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All Spc. Bryan Roudebush wanted was a legal high. Trying to get some relaxation, he sat on a balcony in Waikiki, Hawaii, and took five hits off a small pipe packed with a drug called spice. He stepped back inside, dozed off on the couch beside his girlfriend Ola Peyton, and then — as if in a trance — he beat Peyton senseless and nearly pushed her off the 11th floor balcony.
He was charged with attempted murder.
“Everything that Ola told me, a lot of it is a dream to me,” Roudebush said. “I remember one significant part of the dream where I grabbed her by the hair and was hitting her as hard as I could. And after I hit her, I had a bunch of hair in my hands. I can’t tell you if I did do it or I didn’t because to me, it’s not real.”
Roudebush said his violent reaction was fueled by the drug spice, a synthetic version of marijuana’s active ingredient tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, which is legal in many states but currently in the Army’s crosshairs.
Already outlawed in 13 states and some foreign countries, including Germany, the Army has launched its own piecemeal crackdown, banning possession of the drug within nine commands.
What follows is one soldier’s story, which Roudebush and his now-fiancée Peyton shared in exclusive interviews with Army Times.
Their hope: that no one else will suffer as they did.
‘Really relaxed, really goofy’
What Bryan Roudebush liked most about Ola Peyton was her patience.
He was home a year from his deployment and at the end of a short-lived marriage. She was a Baltimore transplant, pursuing a marine biology career in Hawaii. They met online in August 2009.
Roudebush, a Dayton, Ohio, native, had deployed to Taji, Iraq, with the 2nd Squadron, 14th Cavalry Regiment, 2nd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 25th Infantry Division. The hypervigilance that had been vital for route surveillance and reconnaissance in the war zone served him poorly in Hawaii.
He was badly stressed.
“When I came back from Iraq, I knew I wasn’t the same person, and I think that was reflected a lot in my marriage, which was brief,” he said. “When I met Ola, it just showed that people could change in a good way. She taught me patience. … I thought I better slow down and regain myself.”
He and Peyton had been dating several months when he first tried spice. On a chaplain-sponsored hike, oddly enough, a battle buddy suggested they hang back and have a smoke.
“I said, ‘What’s spice?’ and he was telling me how it was similar to marijuana and it gave you similar effects as weed, and the cool thing about it was it didn’t show up on a urinalysis test,” he said. “And I said, ‘Yeah.’ “
The pair dropped off the trail and took hits off his friend’s pipe. The herbal mixture gave Roudebush euphoria and an increased appetite reminiscent of the effects of marijuana.
“We got onto the bus shortly afterwards, I popped on my [mp3 player] and I just felt really awesome, like I was relaxed — all the similar effects [to marijuana], nothing like I had on April 2,” said Roudebush. “I thought it was pretty sweet, and I told Ola about it.”
Though Peyton was against it, Roudebush went to a smoke shop in March to buy his own packet of spice and a pipe. He said the two clerks confirmed spice was for smoking despite a warning label to the contrary. Roudebush smoked it with no unintended effects. “There was nothing wrong, nothing happened, it just felt really calm, really relaxed, really goofy,” he said.
A ‘monster’ unleashed
Roudebush remembers little of the night he attacked Peyton, but he recalls sitting in a hospital hours later with no idea how he got there and a small clump of his girlfriend’s hair clinging to his pant leg.
To Peyton, it was all a “horrible dream.”
“April 2, a crazy monster was released for no reason,” she said.
Peyton said after Roudebush returned from smoking spice on the balcony, he was staring blankly, pupils dilated and neck veins bulging.
Peyton was getting up to call 911 when Roudebush pounced on her, knocked her to the ground and began pummeling her head with his fists.
“I was just screaming his name, yelling, ‘No, stop,’ ” she said.
The pair struggled onto the balcony as Roudebush shoved and hit her. Mumbling incoherently, he pushed her upper body over the railing. She thought she was going to die.
She wriggled away and ran back inside, but Roudebush followed and dug his fingers into her eyes.
“It was just one swift motion of him putting his hands on my head and thumbs in my eyes and just pushing,” she said. “It was just one thing after the next. He wasn’t stopping to think.”
Peyton hit back, but Roudebush was undeterred. She made it into the kitchen, but Roudebush caught her and knocked her briefly unconscious. When she awoke, he was yanking out her hair.
Suddenly, he let go. Peyton ran for her life, out of the apartment and to a neighbor’s, where they called the police.
“I was shaking so bad, I couldn’t breathe — it was so horrible,” she said.
Her head and face were cut, bruised and so swollen that Peyton had to squint to identify Roudebush for police. She learned later that her corneas were scratched, though the damage was not permanent.
The bruises that ringed her eyes for weeks were so bad that she was at first embarrassed to leave the house.
Putting back the pieces
In the end, Roudebush’s victim became his chief defender. Today they are engaged.
Peyton was at home in Maryland when Roudebush bailed himself out of jail, called her, and won her forgiveness. They talked every day for a month, she said, “almost like we were getting to know each other again.”
“The whole time I was healing, I still loved him, I still cared about him, and I knew it wasn’t something he intentionally did,” she said. “I knew it wasn’t really him that night. I could see it. I knew it.”
Peyton said Roudebush had never been violent with her before that night. Roudebush and Peyton say they now think that during the attack Roudebush was subconsciously acting out snippets of his conversations from earlier in the day.
The couple had discussed how Roudebush had been beaten in the back of the head as a child, and a scene from the movie “Clash of the Titans,” in which characters tried to destroy a disembodied eye.
“The drug just swirled a lot of things from his past and present together, and made it this horrible dream he thought he was having, but in reality, it was actually going on,” said Peyton.
Back in Hawaii, Peyton defended him in a meeting with prosecutors.
By this time, Roudebush was out of the Army. He said he was given a general discharge under honorable conditions without a court-martial. In July, Lt. Gen. Benjamin R. Mixon, the commanding general of U.S. Army-Pacific, issued a standing order to all soldiers and units under his authority banning the use, possession, distribution and purchase of “certain intoxicating/psychoactive substances of which ‘spice’ is one,” said Loran D. Doane, a spokesman for U.S. Army Garrison-Hawaii.
Hawaii in August made distributing spice a felony punishable by three to five years in prison.
That month, a Honolulu judge accepted Roudebush’s guilty plea to felony first-degree attempted assault, and under a deal with prosecutors, he is expected to be sentenced to five years of probation. A condition of his release was that he remain in good standing with his drug treatment program.
“He’s dealing with issues in his past, and his attitude and the way he deals with things,” Peyton said. “It’s not so much addiction or drugs, but why occasionally he would turn to them. So, facing things.”
As Roudebush and Peyton rebuild their lives, Roudebush said he still has something to contribute to the Army: his story, as a cautionary tale about drugs.
“My dream and ambition is to either get back into the military, or to work with the Army somehow, with young soldiers, either related to drugs or domestic abuse,” he said. “I want people to know our story, that you can turn your life around regardless of how bad your situation is.”
