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USA - Plano Man, 20, Dies by Overdose in Texas Heroin Massacre (1997)
On June 8, 1997, a 20-year-old man named M.M. died in Plano, Texas as a result of a heroin overdose. His death led to the start of a federal investigation into the rising number of heroin deaths among young people in Plano during the 1990s. The investigation resulted in the conviction of 29 individuals ranging from small-time drug dealers to illegal immigrants who smuggled the heroin across the border.
The Rolling Stones dubbed this the “ Texas Heroin Massacre.” Major publications including the New York Times and Newsweek wrote articles about Plano's heroin problem. MTV’s long-time running show True Life covered the events in their first episode “Fatal Overdose.”
The following is an article by the Dallas Observer. Because it's long, only the first half is posted below. You can read the full article here. M.M. wasn't the first Plano youth to die of a heroin overdose. In the endless game of death and law enforcement that we call the war on drugs, it's hard to tell what number he rolled. According to The Plano Star-Courier, he was the eighth of 15 deaths "tied to [heroin] in Plano" since January 1996. The Plano Police Department's official tally lists the 20-year-old M.M. as the ninth of 13 Plano heroin deaths between June 1995 and February 1998.
But looking back, M.M.’s death clearly was a turning point in Plano's long funeral dirge. It was the event that, for better or worse, brought federal investigators to Plano and spawned a joint federal-state task force. It was the first of four deaths that resulted in last summer's federal indictment of 29 people for dealing drugs, a case in which most defendants faced the possibility of life in prison.
Now, 22 months after M.M.’s body was wheeled into a Plano emergency room, his father and the parents of other overdose victims are asking whether law enforcement's tough-on-drugs answer to the city's heroin epidemic solved the problem or simply made more victims.
At 1:20 p.m. on June 8, 1997, 19-year-old B.E. and 18-year-old R.B. burst into the emergency room at Columbia Medical Center of Plano. With them was a comatose M.M., who the two Plano teens said had been drinking. They also told emergency-room personnel they had found a heroin syringe near his body.
The nursing staff called Plano police as Dr. K.Y. spent a few moments vainly attempting to revive M.M. At 1:32, Dr. K.Y. pronounced him dead.
The doctor told police M.M. had been dead for some time. Though the cause of death was listed as "acute narcotism," the Collin County medical examiner reported that M.M. in fact died of bronchial pneumonia, which he contracted after inhaling his own vomit. The medical examiner deduced that M.M. had been in respiratory "distress" for anywhere from four to 10 hours.
Dr. W.R., the medical examiner, said a number of recent heroin deaths he had seen were disturbingly similar to M.M.’s. In two of the most recent overdose cases, witnesses admitted they had not sought medical help until after the victim died. In M.M.’s case, B.E. and R.B. said they had been worried about M.M. for as long as six hours, according to police reports. During that time they tried to wake him, repeatedly checked his pulse and breathing, and even tried to administer M.M.’s asthma medicine. After he died on R.B.’s couch, they cleaned up the evidence of heroin use before taking his stiffening, blue body to the hospital.
Neither R.B. nor B.E. was charged in M.M.'s death. In police interviews, they suggested the blame lay with others: M.M., his family, kids who used heroin, kids who were "known drug dealers." R.B. and B.E. weren't alone. A half-dozen other youths who procured everything from the prescription drugs Valium and Xanax to alcohol for themselves and their underage friends that night blamed other kids--among them C.C., the Plano teen who helped M.M. buy the heroin that did him in.
Yet even after he was identified by his peers, it was doubtful that C.C. would face charges. No one had been charged in any of the previous deaths, and in early July, Plano police told M.M.’s grieving father, G.M., that they were closing the file, having determined that his son was "both victim and perpetrator."
In response, an outraged G.M. called the FBI. He met with Drug Enforcement Administration agents. He demanded that those responsible for his son's death be brought to justice. G.M. got his wish. Federal and local law-enforcement officers soon formed the Plano heroin joint task force, which last summer brought a precedent-setting federal indictment against C.C. and dozens of other addicts. Also charged was a group of illegal immigrants that authorities claim was the "primary source for heroin and much of the cocaine in Plano."
