Robin Jordan says she can remember every detail of May 12, 2018.
She was driving from Durham to visit her son at work. Jordan had her two of her three daughters and her granddaughter, her oldest daughter Jessica's child, in the car with her. They were on their way to see Jordan's only son at work. It was his birthday.
"My husband called me and wanted to know where I was," Jordan remembered. "He said 'you need to come home right now.' I just did a take in my brain of where everyone was at that moment."
She knew it had to be about Jessica or her sister.
It wasn't until she got home in Graham to her husband and detectives in her home that she found out it was Jessica.
"They said Jessica was dead. And then I was on the floor," Jordan said.
Her daughter died at 32 of an overdose after over 10 years of battling drug addiction. A toxicology report obtained by Elon News Network found cocaine and fentanyl, a synthetic opioid that's 80-100 times stronger than prescription-strength pain killers, were in Jessica's system.
Jordan says she she was aware of her daughter using hard drugs since she was a freshman in college. But Jordan said that her problems with addiction stemmed from issues much deeper than a substance disorder.
"We started getting letters from the school pretty soon in the fall saying that she was failing her classes and threatening academic probation," Jordan said. "My husband and I went down she was hiding out in her dorm and was sleeping all day. She wasn’t going to class. What we found out at that time was she had been raped on campus."
They moved Jessica back home. It was soon after that they noticed a shift in her behavior.
"She was running around all night. She was running out with people we didn’t know," Jordan said. "We started taking her to counseling. At that time she disclosed that she had been sexually molested by a family friend when she was five years-old. She had carried that secret with her for her whole life."
That secret would lead to a life of secrets. Stealing, sneaking out and being brought home in police cars. It was to the point where Jordan begged someone to arrest her daughter.
"Magistrates would say 'if she’s not suicidal or homicidal there’s nothing we can do.' And I know that’s true I don’t question that. But it put her in a really bad place."
A bad place not just for Jessica, but for 81 fatal and non-fatal overdoses in Alamance County so far this year. 39, of which, were opioid-related.
Sergeant Chris Crain of the Alamance County Sheriff Office's Street Crimes Division is working to map out the problem.
"These people that operate under the radar that people don’t think about, they could be your neighbor," Crain said. "What they don’t see is the person who’s profiting from bringing the drugs in. They live in your community maybe they’re a legitimate business owner."
The department started using a system called ODMAP, a computer software that allows any reporting agency track overdoses in their jurisdictions. So far, only the Sheriff's Office, Burlington Police and the Alamance County Health Department reports to the system.
According to Crain, information from ODMAP has led police to transient areas along the interstate, especially cheap hotels, for easy access. According to Crain, it's not necessarily to catch the user, but to catch the dealer.
"The way drug investigations work is we don’t really have a lot of information about the source so we start at the bottom and we’ll work our way up," Crain said. "Our enforcement is not focused on the people with the addictions it’s more about getting to the people that are actually selling and pushing stuff off the streets. The ones that are profiting from it. From other people’s misery."
Not unlike the misery that's been living inside Jordan for the past year and a half.
"There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t relive decisions I made. Question myself. Wished I’d done it differently," Jordan said. "You do the best you can do at any given time and you just have to trust that you made the beast decision you could with what you had."