HE AWOKE TO the blast of the front door flying off its hinges, and Demaryius Thomas peeked out his bedroom window and saw six unmarked cars and a dozen police officers with their guns drawn. A pack of drug dogs roamed the front yard. The spotlight from a police cruiser cut through the predawn darkness of rural Montrose, Georgia, and shined into his single-story house. "Don't move!" Thomas remembers hearing one of the officers yell, so he ducked back into bed and hid under the sheets.

He was 11 years old on that March morning in 1999, but he already knew enough to understand what these policemen had come looking for. He already knew they would find it.

An officer in black tactical gear entered his room without knocking, pulled him from bed and led him to the kitchen table, where the rest of his family was already waiting. During the many lonely milestones still to come in Thomas' life -- at the NFL draft, the Pro Bowl, the Super Bowl -- he would think back to this moment and remember it as the last time his family sat together: his stepfather, cursing, blood running down his face from a cut suffered during the chaos of the raid; his 3-year-old sister, hysterically crying; his 9-year-old sister, shivering in her pajamas; and his mother, Katina Smith, seated in her chair, praying and sobbing and swearing that she had done nothing wrong.

They sat at the table for an hour as the police officers searched through their house. The dogs paced across the backyard where Thomas had just started learning to play football. Officers inspected his basketball uniforms and his trophies and tore open the cases of his video games. Finally their search led them to a closet in the master bedroom, where they found a purple coat with hot-pink lining. Inside one pocket were two gigantic rolls of cash: 30 $100 bills and more than 60 $20 bills, totaling more than $5,000.

"It's just my tax refund," Smith said, but her son and the agents knew better.

The officers placed Smith under arrest just as the school bus turned up the dirt driveway toward the house. Thomas begged to stay home from his junior high school -- to go hide again in his bedroom -- but his mother wouldn't let him. Instead, she asked the officers for a favor: Could she walk her son to the school bus, like she did every morning? "Please, you don't have to do that," Thomas said, trying to dissuade her, but by then he was already being led down the driveway. His mother walked next to him, her hands cuffed behind her back, as six officers trailed behind.

Years later, as a wide receiver for the Denver Broncos, Thomas would consent to a routine appointment with a professional sports psychologist who wanted to talk about defining moments. What were the memories he drew on when the pressure became suffocating? Was it catching Peyton Manning's first touchdown pass as a Bronco? Scoring a game-winning touchdown in the 2012 playoffs?

"I don't really think about any of those things," Thomas remembers telling the psychologist. He instead told the story of March 15, 1999: The door kicked down. The drug dogs everywhere. His mother in handcuffs. And now the school bus waiting in the driveway for a shy sixth-grader in Montrose, population 154, where it suddenly seemed as if everyone were watching his life come apart. That was fear. That was pressure. That was the defining moment. "The worst bus ride of anyone's life," Thomas said.

He tried not to cry that morning as his mother walked him to the door of the bus. She told him she loved him, and he waved to her as the bus rolled away. The other children fixed their eyes on him. They cleared their legs from the aisle to make room for him to pass. He walked to a seat near the back and sank into the green vinyl.

The bus was silent. The two-mile ride stretched on forever. When they pulled up to school, Thomas was the first student to speak.

"Don't any of you dare say nothing," he said.

BAY-BAY, OR Mama's Boy, is what his classmates had called him up until that day, and those nicknames didn't bother him because they were true. Smith was only 16 when her son was born, and by then Thomas' father was already away at basic military training and then off to Saudi Arabia. Smith dropped out of high school, and for the first several years she shared a bed with her son in a single-wide trailer near Montrose. They lived out in the vast nothingness of central Georgia, in a field of pines located 40 minutes from the nearest grocery store, in Macon. They had no car and had to rely on rides from family members. There were no neighbors. They stayed together in the trailer and played.

"For as long back as I can remember, she was pretty much the only person I felt like I knew," Thomas says. "Nobody was closer to their mom than me."