Twenty-two months after M.M.’s death, those deemed responsible for his overdose have been brought to justice. C.C. pleaded guilty to using the telephone to get heroin; the crime likely will earn him four years in federal prison. C.C.’s supplier, and C.C.’s supplier's suppliers, junkies or minor dealers all, have pleaded or been found guilty of conspiring to distribute heroin. Police and federal agents have declared victory over Plano's heroin problem. In February, a jury convicted 11 of the 12 remaining defendants of conspiring to distribute the heroin that killed M.M. and three other Plano teens. That same day, Plano detective B.M. told his hometown paper that "since the arrests, the presence of heroin in Plano has been cut by 91 percent." The DEA is touting Plano's effort as a model for how to combat heroin, and Plano is sending law-enforcement delegations as far away as New Jersey to educate their brethren on how it was done.
And G.M, the man whose anguished call for justice helped bring it all about, isn't happy.
"For us, there is no satisfaction," says G.M., seated on the sofa in his airy North Dallas home. "In fact, I'm writing a letter on behalf of [C.C.], asking the judge to give him probation."
G.M. isn't alone. Most families of the dead are asking U.S. District Judge R.S. not to send one or more of those found responsible to prison. Slowly, reluctantly, painfully, they have concluded that turning users into federal inmates is at best misguided policy. Some feel that the retribution and rhetoric used in the drug war are barbaric; others feel that warehousing addicts does little to solve the problem of addiction even as it provides the public with a false sense of security. Still others know that, had the fates been just a little kinder, their own dead children could be the ones facing federal time.
"The problem isn't them, the people they prosecuted," G.M. explains. "The problem is the [drug] policy." Based on what they have observed over the last two years, G.M. and his wife are no believers in drug interdiction, especially the newest, latest tough-on-drug laws used on their behalf. They've formed a nascent foundation hoping to help reform what they call "medieval" drug laws, as well as to provide treatment and counseling.
"These kids are sick," G.M. explains. "They have a medical problem. And instead of helping them, we label them criminals and drive them further underground."
By the time M.M. died, an epidemic was well under way, yet the good people of Plano hardly knew it. It started in the early '90s, as scientists at the National Institutes of Health began to notice the numbers measuring heroin abuse creep up nationwide. At first, the increases were among youth reporting they had tried it; by the mid-'90s came hospital reports of a growing number of overdoses. And for the first time in recent history, the increases were not only in inner-city hospitals, but in suburban ones.
Still, for the most part, these reports were from far away: Seattle. Baltimore. Not North Texas, and certainly not Plano. "You've got to understand, in Plano, over the last decade, roughly '84-'95, we'd only dealt with 14 cases of heroin," says B.G., Plano's police chief. And those, B.G. says, were just "street cases"--possession, not overdoses.
However, B.G. says that beginning in late '95, Plano police began seeing "preliminary indications of heroin use."
"The first indication we saw was, our burglary detectives started detecting suspects coming in who were using heroin," he recalls. Though there may have been few arrests, state and county health officials say that heroin deaths were not exactly unknown in Collin County. Between 1987 and December 1995, the Collin County medical examiner recalls seeing at least eight heroin-overdose deaths. According to the Texas Commission on Alcohol and Drug Abuse, an average of three Collin County residents died of heroin overdoses each year between 1987 and 1995. For the most part, though, the victims were junkies in their late 30s, and their deaths received little notice.
But in 1994, the ages of the dead began to plummet: 27, 18, 21. In 1996, the heroin dead averaged 18 years old. Still, B.G. recalls, "the deaths...were spread out such that, you know, no patterns really started jumping out. No one was panicking; that came much later, in the fall of '97, followed quickly by the media, everyone from Newsweek to MTV pursuing tales of teenage suburban junkies. During the first eight months of 1997, the county would average more than one heroin death a month. The median victim's age was 21; the youngest was 15.
G.M. and J.M., M.M.’s parents, never expected heroin to follow them to Plano. "We didn't want to raise kids in New York," recalls G.M., who was raised in Brooklyn. J.M. was reared in Harlem and had walked past shooting galleries on her way to school. Both were the offspring of blue-collar families, and they came to Texas in search of opportunity, safe neighborhoods, and good schools. Since arriving in the mid-'70s, G.M. has been in businesses varying from real estate to vitamins, diamonds to delis. Currently he works as an "international financial consultant."
