'Agape love' or 'Nightmare'? The rise and fall of the Loris Recovery Ranch

Kim Roesch felt empty and confused when she got the call that her brother had died of a drug overdose at the Recovery Ranch.

The 40-acre compound on Liberty Church Road in rural Horry County was set up by Christa Reynolds and her husband, ostensibly for the purpose of giving drug addicts and alcoholics a safe place to overcome their illness and return to society.

But Paulie Roesch, 41, overdosed there on April 6, 2021, and was later pronounced dead at the hospital, according to a coroner’s report. His death was ruled a drug-induced cardiac arrythmia from narcotics that included methamphetamine and fentanyl. He left behind five children. 

“How are you able to bring [drugs] in?” asked Kim Roesch. “Should you not be searched? … How did he OD at a recovery ranch? I don’t understand that.”

While the ranch marketed itself as a safe place for recovery, former residents and public records tell a different story.

Complaints about the ranch to Horry County police and the state Department of Health and Environmental Control (DHEC) include allegations of elder abuse, poor living conditions and pervasive drug use. Records state that the ranch generated hundreds of 911 calls, housed convicted sex offenders and held residents’ prescribed medication.

Multiple former tenants said that while Reynolds was in charge, they don’t remember seeing her there often. They said a handful of residents called “leaders” handled the day-to-day operations.

Kim Roesch wonders how such a place was allowed to continue operating. In addition to her own children, she’s now raising three of her brother’s kids: his son and twin daughters. She questions whether her brother would be alive if he hadn’t sought help at the ranch.

“I’ll never see that sober side of him and he’ll never see my nephew drive a car… and his twin daughters are amazing,” she said. “I don’t think anybody should be living there. I don’t think that it is a safe environment for anybody.”

Pending in the South Carolina legislature is a bill that would create a voluntary certification program for private recovery centers that, like the Recovery Ranch, are not DHEC-licensed treatment facilities.

“A lot of these places specifically avoid providing or doing certain things that would make them subject to licensure,” said Melissa Westlake, a University of South Carolina doctoral candidate and researcher who studies how states regulate substance use disorder treatment providers within Medicaid. “And so the whole point is kind of to avoid some of this oversight or licensing requirements that might cost them money or kind of restrict their ability to provide this service.”

If the bill becomes law, it would amount to a state endorsement of recovery houses that adhere to standards laid out by the National Alliance Recovery Residences.

The state affiliate, the South Carolina Alliance for Recovery Residences, already certifies houses around the state that offer their services to people living in recovery here. Only one facility in Horry County is on the list: Myrtle Beach Recovery. The ranch is not included.

“It’s really unfortunate that over the years we’ve heard a lot of stories and seen a lot of residences that have marketed themselves as being helpful places for people to heal and recover and yet the practices that we hear that they engage in are actually more harmful than helpful,” said South Carolina Department of Alcohol and Other Drug Abuse Services (DAODAS) Director Sarah Goldsby, whose agency would oversee the proposed program. 

Goldsby said she could speak generally about complaints her office has received regarding unlicensed recovery centers. She declined to comment specifically about the Recovery Ranch. 

“We get a lot of reports from residences and from family members that some of these locations are really unsafe," she said. "Some of the practices in these locations are exploitative of the residences and actually introduce harm under the guise of being a helpful entity.”

The bill was modeled after similar legislation in Florida and was a recommendation of the state House Opioid Abuse Prevention Study Committee. It was introduced last year by state Rep. Russell Fry, R-Surfside Beach, who chaired the committee and worked on the bill in consultation with DAODAS.

“Everyone starts a recovery center with the best of intentions,” Fry said. “Good intentions sometimes don’t get the job done. You, as an example, can open up a recovery residence, and without adequate training or resources or help, even advice, sometimes the very thing you’re trying to help protect against happens in your recovery residence.”

While the program would be voluntary, it would offer a state-level endorsement of reputable recovery houses for those interested in providing philanthropic support and it also prevents any state agency, employee, state vendor or state contractor from referring a person to a recovery house that’s not certified.

But the bill can't become law until at least next year, if ever. It’s never even received a hearing. Fry said sometimes it takes a couple of years for a bill to reach the governor’s desk.

“The legislative session is pretty much over,” Goldsby added. “We expect this bill to be reintroduced in the next session, beginning in January. So that legislative session will be two years. We do hope that it moves forward again to pass as law.”

