He landed in Williston, N.D., where he lived in a car in a Wal-Mart parking lot for weeks, eventually getting hired as an oil roughneck. Turco worked 90 hours a week, earning nearly six figures, and said it was the best thing he'd done in his life.

"I'm finally living an adult lifestyle," Turco, then 24, said in March 2013, "instead of a teenage dropout lifestyle."

But the floor dropped out from under Turco in the middle of 2014, when an oil glut led to a plunge in gas prices that delighted drivers but indirectly put an estimated 250,000 global oil and gas employees out of work, including Turco. He returned home to the Midwest and self-destructed.

A few minutes before dinner on Oct. 5, his mother found him in his bedroom dead of a heroin overdose.