DOWNWARD SPIRAL OF DRUGS, DEATH

Ruin: End Of A Carroll Teen-Ager's Life Shows Far-Reaching Pull Of Drugs.

When Brianna Tighe heard the announcement that a close friend had died of a
heroin overdose, she burst into tears and ran from her classroom at
Westminster High School.

She later swore up and down to her younger sister that she would never even
try heroin, that she could never do something so stupid.

Last month, nearly three years after the friend's death, police found
Brianna, a former cheerleader and honor roll student, dead in a Pikesville
motel room after using heroin and inhaling nitrous oxide.

To friends and family of the bubbly 18-year-old, Brianna's is the story of
how drugs can pull in even those who seem like the most unlikely of
victims. Even someone who forswore using the drug that has catapulted
Carroll County into the national drug prevention spotlight with its "Heroin
Kills" video and toe-tag bumper stickers. Even in a community more commonly
known for its rolling hills and dairy farms than for the 15 people it has
lost in the past four years to heroin overdoses, five of them this year.

"One assumes that just because someone has a lot of potential and is real
smart that they won't get into drugs," said Brianna's younger sister,
Barbara "Kriistal" Tighe. "But it doesn't matter how much potential you
have. It can still happen."

Before the downward spiral that would take her from the heights of
popularity and straight A's to an unhealthy dependence on drug-using
boyfriends, Brianna certainly had potential.

She was smart. She was popular. She was pretty. The summer before her
freshman year at Westminster High, Brianna began spending her days with her
three best friends -- her younger sister, her cousin, Danielle Fuller, and
her friend Clare Pavey. The girls affectionately referred to their
tight-knit group as the Daisy Club.

They spent lazy summer afternoons at Cascade Lake in Hampstead and in the
two-story treehouse in Clare's backyard. They talked about boys and left
notes in each other's basket mailboxes and took regular votes on which of
them was the prettiest. The foursome wrote a pact, changing the words of
the Pledge of Allegiance to devote themselves "to hipness and loveliness
for all."

"Back then, she was very carefree," recalled Clare, 18, now a freshman
business major at Western Maryland College in Westminster. "This was
between eighth and ninth grade, when all girls are very insecure. As the
oldest, I was the leader of the group, but she had such a strong
personality that she was always dying to be the leader."

In school, Brianna studied hard, working toward a 4.0 grade point average
and vying for an honor roll bumper sticker that her father could display on
his minivan. She thought about becoming a lawyer, then a psychologist, then
an interior designer.

She joined the cheerleading squad and spent hours with the service
organization Key Club, selling flowers as a fund-raiser, decorating the gym
for the school's annual semi-formal Valentine's Day dance, and wrapping and
delivering presents at Christmas to a family in need.

'She turned wild'

Friends began to notice a change in Brianna in the fall of 1997, during her
sophomore year. She started smoking, first cigarettes and then marijuana.
She became less interested in school and more interested in finding ways to
get out of the house to see her boyfriend, who worked with her at a
Westminster Burger King.

"[He] is how she turned wild," recalled Kriistal, now 17. "Her desperation
to see [him] transformed her from a goody-goody student into a totally
codependent girlfriend. She changed from a leader to a follower, from an
achiever to someone who would do anything for one person."

In January 1998, the heroin overdose of 15-year-old Liam O'Hara captured
the attention of much of the Carroll community. The Westminster High
sophomore had been a close friend of Brianna's. They worked together at
Burger King and had eaten dinner together the night before Liam's body was
found.

His death provoked Brianna's promise not to make the same mistake.

Shortly after the start of her junior year, Brianna left Westminster to
live with her mother, Melanie Carr Tighe, who owns a floor covering store
in West Virginia. Although Brianna attended school there, she soon dropped
out -- only three credits shy of her graduation requirements.

Michael Tighe, Brianna's father, said the family discovered that Brianna
was using drugs while she was living in West Virginia.

By then, it was cocaine. And by then, there was a new boyfriend.

"She started staying out all night and sleeping all day," said her father,
Michael Tighe, who works as a cable line technician and lives with his
second wife and two of his four children in a white colonial outside
Westminster.