The Recovery Ranch's Loris-area operation shut down last year after the 15th Circuit Solicitor’s Office retained a special prosecutor to file a nuisance action against the ranch. 

But the laws that allowed it to operate for years with no oversight haven’t changed.

*****

In August 2021, the ranch was bustling with residents getting ready for an attempt to move the operation to Dillon County.

On a sunny Tuesday morning, Reynolds pulled up to the ranch property in her truck, a cream-colored Dodge Ram pickup with dually wheels in the back, to supervise preparations for a move. 

At the time, she said she was planning to send a majority of the remaining residents to a new trailer park farther inland that would be supervised by a husband-and-wife team while keeping around dozen folks at the Loris location, where she lived in a single-family home with a white picket fence and screened-in porch next to the ranch. 

The ranch used to be much busier.

Reynolds said county officials came to the property about a month before and forced her to cut power to seven of the makeshift residences scattered around the property. She said she made dozens of people leave the compound, cutting the population from around 65 down to around 25.

“It just kind of worked itself out. It was the craziest thing,” Christa Reynolds said. “They came out on a Friday, said ‘We’re gonna cut power to seven residences on Monday at 10 a.m.’ and we had 35 people relocated by from a Friday to a Monday.”

Of those forced out, Christa Reynolds said about 60% of them went to stay with family, 17 of them were sent to a homeless shelter and “the rest of them probably went back to the streets, or jail.”

“I’m just at a point in my life where I’m not gonna, I’m just not gonna fight ‘em,” Reynolds added. “A) I’d never win. I’m smart enough to know that. And B) they don’t have to like me but at the end of the day we need to support something that matters, because it’s about the addict.”

In the back of the complex, two deconstructed modular homes succumbed to a crackling inferno. The large blaze of dancing flames sent a beacon of black smoke into the clear summer sky, visible for miles.

Rather than move or repair the structures for use later, the ranch’s leaders burned them down.

“It’s bittersweet because it used to house probably close to 10 people. Maybe four in one, and five in another,” Christa Reynolds said at the time. But for her, trying to move the mobile homes to Dillon wasn’t worth the effort. “They weren’t even safe, honestly, at that point to move, from a financial perspective, and the condition they were left in. It made sense.”

Lisa Hess arrived around the time of the downsizing. While some tenants helped with preparations for Dillon, she had draped herself over a stained, sheetless mattress outfitted with only a pillow, a blanket and a large teddy bear inside a small rust-red trailer, just one of several improvised living spaces scattered around the ranch property.

All the doors were open to let in the breeze. Flies buzzed around the dimly-lit living quarters, circling a tepid cup of coffee and a half-burned cigarette on a chair near Hess’ bed. A gentle draft offered the only reprieve from the summer heat.

Hess, who’d been at the ranch for about a month to escape homelessness, couldn’t give her exact age. First, she said she was 54 years old. Or 53. “I was born in ’58,” she recalled.

She didn’t want to move from her bed. She was grieving the loss of her daughter, who had also served a stint at the ranch while battling a substance use disorder, Hess and Christa Reynolds said, but she didn’t die there.

Reynolds stepped into her trailer. 

“It actually feels decent in here, y’all,” she said. “Smells a little.”

Hess looked up at Reynolds. “I’ll tell you what you need, Christa, you need an awning on top of that door over there, because every time it rains, it comes in the floor."

“That’d be really easy to do,” Reynolds said. “An awning?”

“And another one there,” Hess pointed. “Christa’s a sweetie."

At the time, Hess’ trailer was one of three remaining permitted structures on the property, Reynolds said. Horry County took her to court six times last year for various code enforcement and zoning issues, including unpermitted housing units, according to online court records. 

Still, three long power cords hung out of the window of one of the remaining structures.

“I don’t need to know where the drop cords are going at, but we had a lot of weed-eating, electric weed-eating going on, we’ve got rakes going on,” she said, touring through the complex. “So today, basically, they were supposed to get a store run. And I said ‘We’re not doing anything until this place gets from a two to a five on a Richter scale.’”

Walking down a dirt road towards a clearing in the back of the property, Reynolds began yelling at a lanky man loitering near an idling tractor trailer. 

“Go. What you’re doing’s wrong,” she snapped at him.

“He’s being evicted. He brought drugs on the property,” she explained. “When they bring drugs on property, it’s not safe. It’s not safe at all. We had to Narcan him three times two weeks ago to bring him back to life.”

