Spicer Breeden Did All Your Cocaine

“This is the best cocaine ever, I am a fucking BEAST!”

~Spicer Breeden

America has a complex relationship with tragedy.  Everyone likes The Shawshank Redemption, but on it’s opening weekend more people went to see The Little Rascals and The Mask.  We know Shakespeare’s greatest plays were tragedies, but we don’t give a shit because, come on, plays?  We laugh when we see a full grown man get smashed in the groin with a baseball bat, but get pissed off when our lame friend gets all worried and asks, “Is he gonna be able to have kids again?” Tragedy makes us uncomfortable, especially in instances where we see two American flames flicker and extinguish.  We love to highlight all that is American, but we prefer to shield ourselves from the tragedy of Americans.

That is, unless a mountain of cocaine is involved, and then we’re all about that shit.

Fair warning, this article will be like 80% cocaine jokes and 20% glossing over the tragedy of a hit and run death

Such is the story of Spicer Breeden and Greg Lopez.  On the surface, the story is standard and sad.  Breeden, a 36 year old partier with an inherited fortune, was in his car where he was involved with a hit and run on the highway, killing Greg Lopez, a Colorado columnist who just the previous day had proven his awesome Americanness by splitting 40 beers with a friend.   Two days later, Spicer Breeden killed himself in quite the unusual way.

This alone would be an American travesty.  But the story is much more American than just the tragedy.  It is a cautionary tale, for sure, but also a tale of drugs, alcohol, fiscal irresponsibility, insanity, and drugs drugs drugs.

Did we mention drugs?

Spicer Breeden inherited two million dollars from his mother at the age of 13.  His mother’s family, the Boettcher family, was largely responsible for the development of modern day Aspen, Colorado, almost singlehandedly changing it from a mining town to a coke-and-hookers-and-I-guess-you-can-ski-there town.  Breeden’s great-grandfather, Charles Boettcher, fled the Prussian draft at the age of 17 to emigrate to America.  He began working in the Wyoming territory, and by the time he died in 1948, he commanded a Colorado business empire, owning railroads, mines, ranches, factories, mills, a life insurance company, and the region’s most powerful investment house.

As Charles Boettcher neared his 96^th birthday, he told Time Magazine, “I like to work.  I’ve worked hard all my life, and I suppose I’ll keep working as long as I can raise a hand.”

Similarly, as his great-grandson, Spicer “Seriously This is Why You Never Name Your Kid Spicer, What the Fuck Were You Thinking?” Breeden neared his 36^th birthday, he told a chick at a rave, “I like coke.  I’ve been doing coke, and lots of it, all my life, and I suppose I’ll keep snorting it as long as I can still roll up a one hundred dollar bill.”

Spicer Breeden never worked a day in his life.  His normal daily routine involved staying up late drinking and snorting holy-shit-your-body-is-probably-30%-cocaine-at-this-point amounts of coke (think $800-worth in a night), sleeping it off until he could drag himself out of bed, go out to eat at a fancy restaurant, and just press restart on that fucker.  Every day.  Every damn day.  Whenever Spicer Breeden participated in the government census, they had to ship him special forms so he could have the option of checking “Yayo” as his gender.

Spicer Breeden was all about five things- coke, partying, his collection of luxury cars (and subsequently crashing them), his collection of playboy magazines, and coke.  According to court records, Breeden once bragged about driving his Porsche 140 miles per hour, losing control, and “kissing the wall.”  This proves two things, A- Spicer Breeden was insane, and B- apparently court records are occasionally fucking awesome.

But enough about reckless driving, let’s focus on how much coke Spicer Breeden would snort.  If you ever gave Spicer Breeden a drug test, the urine sample would start laughing at you.  Spicer Breeden was the only man to ever know the answer to the question, “How much would it cost to fill up an entire bathtub with cocaine?”  In high school, Spicer Breeden wrote in everyone’s  yearbook, “Have a great summer and, one second…OH MY GOD YES THIS COCAINE IS GLORIOUS I COULD DEVOUR SATAN RIGHT NOW YESSSS.”

To give you an idea of how much Breeden spent on coke and cars, he inherited two million dollars, and by the time of his death, at 36, he only had $500,000 left.  Assuming he started doing coke at the age of 13, when he received his inheritance (probable), that means that he lost over $130,000 every year, even though he owned and leased real estate (or at least had people do it for him).  That’s a lot of coke and cars.

