Alice in Chains: The Untold Story

They stopped at a bar after leaving the airport. After Demri finished her drink, Austin said her drink tasted funny and asked Demri to taste it. Demri finished Austin’s drink as well. “The plan was to get her drunk, shut her up, and we’ll go from here. So that’s what happened, and we go up to my place, and we get up in the morning,” Austin said. The next morning, several of Demri’s friends and relatives had gathered in the living room downstairs, including her maternal grandparents, her brothers, and Layne. At some point that morning, Austin told Demri to lie down in her room, where she had disconnected the phone to avoid waking Demri up or tipping her off. When Demri came out to the living room, she knew exactly what was going on.

“You’re not fucking intervening on me, and I’m not going to fucking rehab,” she said, and went back upstairs. Ultimately, they talked her into coming back out to hear what everyone had to say. According to Austin, the most profound comment came from her son, Devin, who said, “You’re my sister and I love you and I don’t want you to die.”

Austin made plans to check her into one of three possible clinics, to give Demri some choice in the process. She chose a clinic in Port Angeles, a city in Clallam County on the shores of the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Known as the Lodge, it supposedly specialized in treating heroin addiction, Austin said. Demri was going through mood swings during the entire drive.

“She would say things like, ‘I’m fucking leaving as soon as I get there.’ ‘As soon as I get there, I’m going in the front door and out the back door.’ And I would respond with, ‘Well, Dem, you’re going to do what you’re going to do. My job is to get you there,’” Austin said. “I’d wink at Layne. Then she would say, ‘Well, I hope the food is good.’”

They checked her in, and Austin and Layne drove back to Seattle. They joked that Demri would somehow get back to Seattle before them. Austin dropped Layne off at his home at around midnight; then she got home about an hour later and went to bed.

One aspect of Demri’s personality, according to Austin, was her inability to handle guilt. In Austin’s words, “If she offended you, and you didn’t have a cell phone or anything, she would start calling your house, waiting for you to get home to apologize.” Because of her mood on the way to rehab, she felt guilty about it after checking in. Once admitted, she was supposed to be prohibited from receiving phone calls or any type of communication from the outside for a week.

The staff agreed to make an exception and allowed her to call Austin and Layne. “Her thing was ‘I’ve got to apologize to my mom and Layne. I’ve got to tell them I’m sorry. I’ve got to tell them that I love them. I’ll stay. I’ll stay and be a good person, if you just let me say I’m sorry.’”

She didn’t get through to either of them. Austin’s bedroom phone was still disconnected from the intervention, and Layne was probably exhausted from his return trip from Germany. Demri checked herself out after a few hours. According to Austin, Demri went to rehab two more times, staying the longest at the Sundown M Ranch, which she left a few days before graduation. “She actually got kicked out of there for talking to people,” Austin said. “She did well there.” This was the only treatment Austin paid for herself. She said she would not be surprised if the others were paid for either by Layne, his management, or his record label.

Demri’s health began taking a turn for the worse around Thanksgiving of 1993. She told her mother she had been having fevers in excess of a hundred degrees. Austin told Demri the next time it happened, she should go to the hospital. The first of many hospitalizations happened shortly after. “She came in to the hospital for the first time at the end of November of ’93. She was in until January of ’94. She got out [and] was back in in March of ’94 and at that time put on life support,” Austin recalled. “When she would be in, she would come in to the emergency room. They would admit her up into a medicine floor; then she’d go from the medicine floor to the [Intensive Care Unit] and life support, and then she wouldn’t die. So she’d go back to the medicine floor—she’d be on IV and antibiotics for a month. This went on and on and on. She had her lungs operated on twice. She had her heart operated on twice. She suffered miserably.”

While in the ICU, Austin said Demri was conscious but intubated—she had a tube inserted down her throat to help her breathe, which she despised. She would tell her mother, “I hate being fucking intubated. I can’t talk, and these people come and they ask me these fucking questions, and I can’t fucking talk, and I feel like a fucking fish in a fucking fishbowl.” She communicated by writing on a small blackboard with a piece of chalk.