Reynolds, who worked in real estate before opening the ranch, described her facility as “a sober living community." 

"We’re not a halfway house and we’re not a facility treatment,” she said, “but somewhere in the middle, we’re so much more.”

Residents at the ranch were asked for $500 per month for the program, Reynolds said. Those who couldn’t pay could go work at local restaurants and Reynolds said she would take a cut of their pay for rent. The ranch also held fundraisers to generate donations. 

The program at the ranch included two meals and several group meetings per day, with a morning meditation and weekly trips to Celebrate Recovery, a faith-based recovery program that hosts meetings at various Christian churches. Some mental health professionals would come out on Mondays Reynolds said, and a husband-and-wife counseling duo also made a few trips per week.

Christa Reynolds is not a medical professional. The ranch had no nurses, doctors or counselors on staff. But Reynolds saw her work as important while serving people who often didn’t have the resources to get professional help.

“We do drugs, alcohol, bipolar, schizophrenic, so some mental health illnesses; and I love dual diagnoses,” Christa Reynolds said, describing someone who’s battling both a mental health issue and substance use disorder. “Really, I say, Agape love. What’s your mission statement? And I just say Agape love. Love covers everything.”

In three years of operating, the ranch was frequently the subject of friendly local newscasts and favorable newspaper write-ups, occasionally driven by some sort of fundraising effort. But neighbors and former tenants insist not everything was as lovely as those portrayals.

“Christa, she knows how to operate the system,” said Dewey Vaught, a neighbor who lives near the ranch on Liberty Church Road. “For the TV, she knows how to come across.”

Christa Reynolds was initially welcoming when contacted by MyHorryNews.com about the ranch, even allowing a reporter and photographer on the property in August 2021. But after a reporter began asking her about drug use on the property, she asked them to leave the compound.

She did not respond to emails and phone calls in attempts to reach her for comment in the months following the visit.

*****

The Recovery Ranch traces its origins back to Harriet’s House, an operation that Christa Reynolds and her husband Richard Reynolds ran out of the Crystal Lakes mobile home park just south of Myrtle Beach. 

Named after Christa Reynolds’ mother, Harriet’s House was initially set up for women recovering from alcoholism, and it later expanded to serve men as well. The couple had bought the property in Loris as a place to keep their horses, but when they started running out of room for the male clients, Christa Reynolds began letting the men stay at the ranch where they could live in a camper and help out around the property. 

Legally, the organization was called Harriet’s House, though Christa had promoted it as the Recovery Ranch since 2018.

Over the years, the ranch morphed from a place for people struggling with alcoholism into a place that was willing to take anyone, including drug-addicts, mental health patients, those in hospice care and those who, if not for the ranch, would have nowhere to go but the streets or the woods. 

But as the ranch’s mission and population grew, so did the problems. 

Richard Reynolds helped his wife launch the organization but was disaffiliated with it by last summer. He said the place started with a noble goal, but the un-permitted building expansions landed the operation in hot water with Horry County code enforcement. He said the drug addicts, alcoholics and mental health patients had trouble peacefully coexisting, resulting in day after day of police and fire department visits. And some clients who got kicked out for substance abuse were allowed to return. 

“I’m all for second chances, but I drew the line when somebody relapsed,” Richard Reynolds said. “I always said, ‘If you’re gonna relapse, relapse. There’s people here trying to get help. Just leave the property.’ The issue that I had was people that would bring drugs or alcohol on the property. I had no tolerance for that. And then [Christa Reynolds] would let them come back. We would argue and fight over the people she was allowing to come back. That’s when I said ‘Listen, I’m not gonna do it anymore, I’m gonna try to find something else to do,’ and that’s when I became uninvolved.”

Richard Reynolds said conflict at the ranch also caused more and more ranch residents to call 911, even if there was nothing the police could do to resolve the issues. 

“It’s put a stress on their 911 calls, which makes sense, I’m not discounting it at all,” said Christa Reynolds, who put much of the blame for the calls on one resident who “would call 911 like he was calling his mom.”

From January 2020 through mid-August of 2021, the county received 250 emergency calls to respond to addresses on the ranch’s property, according to county records received in response to a public records request. Not all of those calls came from residents or neighbors, said a county spokesperson. Some of the calls were to assist another agency that had already responded.