Their biggest problem was money: They never had it, and sometimes Smith fell behind on the gas bill or rent and had to borrow from relatives who were also in debt. She turned 18 and got a job pressing the tags onto shirts at a fabric factory -- 50 shirts coming down the line each hour, 400 shirts each day. She broke off the relationship with Thomas' father and married a co-worker, and they moved farther out into the woods, into a double-wide on two acres. They had two daughters, but Smith continued to spend most of her time with Thomas because he made all of her interests into his own. Mini-me, she called him. She liked to run, so he sprinted with her down the gravel road. She liked music, so he taught himself to play tuba. She liked to drive, so she taught him to drive too, even though he was only 11. They would race each other in the open field behind the house -- she'd drive the stick shift in an old Bronco and he'd drive the Accord. She never once let him win. "You have to earn it," she said, and so he turned into a competitor to please her. He signed up for a basketball team, and she used the machines at the fabric factory to iron his number onto one of her T-shirts. She wore it to games and paid him $5 for every 3-pointer he made.

Whenever his mother was away -- working late at the factory or visiting friends for the weekend -- Thomas went to his grandmother's home, a beige single-wide five miles down the road. Minnie Pearl was the family matriarch, the best cook, and she hosted Sunday dinners and demanded everyone attend church. She considered herself a provider, and she tried to lend her children money and give her grandchildren a weekly allowance, but instead she was usually broke, stuck in the trailer with a car she couldn't afford to fix. She had two adult children of her own still living with her in the trailer, including a son with mental disabilities, so when Thomas stayed over he slept on a couch in the living room. He could see everything from there. He noticed strangers coming and going. It confused him. After some nights, he went home to his mother's house and greeted her with a wave of questions.

What was that stuff always cooking in the kitchen at his grandmother's, white chunks in a pot that smelled of burning plastic?

Who were all those people coming and going from the trailer, a dozen or more each day -- "visitors," his grandmother called them, even though they came with crumpled twenties and never stayed for more than a few minutes?

Why was his grandmother sometimes leaving the house in the early hours, driving off at 3 in the morning? And why did he sometimes hear his mother's voice too out there in the dark in the middle of the night, talking about money?

One day, when he was 9, he came home from one of those visits and sought out his mother. "I think something bad is happening," he remembers telling her.

"Mind your own business," she told him. "You're probably dreaming. It's nothing."

But his mother started increasing her hours at work, and Thomas started spending more time at his grandmother's trailer, and before long he was old enough to see for himself and begin solving the mysteries. That was crack cocaine cooking on the stove. Those were scales used to measure it. These were drug users who kept coming into the trailer and then disappearing into the abandoned red gas station next door, emerging a few minutes later with glassy eyes and thousand-yard stares. That was his mother coming and going with her pockets full of money, giving it to Pearl or taking it from her, acting like the bank. And that was the cash from a drug operation sometimes lying around his mother's house because she was helping hide the profits.

Soon more customers were coming to Pearl's house, and the business was growing, and suddenly his grandmother's hair was always done up like she was ready for a wedding. Instead of eating Sunday dinners at the trailer, they now all drove 50 miles to Ryan's restaurant in Macon, where Thomas no longer had to order off the children's menu and where for the first time since he could remember no one in his family worried about the bill.

In the winter of 1998-99, Thomas approached his mother again, more insistent this time. "Grandma is dealing drugs, and you're helping her," he said. "Something bad is going to happen. They're going to take you away."

"It's fine," she told him. "I'm not doing anything. Stop worrying."

"I don't believe you," he said, and a few months later he awoke to the raid.

RIGHT AWAY, THE prosecutors offered Smith a plea bargain, and her lawyer told her to take it. "This is a no-brainer," Smith remembers her lawyer, Elizabeth Lane, telling her. Lane explained that if Smith took the plea and admitted to her role in the drug ring, she would get only four years in prison. But if she didn't take it and was found guilty of conspiring to distribute drugs, she'd get at minimum a 20-year sentence. The only stipulation of the plea, Smith remembers, was that she would need to testify against her mother, Minnie Pearl, whom prosecutors called the "hub" of the operation, who had two prior drug offenses on her record and whom everyone else was already testifying against anyway. Pearl's cousin had taken the plea. Pearl's live-in boyfriend, a reverend, and a drug runner, had taken the plea. Her distributor, her lookout man and her handyman had all taken deals too. Now all that was left was one more plea deal, for the daughter who had become Pearl's accountant and banker.