Brianna was never arrested, family members said, and her relatives only
briefly considered turning her in to police. Instead, her family sent her
to a rehabilitation program in May.

She stayed only two hours, complaining to her sister, "I can't stand this
place. It's full of all these drug addicts."

Michael Tighe said his daughter was "not the kind of person who was totally
strung out on drugs. It was hit or miss."

Five or six months ago, Brianna's family pulled her back to Carroll County,
this time to Sykesville to live with her grandmother. The move was an
attempt to keep her away from her boyfriend in West Virginia.

But in Sykesville, Brianna found a new boyfriend. This time, the drug was
heroin.

Family's fears realized

Of all the bad relationships Brianna's family watched her suffer through,
the on-and-off tie to Ryan DeLuca worried them the most.

They suspected he was using heroin. They hoped Brianna wasn't. When Clare
Pavey saw Brianna this past summer -- the first time in two years -- she
barely recognized her old friend.

"I walked into the room and she was laying on the bed with her boyfriend at
her father's house, and they looked all strung out," Clare recalled. "She
was yelling at her sister. Her attitude had totally changed. And she looked
totally exhausted, like she didn't want to get up for the world."

Brianna's family and friends say she had broken up with DeLuca. Notes in
her daily planner suggest she was studying for her GED. She had a date to
take a practice exam to earn her high school equivalency diploma, and an
application for Carroll Community College.

She had jotted down phone numbers for Narcotics Anonymous and Junction, a
Westminster-based substance-abuse treatment and prevention center.

On the morning of Nov. 17, DeLuca called. More than 20 times, by her
family's count. Brianna at first refused to speak with him, but she
eventually came to the phone. That day, DeLuca, 19, had received a court
summons on an old charge of possession of marijuana and drug paraphernalia
that had been reactivated, court records show.

What happened after Brianna left her grandmother's house is unclear.
DeLuca's parents, Donna and Frank, declined to comment. They said their son
was unavailable and could not be reached.

What DeLuca told police Nov. 18 -- the morning Brianna was found dead --
was that they had used heroin the day before and huffed at least one
canister of nitrous oxide each, according to the Baltimore County Police
report.

They rented a room at a Ramada Inn on Reisterstown Road in Pikesville,
where he took several unknown white pills that Brianna had given him that
made him fall asleep. When he awoke the next morning, he found Brianna
dead. He called the front desk. The clerk on duty called police, according
to the report.

A call for more treatment

The two viewings for Brianna at Haight Funeral Home in Sykesville were so
packed that staff had to open an additional room for visitors, the family
said. Flower arrangements spilled from every tabletop onto the floor. The
burial at Lake View Memorial Park in Sykesville was similarly crowded.

Stacks of donation envelopes were snapped up by those who wanted to make
contributions to Residents Attacking Drugs, a nonprofit group that formed
after Liam O'Hara's death.

The group initiated the filming of "Heroin Kills," a stark,
painful-to-watch film about heroin addiction that has made its way to 44
states and four countries.

The anti-drug campaign -- and its symbol of a toe tag that reads "Heroin
Kills" -- propelled the county's battle with heroin onto network television
news broadcasts. It also made its way into the homes of Carroll's
comfortable suburban families, some of whom had thought their lives
couldn't be affected by such urban problems as drug use and overdoses.

Friends and family of Brianna and county drug-abuse prevention activists
say her death is a sign that more attention to Carroll's heroin problem is
needed, that although educational programs and awareness campaigns have
helped, more treatment programs are needed to help those addicted to the
powerful drug.

"I'm really upset that every time I lay down to go to bed, my phone rings
and someone tells me that another one of my friends is dead," said Clare,
whose dorm refrigerator is covered with anti-drug bumper stickers, and who
remains close friends with Kriistal.

"I'm sick of it. A lot of people are saying that no one has sympathy about
this death. Of course I'm upset about Brianna's death, but I'm also getting
angry and frustrated.

"This is Carroll County. People call it 'Cowville' and 'Hickville.' This
should not be happening here."