“Christa has a big heart and she just doesn’t say no,” Richard Reynolds said. “That’s why the county got involved. People call 911 all the time. The police, EMS, fire department, they’re out there when I was living there pretty much every day. It got really cumbersome. Most of the time, 90% of the time, they didn’t even need to come. And a lot of those calls are from the mentally ill people feeling threatened.”

Many of the police reports from the ranch dating back to the start of 2020 show officers responded to the property for fighting, but multiple police reports show that officers wouldn’t arrest anyone because the victims wouldn’t cooperate or press charges, and those involved were occasionally intoxicated or would tell conflicting stories about what occurred.

DHEC, too, said its hands were tied, unable to deal with complaints at the property because the ranch didn’t fall under the agency’s purview; specifically, the ranch did not call itself a treatment facility. Residential treatment facilities are not allowed to operate without a license, according to state regulations.

“If DHEC receives a complaint or other information indicating a facility is providing services to ‘chemically dependent or addicted persons’ based on an individual treatment plan without a license, we would investigate their operations and take appropriate action,” DHEC spokesman Derrek Asberry said in an email, noting the Recovery Ranch had made it clear on its website that it was not a treatment facility.

A February 2021 complaint to DHEC alleged the Recovery Ranch “has ongoing illegal dumping and trash burning… and is very dirty and unsanitary. There is ongoing drug use here and manufacture of drugs, drug sales and prostitution. The owner takes people’s money and doesn’t properly supervise the clients.”

Kevin Grainger, who lives near the ranch and owns property adjacent to the ranch, said he and his neighbors started seeing needles littering the side of the road after the program settled there in 2018. 

“We never found them until they went up there,” he said. “I’ve been staying here since ’96, never had a problem with that.”

The February 2021 complaint to DHEC specifically cited concerns for the safety of “the elderly clients and others that are too mentally handicapped to assert their rights,” and asked for “a thorough investigation” of the ranch. 

Ashley Hucks, who stayed at the ranch to treat a substance use disorder, doesn’t believe elderly people should have stayed on the property. It was a place where “patients run the hospital,” she said.

“They need assisted living care,” Hucks explained. “She was letting residents, as their chores, take care of them, and not everybody’s experienced in that type of thing. They don’t know what to do. They needed more attention than what they were getting.”

People who stayed on the property were often assigned work around the property. 

Amber Jordan, who lived at the ranch last year, said she was given the job of taking care of the ranch’s older residents and upon arriving found one man living in filth.

“When I went out there, I found him in absolute, just disgusting conditions,” she said. “Urine, feces, roaches, no supplies, nothing. All of his clothes were urine-soaked, no clean clothes, nothing. While I was there, I did my best to get him cleaned up.”

Jordan said she originally came to the Grand Strand to stay with a friend in recovery. But after he went back to using and eventually died, she needed a place to stay and went to the ranch, thinking she would be able to help people. She left in April 2021. 

“I thought it was a gift from God really,” Jordan said, “like ‘I’m gonna be able to do this,’ but it ended up being an absolute nightmare.”

DHEC didn’t investigate the February 2021 complaint “because the allegations were not within DHEC's regulatory authority,” Asberry said in an email. “Specifically, the allegations of the complaint did not describe services of an unlicensed ‘facility for chemically dependent or addicted persons.’”

“Unfortunately, right now, there’s really no authority or oversight over these entities at all,” Goldsby said. “The best we can do is to encourage whistleblowers to call the authorities, to call local law enforcement, and local law enforcement has to be the first line, because you have to have evidence and substantiate the claim.”

The problem, though, is that “it is incredibly difficult for people who are in such a vulnerable place without money, without housing, in a fragile state of just coming out of active addiction to be a whistleblower,” she said. “It’s almost impossible.”

Sometimes, people from unlicensed recovery facilities around the state call DAODAS to complain about the conditions of the places where they’re staying. The complaints are usually made via phone call. 

“We’ve heard everything from ‘This is an unsafe environment that is not homelike,’ to ‘The owners and operators are trading substances for sex with the residents’ and everything in between,” Goldsby said, again speaking generally and not specifically about the Recovery Ranch. “When we hear these reports, we beg the callers to call the local law enforcement to investigate their claim. But until we have that evidence and until we have that investigation, the state has no authority to intervene; we have no authority or oversight.”

In February of 2020, Horry County police received a call from someone alleging elder abuse at the ranch. “Man living on kitchen floor and roaches are crawling,” state the call for service notes, which were obtained from the county through a public records request.