"Just do it. Say what you gotta say against me and move on," Minnie Pearl told her daughter. "There's no point in both of us going away forever. That's just being stubborn and stupid."

"No way," Smith said. "I can't testify against you."

"Don't throw your life away," Minnie Pearl said. "You can still see your children grow up. You might be home before Demaryius is even in high school."

"No," Smith said. "How could I turn on you?"

Smith had always felt as close to her own mother as Thomas felt to her. Minnie Pearl had raised her children alone, after her husband gambled away the family's money and left them stranded with no savings in a mobile home in central Georgia. Pearl had worked two jobs.

She had taken the midnight shift. She had started dealing drugs, she says, mostly because she wanted to better provide. "You did this with family in mind," Smith told Pearl. "So what kind of backstabber does that make me if I can't stand by you?"

"It hurt so much to see him that I actually ached." - Katina Smith

So together Smith and Pearl took the case to a joint jury trial, and for three days Thomas and his sisters skipped school and dressed up for court. They sat in the gallery and listened, Thomas holding his youngest sister in his lap. Smith's lawyer spoke first: "For the record, my client is proceeding to trial over my objections and against my advice," she told the judge, and from that low point somehow things got worse for Smith and Pearl as prosecutors detailed a drug ring that operated from 1992 to 1999. Pearl had started out dealing weed to make extra money when she fell behind on her house payment, but she switched to crack cocaine when she realized addicts made the most consistent customers, prosecutors said. She regularly purchased about $1,000 in drugs from a supplier in Florida and then sometimes sold the drugs for twice as much, eventually making enough money that she decided to store some of the cash in the closet of the master bedroom at Smith's house. Smith brought Pearl more money whenever she needed to re-up her drug supply, prosecutors said.

Neither Smith nor Pearl was a drug user, but the operation was every bit as desperate and unstable as the customers it depended on. Pearl ordered her shipments for the 1st and the 15th of each month because that was when her customers received government checks and had money to spend. She referred to an ounce of cocaine as a "shirt," and she ordered four or five shirts each month. She hid her drugs in the rafters of an abandoned gas station filled with molding food and field mice. Her bodyguard was also her boyfriend; her junior dealers were addicts who got paid in crack at the beginning of each shift; and her lookout man was a thief who spent most of his time searching the rafters of the gas station, trying to steal her supply. When Minnie Pearl worried about getting caught by police, she sought comfort in religious chants and root doctoring, stringing peppers across the ceiling of her trailer.

In her busiest weeks, prosecutors said, Pearl could move $5,000 in drugs, but she still drove a late-'80s Oldsmobile with a bad transmission and ironed pant legs 40 hours each week at a local textile factory.

"What did she do with the money?" a prosecutor asked during the trial when Pearl's live-in boyfriend was on the stand.

"She took me out to dinner," the boyfriend said. "She bought clothes and got her hair did and made house payments and car payments and paid her bills and provided for the children. She was real free-hearted."

The prosecution finally rested its case after three days -- after playing taped phone calls between Pearl and Smith talking about drug money, after showing photos of drugs and cash, after testimony from 14 witnesses. "Now it is the defense's turn to present its case," the judge said, but the defense didn't have a case. Neither Pearl's lawyer nor Smith's lawyer called a single outside witness. The jury left the courtroom to deliberate one day at 3:55 p.m., and Thomas took his sisters outside the courthouse to play. By 5, the verdict was in, and Thomas hurried his sisters back into the courtroom to hear it.

"Guilty," the lead juror said, and later the judge clarified the details. Minnie Pearl, 43, would be sentenced to two terms of life in prison. Next the judge addressed Smith, 27, and to Thomas, his mother's sentence almost sounded longer: 294 months.

Or more than 24 years.