Kim Jones lives in a neat house on a road lined with cattails and lilies near the Delaware River with three dogs, four cats, her new husband, her 19-year-old daughter, Hannah, and her father, Curt. Kim has planted blueberries in the backyard and plans to start keeping bees. A wooden sign in the window of her garage conveys her hope for the future: “Honey For Sale.”
But she dwells on the years when her drug addiction erased her from her own life. While she was using — mostly crack cocaine and heroin — and for the 25 months she spent incarcerated, her parents and sister were raising her two kids, Hannah Moumen and her older brother Curtis Jones. Kim’s aunt Julie stepped in from time to time, and neighbors, friends, colleagues and the parents of her kids’ friends were worrying and picking up slack.
Sitting on the back porch at the house in Middletown, Del., Curt, who is 77, talked about the retirement travel that he and his wife, Roberta, had been planning when Kim disappeared in 2011. They had their eye on a smallish motor home with a Mercedes cab, dreaming of touring the West and pursuing one of Curt’s passions, competitive trap shooting.
“We were this close to buying it,” Curt said, holding up his thumb and forefinger in a pinch.
But in the end, there wasn’t a choice. Curt served 20 years as a state trooper in Delaware. The police have a saying, “There’s no such thing as an old addict,” he explained. “I told Roberta, prepare — you know — prepare the casket. It’s done. If this continues on, you’re going to bury her. So the main thing is, let’s get these kids squared away.” Curt and Roberta let the motor home fantasy go, and Roberta, a nurse, took early retirement so she could care for Curtis and Hannah, who were 8 and 6.
In Delaware, it seems everyone knows everyone — “It’s two degrees of separation,” Curt said. So the trial of President Biden’s son Hunter on charges of lying about his addiction to purchase a gun felt to some of the state’s residents like a reality show cast with their neighbors and friends. Curt attended the University of Delaware with Jill Biden’s first husband, Bill Stevenson, and as a state trooper assisted at the scene of the car accident that killed Joe Biden’s first wife, Neilia, their baby daughter, Naomi, and injured both Hunter and his brother, Beau.
The Hunter Biden trial, which ended Tuesday with his conviction on all three counts, was a national spectacle, a prurient display of betrayal, excess, indulgence and lies: a pistol in the trash, a crack pipe on the porch, a cadre of girlfriends and wives orbiting Biden offering him their love, fear and vigilance — and sometimes more drugs.