The records show that someone told county responders that the allegations were not true. A county spokeswoman declined to answer specific questions about the call or why police didn’t investigate any further into the claims.

Roxanne Milano went to the ranch last year when she was on the verge of homelessness. She had been forced to leave the house she had shared with her mother, who had just passed away. With nowhere else to go, a friend suggested the ranch. She said some of the people who stayed there should have been in assisted care facilities.

"They’re not with it mentally and physically, and crap on themselves, and they can’t walk, they only shuffle along so we know that there’s cognitive problems,” Milano said last year. “And they need to be in a nursing home and they are not at all properly cared for. The only way the other residents know how to deal with them is fuss at them and yell at them, which of course does not help. And I witnessed that myself.”

DHEC received yet another complaint about the Recovery Ranch in May 2021 that claimed the ranch was “under served by a water source and septic source,” and that “the facility holds and distributed controlled substances and all client medicine including suboxone. Ms. Reynolds allows repeat offenders including sex offenders, drug dealers and violent felons on the property.”

According to the Horry County Sheriff’s Office’s sex offender registry, as of early November 2021, three convicted sex offenders had listed the ranch’s address as their home address.

Bobby Brazell, who runs the Midlands Recovery Center in Lexington and has years of experience helping the state’s population of addicts in recovery, said operations like the Recovery Ranch make the recovery community look bad.

“We already fight against stigma already, and places like that don’t help,” he said. “Now if they marketed themselves as housing first, or a homeless shelter, or something like that, then they can basically do their appropriate paperwork and market themselves appropriately. But to basically market themselves and get news coverage saying that they’re this great recovery ranch where people thrive is just ridiculous.”

*****

Ashley Hucks and her husband Adam went to the ranch in December of 2020. Ashley Hucks had just gotten out of the hospital and was withdrawing. Her aunt suggested the ranch.

“She’d mentioned the Recovery Ranch before,” Hucks said, “And I just never went. So I don’t know if she found it through Facebook, ‘cause I can’t imagine someone would have told her, ‘Hey, this is a great place to go.’”

When they arrived, the leaders took the medicine they’d been prescribed. It was standard procedure for residents to give up their Suboxone and other prescribed drugs.

According to an Horry County police report from February 2020, officers were called to the ranch for a report of found property: boxes and bottles of Suboxone, a federally controlled substance for treating opioid addiction that requires a prescription.

Several residents had failed a drug test administered by ranch leaders, according to the police report, and those who failed had recently obtained Suboxone from the boyfriend of one of the ranch’s leaders. 

The report said the leader found the Suboxone in a tent on the property that she shared with her boyfriend and brought it to the ranch's owners.

The owners told a responding officer that “all medication had to be stored in a safe inside the office,” according to the police report, which noted that one of the ranch's owners “became very confrontational” with an officer who “asked how they gained possession of the suboxone.” The report was redacted and didn't identify which owner became confrontational.

The report said the officers left the Suboxone with a ranch owner, who agreed to keep it in a safe in the office.

In a police report from October 2020, officers responded to a man walking naked down Liberty Church Road in nothing but shoes and a baseball cap. When officers responded, the man told them that “the complainant had been giving him medication that was prescribed to other people.” 

Responding to questions about these reports, a county spokeswoman said the police department “does not offer commentary on the handling of specific cases" but added that “the officers followed the proper protocols and procedures.”

Speaking generally, 15th Circuit Solicitor Jimmy Richardson said it’s illegal to possess a federally-controlled substance like Suboxone without a prescription.

“It is illegal to possess Suboxone without a prescription unless you’re a pharmacy. It’s at least possession,” Richardson said while pointing out that it might be tough for a jury to convict someone for holding another person’s medicine if the person who had been prescribed the medication had requested it.

“That would be a real tough thing for us to be able to prove in front of a jury that I had done something wrong if I was holding your medicine and you had asked me to hold it for you,” Richardson said. “By statute, it’s illegal. But it would be illegal for me to have it to begin with, without a reason.” 

Christa Reynolds was never charged with any drug offenses.

When Paulie Roesch overdosed and died at the ranch, police visited the compound and told the ranch leadership they couldn’t take people’s medication anymore, according to multiple former tenants. 

A police report shows Horry County’s criminal investigations division visited the ranch for an overdose death the day Roesch died. 