"I want to share something with you," says J.M., pulling out a brown 3-by-5 photo album. As her visitor leafs through the photos, she provides a narrative: There's M.M. as a wrinkled, red-faced newborn; there, as a cute brown-headed kid with a Beatles-style haircut, posing with his two older brothers, D. and G., in front of the Parthenon. A few pages later, he's a gawky adolescent; then, suddenly, a darkly handsome teen.
The photos, and the occasional call or letter from a friend of M.M.’s, are what they have to remember their son by. There is no gravestone; his body was cremated, and his brothers spread the ashes on a mountaintop in Silverton, Colorado.
Unlike many parents, the M.’s knew about their son's drug use--most of it, anyway. M.M. had spoken with his parents about trying marijuana, and they knew he was experimenting with other substances.
"Kids, they make up their own patchwork of beliefs," G.M. says, and sighs. "He said he liked [marijuana], that this other kid's dad had been smoking it for 40 years, it didn't cause any harm. I said, 'It's illegal. If nothing else harms you, that will.'"
By the time he was 16, M.M. was struggling in school. According to police records, he got in a series of scrapes with the law, incidents from stealing a bottle of rum to smoking dope in a hotel room. But he managed to hide most of it from his parents, and they wrote off the school problems to a learning disability. Gradually, however, they came to suspect that he had a substance-abuse problem. "When he was using, he slept all the time," J.M. recalls. "He couldn't get anything done." The seriousness was brought home in the spring of 1997, after M.M. moved to Santa Barbara, California, to be near a girlfriend. Shortly afterward, he and the girlfriend landed in the Santa Barbara County jail for driving while intoxicated, forging a Valium prescription, and trying to write a check from a stolen checkbook.
Practicing a bit of tough love, G.M. refused to bail his son out for several days. When M.M. did get out, his father insisted he come home and get clean. M.M. moved in with his big brother D., who was helping his parents keep an eye on his younger brother. G.M. sent his son to a private drug counselor and made him submit to a weekly urine screen.
"The next few months we had with him, when I look back, they were like a gift from God," G.M. recalls. M.M. was off the drugs. He began to gain weight, to work out again, to think about the future. He enrolled in a community college, determined to study art. They thought he had turned the corner.
"We didn't understand about relapse," he says.
On a Sunday morning five days after his 20th birthday, M.M.’s family gathered for church. “D. came in by himself," G.M. recalls. "I asked him, 'Where's M.M.? And he said, ‘M.M. didn't come home last night.'"
After church, G.M. and J.M. went shopping. When they got home at about 2 p.m., a message was waiting from D.
"He said 'Beep me,'" G.M. recalls. "So I did. He said, 'Dad, you need to come to the hospital.' I said, 'How come?' He said, 'You just need to come.' I said, 'Tell me.' And he said, ‘M.M.’s dead.'"
"I've known M.M. since the ninth grade," says C.C. "We had a mutual friend. It really was sort of a drug friendship. Our mutual friend was the one who got M.M. doing cocaine."
C.C. is speaking from the Grayson County jail, where he and most of the other 29 federal defendants are doing time as they await sentencing. It's easy to see why teachers, school administrators, parole officers, and rehab directors alike describe him--a handsome 20-year-old, personable and funny, with coffee-and-cream skin and soft brown eyes--as a "born leader."
He looks out of place in this setting, a depressing, squat building of cement and cinder blocks covered by peeling paint. The jail lacks the most rudimentary comforts; the exercise area is a 10-by-10 room with a hole in the ceiling, and inmates are not allowed to receive books. It's a tough life for a 20-year-old who attended good schools (Highland Park, Plano), plays violin, and pines for Italian language tapes (also not allowed). A natural storyteller, C.C. writes poetry and prose; he hopes someday to work in a creative field, maybe journalism, maybe film, maybe advertising. On a recent April morning he regaled visitors with tales of jailhouse life, wearing a gee-whiz, slightly startled look, like an amateur anthropologist suddenly transported to Samoa. Certainly he is no saint. He was once suspended for a high school prank. By the time he was a junior, he was failing in school, mostly because of absences caused by drugs. He dropped out and was arrested for marijuana possession.
