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Sunday, March 24, 2002

The first terrible clue was finding the kitchen clean after a weekend camping trip.

Then, Lauretta Perkins knew something was really wrong when she discovered her sister, the tidy one from Ohio, in her Squirrel Hill house, and her 22-year-old son, Jon, sitting like a statue on the couch. Jon, too numb to speak, let his aunt tell Lauretta.

Her 19-year-old daughter, Delia Perkins, had overdosed on heroin, and was on life support.

Lauretta rushed to the hospital with Delia's stepfather, Pat Conroy. He recalls her disbelief.

"As we drove there, she kept saying, 'When she sees me, my baby will come alive. She will come back.' When we got there, she was pleading with her at the bedside."

But Conroy knew it was too late. "I am a Vietnam veteran. She smelled dead. She looked dead. She was gone."

Two days later, doctors removed the life support, and Delia officially died. It was Oct. 3, 2000. She was the only teen-ager killed by a heroin overdose in Allegheny County that year. The vast majority of heroin victims are in their 40s.

But last year, as cheap, potent heroin permeated Western Pennsylvania, it took the lives of three teens. First two 18-year-old girls, from Fawn and Natrona Heights, died in their homes. Then in November, a Franklin Park man found his 17-year-old son dead.

This year, on Jan. 11, a Butler woman discovered her 16-year-old son, who'd tried to kick his habit once, dead in his bedroom.

Heroin abusers die quietly as the drug slowly suppresses their breathing. Allegheny County's chief deputy coroner, Joe Dominick explains, "You really get high and have a good time. You go into respiratory failure, and you don't care."

Many other teens have barely survived overdoses. Nikki Tufano, a public defender who represents children in delinquency cases in juvenile court, got four of them in the first three weeks of February. Usually, they're charged with possession and sentenced to treatment programs.

Tufano, who lived in California's drug capital, Haight-Ashbury, in the 1960s and frequently found dead and dying heroin addicts on her sidewalk on the way to work, believes today's teens are naive about this drug. "I don't think they know how bad it is," she says, "Why else would they take a drug with a 90 percent addiction rate that eventually kills you?"

Lauretta Perkins and Pat Conroy don't know why their daughter did it. At the time, they weren't aware she was.

Delia quit school at 17 and moved in with a 15-year-old friend and her mother. Still, Lauretta saw her daughter frequently. Delia got her general equivalency diploma and began working at the East End Food Co-Op.

In the summer of 2000, Delia appeared to be a happy, healthy 19-year-old.

But over the next several months, she lost 25 pounds and looked disheveled. Then, Lauretta recalls, "She blew me off, her aunt and her brother too, everyone who tried to make social contact."

On a Friday night late in September, Delia's friend, who was 17 by then, found her unconscious in the bathroom with a needle, but didn't call for help.

By about noon the next day, Delia wasn't breathing, and someone called paramedics. They revived Delia and took her to a hospital. Her mother and step-father, camping and unreachable by phone, found out the following evening when they returned home.

Two days later, friends and family, who had come from as far away as Utah, gathered around Delia's hospital bed to comfort each other as she died.

It wasn't the natural order of things, Lauretta says. At Delia's age, they should have been gathering for her wedding.

-- Barbara White Stack