Christa Reynolds confirmed that law enforcement told her she couldn’t hold other people’s medication.

“Horry County police — these two detective women told me that basically what I was doing was not allowed and was illegal,” Reynolds said. “But you know what, it’s really worked out. Which has been a blessing because at the end of the day, we want them to be able to get out in the real world and do real world things, and that would include having to take their own medicine on their own and not manipulate it and take it like it’s instructed to be taken.”

She demurred when asked whether the ranch doled out medicine to those without a prescription. “I’m not aware of that,” she replied.

In late March 2021, Hucks said she and her husband Adam had been having relationship problems and Adam left the ranch on March 22 to stay with his family. That’s when one of the ranch leaders took her phone away, according to Hucks, Milano and Jordan.

Hucks said she was told the ranch leadership wanted her to figure out what she wanted without any distraction from Adam.

Hucks called Adam to let him know they would be taking her phone, and he told her that he’d been messaging drug dealers all day. “I told him, I was like, ‘Just don’t do anything stupid, we’ll talk about this when I get my phone back.’ And then they took my phone.”

Later, Hucks was able to use another phone to talk to Adam, she and Reynolds said, but Hucks didn't have access to her own phone.

"She had just come back from being on the streets," Reynolds said. "She would have come back for the second time. So you put your phone up. And after 11 your phones are supposed to be shut off anyways. It's a tragic accident. I'm not gonna get into specifics on somebody else's tragic accident."

When Hucks finally got her phone back, it was filled with messages from her husband. It was too late to respond.

“I didn’t even know he died,” she said. “I didn’t find out until the next morning. I turned my phone on, I had a bunch of messages from him; he didn’t want to feel like this anymore, he just wanted to numb himself again. And some of it was me.”

Adam Hucks died of a drug overdose on March 22, 2021. He was 32 years old. Coroner records said he had recently gotten back from the Recovery Ranch.

“I don’t hold it against the girl who took my phone,” she said. “She was just doing what she was told. But … if I had my phone, he’d probably be OK right now. But I don’t know that for sure. He still could have done it even if I talked to him.”

Reynolds also said police told her to stop taking residents’ phones. “That was another thing the police officers said we could not do; hold phones, because we don’t have a house phone.”

Licensed residential treatment facilities generally prescribe medicine and hold it for patients, said Westlake, the University of South Carolina doctoral candidate and researcher. But organizations’ ability to dole out meds comes down to having the proper licensing, which the ranch never had.

“If they’re not going to seek out the licensure to provide this treatment and then have the people on staff that they need to provide treatment, then they also can’t do some of these things like hold onto people’s medication and distribute medication because they wouldn’t be licensed to do so,” Westlake said.

But not every recovery residence skirts the rules or causes problems.

“What everybody needs to know is there are many locations where people are living together in sobriety where it’s a healthy and strong environment,” said Goldsby, citing The Oxford House as an example. “People are raising families, going to work and just living with other residents that support their daily success in life. There are so many locations around the state that are doing excellent work and the right thing. And those places are not a threat to any neighborhood.”

*****

Growing up, Paulie Roesch loved football and crabbing, but he spent much of his life battling addiction, said his sister, Kim Roesch.

“Paulie was like a gypsy, he traveled often. He made his way around the states. My brother was not perfect. He had a heart of gold, but he couldn’t get his stuff together.”

Paulie bounced around the country, landing in Myrtle Beach about five years ago. At the time, he was sober, his sister said, but he eventually lost his sobriety and started a relationship with a woman named Kelly Weaver who he met in the area. He went to the Recovery Ranch for the first time in 2018.

“He might have stolen from someone because that was the way that he needed to live, and it’s sad to say that’s the choices that he made,” Kim Roesch said. “But at the end of the day, even if Paulie stole $20 from me and then he saw somebody on the street that was doing worse than him, he would give them that money. It doesn’t make what he did right, but that’s who my brother was. He wanted to help others but never help himself, and he tried, but it just didn’t work.”

Weaver, Paulie Roesch’s partner before he died, described him as a hard worker.

“[Paulie] built the chicken coop, he helped build the barn, put up the fence for the horses. He helped put electricity in the house; he did a lot of work at the ranch. Helped set up the trailer” Weaver said. “He was well-liked and well-respected, and they all looked up to him.”

Despite what happened to Paulie Roesch, Weaver said she had a positive experience at the ranch, as did Matthew Langston, her boyfriend.

