." More felonies for drugs, burglary and theft followed David into his adult years.

By 1999, at age 24, he thought he'd put his criminal past behind him. He was eight months clean, having enrolled himself in a methadone treatment program, when Tiffany walked into his life.

It was a spring night just after last call, and he was waiting outside the Snake Pit in Capitol Hill when a girl hopped into his truck and yelled, "Let's go!"

"Where are we going?" he asked. Realizing she was in the wrong car, Tiffany improvised and invited the stranger with her to an after-party. They stayed out all night and shared their first kiss as they watched the sun rise over Berthoud Pass.

"We were pretty much inseparable after that," David says.

Within six months, they were living together -- and partying hard. "I was off the charts. I was a rock star," David says of his heroin and cocaine usage. After a while, however, it got to be too much, and they moved out to Wheat Ridge to chill out. They were both in methadone treatment programs in 2000 when Tiffany got pregnant; they were married soon after.

Tiffany felt healthy and ready to be a mom. She had a merchandizing job with a major retailer, and she worked up until three days before Martin was born in 2001. When she went back to work two and a half months later, she put Martin in a daycare program at Family Star Montessori and Early Head Start. At night she stayed home and played with her son. She read him books at bedtime. They were inseparable.

David, on the other hand, was freaked out by fatherhood. He started partying and getting into trouble again, living in and out of jail and halfway houses. Even when he wasn't incarcerated, he stayed away because he didn't want to screw up his son. Tiffany called herself a single mom.

But by the time Martin was two, David had come around. "He started developing a personality, and it blew me away," he says. He began visiting his son at Family Star every day, and he was asked to join the school's Fatherhood Leadership Council. Craig Hart, the fatherhood project's leader, was willing to take a chance on David despite his felonies and halfway-house residence. "David was 100 percent committed to the program and was 100 percent committed to his baby. Still is," Hart says.