Unlike many present the night M.M. died, he's happy to talk about it all: M.M.’s death, heroin, his role, his addiction. Though they ran in different circles, the pair crossed paths at weekend parties, which is how they hooked up the night M.M. died. That evening's big bash was held at the home of a newly minted Plano Senior High grad, and police reports state that the entertainment, for 60 or more underage visitors, included "a large amount of alcoholic beverages," marijuana, Xanax, and Valium--the latter two available for purchase from a fellow partygoer for $3 a pill. (The host told police his mother was present the entire night, in her bedroom.)
B.E., one of the two kids who were with M.M. when he died, told police that drugs were more readily available at these weekly Plano parties than at college. The party host, in turn, told police that M.M. and some others were "haranguing" C.C. to get them chiva, a blend of heroin and antihistamines that is snorted or injected. R.B. said he overheard C.C. saying he was "out of it and had none on his person, but he would make some phone calls and try to hook some deals up."
Eventually, the party shut down, and C.C. drifted over to R.B.’s, where M.M. and another addict were. At that point, C.C. says, he agreed to take them to his supplier, a Plano grad in his mid-20s who dealt to support his own addiction. Police reports say that the other kid gave C.C. the money and that C.C. turned the heroin over to M.M. and his friend. C.C. made nothing on the transaction and went home without sampling the drugs.
"I was trying to quit," he recalls. "And I knew if I went back [to R.B.’s], I'd end up doing it. We had a long talk about it, and M.M. knew what I was trying to do. He said, 'I'm proud of you for trying to stay clean.’”
M.M. and the other kid returned to R.B.’s, where they did some more chiva, then passed out. From there, the tale gets vague. The other kid, who told police he remembers little of that night, woke up at 7 a.m. and ran home. R.B. and B.E. said they tried to wake M.M. several times that morning, and both apparently knew he was in trouble, since they took his pulse, attempted to administer his asthma medication, and even held a mirrored coaster to his nose and mouth to see whether he was breathing. (They got the idea, B.E. told police, from watching Pulp Fiction.) They went back to bed, and when they finally awoke at 1 p.m., they "noticed a chunky yellow substance oozing out of the mouth of M.M.,” police reported. Noting that his "appendages were very cold," they rifled his pockets. The two told police that was when they discovered the chiva, which they flushed down the toilet before heading for the hospital.
A few days later, police tried to interview C.C. over the telephone.
"I said, 'I'd like to help you, but I really can't answer any questions without an attorney," C.C. says. He also told them he "felt guilty" about having to protect himself when a friend had died. "That was the last I heard from them for five or six months," he says.
When they got to Columbia Medical Center, G.M. and J.M. were escorted in to see their son's body. They recall that the Plano Police Department was with them the whole time, guiding the grieving family. "They were totally prepared," marvels G.M. "They had a preacher there in uniform, under the employ of the Plano police...They make sure they are the vent for the parents, so it never gets out of hand." G.M. shakes his head. "And I know when I'm being handled. I was handled by the best, and taught how to handle [other] people, because it had to stand up in court."
Although the Plano police didn't know it, G.M. is a former FBI informant.
"About 20 years ago," G.M. explains,” I was indicted. For extortion, money laundering, that sort of thing. I beat the charge," he says.
In 1990, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York indicted G.M. again, this time for possession of stolen securities. Rather than fight the government this time, he became an undercover informant. (Federal authorities confirm that G.M. was an informant working on a range of cases, from illegal arms deals to credit-card fraud, but they declined to provide any details.)
At the time of M.M.’s death, G.M. knew little about heroin or addiction. What he knew was that his son was dead and his family devastated. A short, dark bulldog of a man, G.M. recalls his first response: Somebody should pay. He badgered Plano police, who, in his view, were being less than aggressive in the pursuit of his son's killers.
"He wanted something done," Plano’s police chief B.G. says. "He wanted arrests made. He wanted people held responsible for the death of his son.” |