Weaver said she had tried other recovery centers and hadn’t found relief. But she found success at the ranch both in the structure and daily meetings and in her freedom to come and go as she wanted, as long as she had an accountability partner and permission from the leaders.

“I would be dead right now if it wasn’t for the ranch,” she said. “I left the ranch for a small period of time and I went back out and got high and ended up back in the hospital, and they came and picked me up from the hospital and brought me back home.”

In her view, the ranch was a place of fellowship, where residents learned how to take care of themselves in order to re-enter society. She blamed the poor living conditions on the county’s strict rules on which units could have water and electric service.

“You had everything you needed,” she said. “Clothing, bathing essentials. Anything and everything you could think of was there. All you had to do was get off your lazy duff and go do it.”

Langston arrived at the ranch in April 2021. At the time, the former opioid addict said he was homeless and “bankrupt in every way possible.” He, too, had been to treatment before, he said, but never found what he needed and credits Christa Reynolds and the ranch for helping him stay clean for longer than he ever did during his time as an addict.

“The ranch actually saved my life, it really, really did,” Langston said. “I will forever give the ranch credit and gratitude for saving my life. She reached out when she knew I was homeless, I was a drug addict, and she gave me a place to stay when even my family wouldn’t give me a place to stay.”

At the ranch, Langston said he found understanding from Christa Reynolds, who was familiar with what he called the “ins and outs” of addiction and sobriety.

“Some things I want people to know is the ranch is what you get out of the ranch,” he said. “It’s what you want out of the ranch. I went to the ranch and could have went south or could have went north. Luckily, I went north. She allows anyone to come through those doors. She doesn’t give up on anyone. That’s something I’ve never seen before at other treatment facilities.”

In August 2021, Weaver and Langston left the ranch, fearing Horry County officials would force it to close.  

“All they’re doing by closing that place down is putting people in their grave,” Weaver said. “If they don’t have insurance and they don’t have any money, they can’t go anywhere. They go right back on the street and that’s why they end up dead. Because there isn’t another recovery place that I can think of that will let you come in with no money. She’s the only one I know of.” 

In a county where affordable housing is difficult to find, a place like the ranch is a step up from cold nights under bridges or bushes.

“And if you are sleeping on the street, you also have the risk of being arrested and getting a criminal record,” said Stephanie Southworth, a senior lecturer of sociology at Coastal Carolina University who studies the homeless population in Myrtle Beach. 

“There literally is no place for homeless people to go here,” Southworth said. “The shelter; there aren’t enough beds for all these people, and we have a society or a city that criminalizes being homeless, or at least everything that you do when you’re homeless. So I can see why they would go to the Recovery Ranch.” 

Those recovering from addiction without means are also vulnerable.

“It’s that critical time, and especially for particular people who don’t have a lot of assets or what we call recovery capital, where they really are subject to seeking support from anyone and any entity that looks like a helping hand,” Goldsby said. “And that vulnerability just leads to the potential for exploitation.”

That type of exploitation ran rampant in Florida, where treatment facilities would skirt state licensing requirements by charging for rent and urine screens but without licensed mental health providers or nurses or physicians on staff, Westlake said. “They just say they offer a living environment for people to come with other like-minded people in their recovery journey.”

South Carolina’s problem isn’t as bad as Florida’s, Goldsby said, “but we know that we do have some bad apples in the state, and we want to protect our state from seeing that type of exploitation happen.”

The bill that has yet to pass in the South Carolina legislature “is really a way to address what is possibly going on but also be a preventative and not allow our state to become a place where these businesses set up shop.”

*****

The Recovery Ranch is now just a glowing ember of its former fiery self, leaving behind a legacy of recovery for some and smoldering anger in others. Some of the structures have been taken down and it’s no longer teeming with tenants.

In a statement, Solicitor Richardson said he stopped pursuing a nuisance action because the ranch agreed to wind down operations in Loris. The 15th Judicial Circuit does not include Dillon County, meaning that the ranch could potentially operate there if Reynolds chooses to set up another recovery facility.

“Records show that a meeting was held in July [2021] to see if the complaints could be remedied without civil action,” Richardson said in a statement. “Agreements to abate the potential nuisance have been successful in reducing the complaints and law enforcement interactions to the degree that the State has no current plans to proceed with civil remedies. If anything changes with the property, we may reconsider future action.”