Homicide victim found in Las Vegas dumpster battled addiction
Just eight days after Theresa Henry told her young son over the phone that she loved him and wanted to get better for him, her body was found in a dumpster.
She was more than 2,000 miles from her home in Roanoke, Virginia, but she was trying to get back.
“Unfortunately she will be flying back in a body bag,” her mother, Patricia Mehrmann, told the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
A homeless man discovered the 28-year-old woman’s partially burned body in a dumpster in a corner of a central valley apartment complex Christmas Eve. The scent of gas lingered in the December air as Las Vegas police combed through garbage looking for clues to determine who killed her. Henry died of head trauma, the Clark County coroner later ruled.
Police have not yet arrested anyone in her death.
Her story is one of addiction: a yearslong slide from life as a straight-A student in the rolling hills of Virginia to living on the streets of Las Vegas.
And it started in high school with prescription cough syrup, her mother said.
Before the crystal meth and heroin, before the multiple stints in rehab, before the life on the streets, the girl most people called Tess or Tessy was a standout student who excelled at basketball and track and field until she finished high school. She liked cooking and writing and was an avid reader.
“She could read a book in a day, a day and a half,” Mehrmann said. “She just gobbled up books.”
After high school, Henry attended Virginia Tech for a year. After that, she studied for another year at the University of North Carolina at Asheville.
On Feb. 28, Henry boarded a flight to Las Vegas, where she was scheduled to check in to a treatment facility.
“We were hoping that going to a longer-term care facility might be the solution for Tess,” Mehrmann said.
When things there weren’t working, she left that center for another, where she stayed for a month. After that, she returned to the original center to seek treatment.
Mehrmann’s phone buzzed on Mother’s Day with a text from her daughter, who said she was leaving the rehabilitation center.
“She had a lot of sadness now in her life,” Mehrmann said, adding that Henry had lost custody of her toddler in 2016.
And she went back to the streets.
Mehrmann heard from Henry sporadically over the next several months, receiving calls at odd hours of the night but mostly communicating through text.
The last time Mehrmann heard her daughter’s voice was Dec. 16, when the two talked about getting Henry back to Virginia. Mehrmann mailed her daughter an ID card so she could book a flight home.
“She wanted to be back here,” Mehrmann said. “She wanted to be part of life here.”
Her family was hoping she would see Christmas in Virginia.
Mehrmann said she is being open about her daughter’s experience in the hope that it will raise awareness about addiction and who it affects.
“This is not a disease of bad people,” she said. “This is a disease of beautiful people like my daughter Tess.”
Contact Blake Apgar at bapgar@reviewjournal.com or 702-387-5298. Follow @blakeapgar on Twitter.
