Heroin's scourge getting worse here

Monday,  December 10, 2007 3:06 AM
THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH

Three old buddies met in Westerville to reminisce, play video games and, as was their habit, do drugs.

Anthony Moore and Chadwick Foster shared cocaine with James Baisden, who was visiting from West Virginia, Westerville police say. Later in the evening, Moore and Foster broke out black-tar heroin.

Shooting up was the last thing they did together.

The three crashed, but Baisden never woke up.

Moore and Foster now are charged with providing the heroin that killed their friend on Sept. 2. Baisden, 28, was the father of three young children.

His death is among 28 from a heroin overdose in Franklin County this year, the coroner said. That's more heroin deaths than in the previous three years combined.

"This is an epidemic problem. The amounts we're seeing -- we're talking central Ohio -- is not normal," said Tony Marotta, resident agent in charge of Ohio for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. "It doesn't make sense for the doorstep of middle America."

Heroin from Mexico, plied by Mexican dealers, is turning up all over central Ohio. Experts say the potency of black-tar heroin, named for its appearance, almost matches the purity of heroin from the Middle East and that the stronger heroin is leading to more deaths.

The influx of heroin parallels the growing Latino population in Ohio.

"They're bringing with them black-tar heroin," said Michael Sanders, spokesman for the DEA's national headquarters.

Heroin use goes through cycles, said Columbus Police Sgt. Bill Mingus. "It's never been a bigger problem than it is now."

Cell-phone deals

Although heroin has been surging in central Ohio, it still is not as common as cocaine or marijuana, police say. But the recent rash of overdose deaths has police concerned.

Officers aren't seeing the stereotypical images of heroin dealers' hanging out in inner-city back alleys while users cruise for a score, shooting up in flop houses or "needle parks."

These days, deals are arranged by cell phone and completed in the parking lots of suburban shopping centers, preferably ones that offer quick access to an interstate.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Tim Prichard said dealers fill and deliver drug orders with such ease you would think it was pizza.

One deal happened in September outside the Old Navy store at 1852 Hilliard-Rome Rd. in Columbus, near Hilliard, federal court documents say. Busy shoppers apparently weren't aware that 70 balloons packed with heroin, roughly $1,400 worth, had just been sold.

In Dublin, dealers and users regularly met at the Kroger parking lot off Muirfield Drive during the summer of 2006. "That was a real eye-opener for us," Marotta said.

The day before James Baisden died of an overdose this fall, he asked his mother for $100. He told her it was for a car payment.

Baisden had struggled with cocaine for years, but in the months before he died he seemed to be doing better, said his mother, Cathy Quinn. He had a car-sales job in West Virginia for six months. He had come back to Columbus to visit his children -- ages 4, 6 and 8 years -- and their mother.

Westerville police think that the two friends who were with Baisden on Sept. 2 had a role in his death. Foster, 32, and Moore, 28, were each charged last month with felony counts of reckless homicide and corrupting another with drugs.

Baisden hadn't used heroin in the weeks before his death. He wouldn't have known about its potency and danger, said Westerville police detective Eric Joering.

But Moore and Chadwick knew what was being sold in Columbus. They had purchased the potent, black-tar heroin from Mexican men through a cell-phone deal, Joering said.

Mexican connection

Often, overdose deaths such as Baisden's are ruled accidental, with no one held responsible, simply because it is unclear who provided the drugs.

"If we can show where they obtained the narcotics from, we'll go after that every time," Joering said of prosecuting the people who were doing drugs with the person who overdosed.

In August, Jose Manuel Cazares Contreras and Victor Delgadillo Parra, both of whom entered the country illegally from Mexico, were charged on federal counts of manslaughter. They are accused of providing the heroin that killed Arthur Eisel IV in Grove City. It was the first time federal laws were used in Ohio to go after dealers for deaths their drugs caused.

Eisel had tried to get off heroin and recently had completed rehab. He was visiting his mother and stepfather's house when he shot up for the last time. His brother found him slumped over the bathtub with a syringe nearby.

Contreras, Parra and many other people whom federal agents have arrested are from Tepic, Mexico, a city of 300,000 people north of Puerto Vallarta.

Some dealers immigrate to central Ohio from Mexico because they know they can make a living selling heroin. Emmanuel Arturo Aguayo Hernandez and Louis Perez Puentes paid a smuggler to help them cross the border, the DEA says. They moved into a Far East Side apartment and sold about $1,200 in heroin a day, according to authorities.

Over on the West Side near Hilliard, federal agents seized $34,170 in cash when they raided the 5577 Millwheel Court apartment. The three people they arrested there admitted that the cash was payment for black-tar heroin.

"It can occur anywhere in the city. It rarely occurs in the same location," said Lt. Jeffrey Lawless of the Grove City Police Department.

Sgt. Jeff Pearson, a detective who has been on the Grove City force since 1983, said he never saw heroin until a few years ago. Now, he sees too much.

Grove City police made 24 heroin-trafficking arrests this year after only one last year. They have had 36 heroin-possession cases compared with three in 2006.