Not like that, but we like where your head’s at

So we come to how, on St. Patrick’s Day, 1996, Spicer “Seriously, That Name Is Retarded” Breeden decided to hang out with a friend, doing shots of vodka, snorting some coke, going out to a club, and on the way back, hitting the SUV of Greg Lopez while going 110 miles per hour in Breeden’s unique (see also, easy to identify) BMW, causing the car to flip over four times.  While most would be concerned about this, and try to contact authorities, Breeden decided, fuck it, sped off, swapped out cars, and then went to a different bar.  Seriously.  AFFotD outside contributers speculate that the conversation between Breeden and his friend, a German named Peter Schmitz.

“Fuck, we might’ve killed that dude.  His SUV rolled, like four times.”

“Dude, don’t harsh my buzz, let’s hit up some bars in LoDo.  There’s probably some sluts out just waitin’ for some dick.”

“Dice.  Let’s just swap out the Beemer for the Audi then.”

When the authorities, obviously, found out that the car in the hit and run was Breeden’s, they came to his house two days later, only to find he had barricaded his mansion, covered the windows, and was watching news coverage of the events outside his house from inside his house.  He then shot himself fatally in the head.

That would be the end of it, a tragic tale, laden with cocaine jokes.

We’re pretty sure that the internet is 50% cocaine jokes at this point

But as it turned out, the tale gets even more fucked up.  The previous night, he did his normal thing.  He got up, did some coke, went out to a steakhouse with Peter Schmitz, went to an all night rave, and passed out.  When he woke up, he decided to do a whole mountain of coke, and start chugging bottles of rum.  By the time they performed the autopsy, his BAC was still .199, though it’s a damn shame he couldn’t have gotten above the Mendoza line.

Not only did he shoot himself in the head, but he decided, fuck it, and shot his dog first (the dog survived, proving that a very drunk, very tweaked 36 year old man really starts to lose his aim when the shot is more than 6 or so inches away).  He then scribbled a new will down saying, “I want everything I have to go to Sydney Stone- houses, jewelwry [sic], stocks, bonds, cloths [sic].  P.S. I was NOT driving the vehical [sic].”  We’d make a joke about the misspellings, except A- we can’t spell for shit ourselves and B- Sydney Stone pointed out to the media that “it’s really mean to make fun of his spelling because he was dyslexic.”

Who is Sydney Stone, you ask?  Well, that’s when things get weird.

Sydney Stone is a former model who was a close figure in Spicer “We Can’t Promise This’ll Be The Last Time We Insult This Prick’s Name” Breeden, and would do his household chores for him and act as a support figure.  We know what you’re thinking, “Oh is that what the kids called it in the 90’s?”

Hell, we wouldn’t blame you for imagining some scenario when he calls Sydney over, goes, “okay, so here’s the plan.  We’re going to do so much Coke, and then chug some rum, and then I’m gonna violently tweak fuck the shit out of you while we watch the news coverage of my house JUST OUTSIDE on the TV, it’ll be like we’re WATCHING each other FUCK without being able to SEE THE FUCKING and GOD I WANT TO HAVE A THREESOME WITH THIS COCAINE IT IS SO GOOD!”

Artist’s Rendition

As it turns out, Sydney Stone was a looks-good-for-her-age 50 year old (in 1996) former model (think “1960’s car shows”) who was working as a seamstress, but befriended Breeden as a sort of maternal figure.  In 1996 she was making 20k a year, so she would not mind getting the money from the “will.”  She fucking carries around a piece of Breeden’s skull.  Seriously.  Prepare yourself for an actual quote that will easily go down as one of the top, “…I did not expect to read a sentence like that ever,” statements of the day.

“Everyone likes to hear about someone rich and good-looking having something bad happen to them.  But he was a human being, and this is part of his head right here.”

Hahaha, what the fuck?  By the way, the dude looked like this.

This looks like a kid who got teased about his coke habits in elementary school.

One interesting wrinkle.  There’s no way to tell if Breeden was driving the car during the hit-and-run, or if his German friend was.  Since the car was only going 110, and Breeden preferred to drive at 140 when tweaking, it’s a fair enough assumption that the German was driving the car.  But, at the same time, when writing his suicide note, he gives all his money to Sydney Stone, and decides, “Man, fuck that German guy” as a P.S.  If he had said, “And I drove the car,” his friend would have been able to get out of jail.  Instead, he goes, “and P.S., fuck you German guy,” just so he could make a foreigner sweat out a lengthy court trial (he was found not guilty, which was followed up with a civil suit).

Things got messy, and by the end of things the will was upheld (you know, basically written on an Applebee’s napkin) and since all of it had blown on coke and cars, the legal struggles dried up the rest of the inheritance.  Which, given that it took about 9 years for the rest of the money to go, is pretty impressive.  Nonstop legal fees for nine years ended up being cheaper than Spicer Breeden’s coke habit.  How about that.