First of Three Parts
OROVILLE — Dava Malcolm is an intelligent, creative, black-eyed, brown-haired, 20-year-old woman, with a vocabulary that would make a Marine drill instructor blush.
But more than that she is a slave, a perpetrator, and, in a very real sense, a victim. Even at that, she makes no excuses for herself.
Dava is a “tweaker,” a methamphetamine addict.
“I’ve been like this all of my life, you know? It’s just the same old (expletive), different day, you know?”
Dava’s story isn’t unique. She is but one of a host of people in Butte County who live in a shadowy world, just out of sight of the general public. A world where the residents have dozens of “friends” but only one love, a witch’s brew of caustic chemicals that consumes youth, health, hope and often life.
It is also a world of violence where drug-eroded minds can turn friends into murderers in a life-ending second.
What makes Dava unusual is her sometimes brutal candor about the world she’s been part of since she was 13.
Right now, she is undergoing a 90-day psychiatric evaluation in state prison prior to her sentencing in Butte County Superior Court on various charges, including felony evading a peace officer.
An Oroville native, Dava has had almost no contact with her father since before she reached her teens. Her mother, also a “tweaker,” was in and out of prison throughout Dava’s growing up years.
The one positive human constant in her life has been her grandmother, Teresa Haka, a cancer patient, who has been in frail health for years.
Ask Dava about her family and her dark eyes fill with tears. But instead of relatives, she talks about Butte County Juvenile Hall. “That was my family. When I got out I used to call them all the time. I still call them. I always talk to them or I stop by there.”
Repeated, if generally minor, breaches of the law had her in and out of the hall from the time she was 13. She got most of her formal education while in custody, and first demonstrated a talent for poetry and painting during classes in the hall.
By law, when she turned 18 she was ousted from the only secure home she had ever known.
Three months before her release, she told an Enterprise-Record reporter that if she wasn’t in some sort of a drug rehabilitation program after she left custody, she would soon be in prison or dead.
Two-and-a-half years later, dressed in an orange inmate shirt and jeans, Dava was sitting in the grim Butte County Jail visitors’ room, talking to the same reporter.
“When I first got out I went back to my old ways, tweaking again. I just got high doing the same old-same old.”
She has a complex love-hate relationship with drug that runs so much of her life.
Dava smokes her meth and, “always the first hit I feel this big relax. Then I just want to keep on smoking to see that big cloud come out.
“After I get high, like this last time, I hated it because I was clean for so long. I was tripping. My head was like spinning. I needed more, no matter what! I needed, more and more and more. It was all bad!”
To date, she has been able to adhere to one rule when it comes to her drug use — no needles!
“All my friends shoot up dope. Everybody is passing around hep-C (hepatitis -C) and some (expletive) sharing the same needles, and who else knows what they got. That’s what’s sick about it. When they shoot up they get all weirdo style. They get — I don’t even know how to explain it. They just get straight weird.”
She has also noticed something else about her “friends.”
“All the people that I knew that turned 18 in Juvenile Hall, they are either dead or they are coming in and out of jail, just like me.”
Two of those who have died were murdered. One of them was Marlin John Dills, 18, who went by John.
“He was in Juvenile Hall with me. He was my best friend. We were together for a long time.”
Dava smiled as she described John as “this tall, skinny, white boy, blonde hair, bright blue eyes. He had this smile we used to call the ‘Colgate, ear-to-ear.’ He’d light up anybody’s day when he walked over. He wanted to marry me so bad. I loved him. Everybody loved him so much.”
For a while after they were together out of the hall, the pair stayed meth free, but according to Dava, they “relapsed.” The couple generally did everything together, but on the night of Sept. 5, 2006, John was away from Dava. He was riding in the back seat of a car with a couple of tweaker friends on a dirt road in Palermo, when, with no apparent warning, the passenger in the front seat pulled a .22-caliber pistol and began shooting at John.
“He got shot three times in his face and five times in his chest by two of our friends, for no reason,” said Dava.
The driver is currently serving time in state prison for voluntary manslaughter, and last month the shooter was convicted of first-degree murder.
After the murder, “I became like a really bad drunk and a tweaker. I was bad. I was baaaad! picking myself to death — stealing, I was doing all the same (expletive) my Mom was doing.”
Staff writer Roger H. Aylworth can be reached at 896-7762 or raylworth@chicoer.com.
Monday: How Dava tried to escape, and what went wrong.
Tuesday: The claws of the “meth monster.”
