- -PLANO AGAIN INJECTED BY FEAR

A Decade After A Rash Of Fatal Teenage Overdoses, Some Wonder Whether
Recent Deaths Are Signaling Another Crisis

First Of Three Parts

Brenden Thayer offered himself to heroin. It took his life, and tried
to steal his family's future.

One morning last spring, Craig Thayer gave a quick courtesy knock and
went into his son's bedroom to wake him for school. Rock stars and
blond bombshells peered down from glossy posters. Brenden was fully
dressed and lying face up on top of the bed covers. Television
chatter from another part of the house interrupted the quiet.

When Mr. Thayer reached out to shake him awake, Brenden's pale skin
was cold to the touch. He didn't move. Heart-thumping panic gripped his father.

"I started to shake him hard. 'Oh, jeez,' I said. 'This is not
happening! Please wake up.' But he wouldn't. I yelled to my wife to
call 911," Mr. Thayer said.

The Collin County medical examiner ruled that Brenden had died of an
accidental overdose after snorting a mixture of black tar heroin and
other drugs. His lonely passage in a middle-class Plano neighborhood
was scary and troubling.

Scary because it highlighted a horrible truth: Just one stupid act
can kill a teenager.

And troubling because many people had assumed that Mexican black tar
heroin had disappeared from Plano after a rash of highly publicized
overdoses in the mid-1990s.

The publicity went away after reporters and documentary filmmakers
got their fill of the "Affluent Plano Teens and Heroin Chic" story.
And the deaths stopped for a time.

But narcotics officers say heroin use was never any worse in Plano
than in many other affluent suburbs. The deadly drug remains a thread
in the region's drug scene.

"Dallas is a hub for traffickers, and we are 18 miles away from
there. Plano has a lot of money, and that makes it a target-rich
environment," said Sgt. Terence Holway, a supervisor in the Plano
Police Department's narcotics division.

If Plano was a target, Brenden became its bull's-eye.

He was a skinny 16-year-old who built a marginal academic record at
Vines High School in Plano. He loved music, and to laugh. He wanted
to play bass guitar in a rock band, but he suffered from stage fright.

Brenden convinced his father that his drug use was minimal - a little
marijuana and alcohol.

"He would say, 'I'm not stupid, Dad.' I guess I was pretty gullible,"
Mr. Thayer said. "Both he and his sister know how to work me and get
me to believe what they want me to believe."

If he had searched Brenden's room before he died, he would have found
a journal in which his son acknowledged his heroin use and expressed
regret about making drugs the centerpiece of his short life.

There, in spare and candid prose, was a veritable road map through
Brenden's troubled mind. But Mr. Thayer found the journal after his death.

For a quarter of my life, I corrupted myself into thinking that the
only real way to handle things and have fun is to use drugs and
alcohol and it blinded me from the real problems and made me think
there was nothing wrong and that everyone just does what I do. -
entry called "Admissions" from Brenden's journal

The Village nursing home in Richardson looks pleasant from the
outside. On a Sunday afternoon, the lobby teems with people in
wheelchairs and visiting family members.

Scented cleaners cloak the odors that characterize nursing homes, but
nothing can cover up the severe mental and physical ailments that
plague the patients.

Carolle Thayer lives in Room 1104. She suffers from Huntington's
disease, an ultimately fatal genetic disorder that ravages mind and body.

She used to be married to Craig Thayer. They are the parents of
Brenden and Carissa, a fiery 15-year-old with red hair, a temper and
a willfulness that has led her repeatedly into trouble since her
brother's death last May.

To understand why Brenden and Carissa fell from the straight and
narrow path, Mr. Thayer says you needn't look further than the
helpless woman in Room 1104.

Mr. Thayer and his current wife, Carolyn, go to the Village most
Sundays to visit Carolle. Carissa did not go along on the first
Sunday in March.

That Saturday morning, Mr. Thayer caught her with a boy in her
bedroom. The smell of marijuana was in the air. After a violent
argument, Carissa ran away from home for a few days. Her relationship
with her father remains an up-and-down affair.

Carissa declined to be interviewed.

"I've had to change all the locks at the house," Mr. Thayer said.
"She's lost so many keys, I had no idea who might have one."

Caretakers in blue scrubs and rubber gloves have lifted Ms. Thayer
out of bed and put her in a wheelchair so Craig and Carolyn Thayer
can take her into a sunlit courtyard.

Carolle Thayer asks about the family cat and about a sister who lives
in New York. The disease has almost erased her ability to speak. So
she uses short sentences.

"Where's Carissa?" she asks.

"Oh, she stayed over with a friend last night," Mr. Thayer says, not
wanting to tell her the truth about his fight with their daughter.
"They're probably still asleep. You know teenagers."

"Thank you," Carolle Thayer responds pleasantly.

Mr. Thayer said the day he told his former wife about Brenden's death
was "the worst day of my life." He left out the part about the
heroin. Brenden died in his sleep, he told her.

Mr. Thayer remembers when Carolle Thayer entered the early stages of
Huntington's in the late 1990s. She dropped stuff and bumped into
things. She suffered memory lapses. She stepped on his feet when they danced.

The family spiraled downward as her condition worsened. She required
more medical care and medication. Expenses mounted. She could no
longer focus on the children, and more responsibility fell to Mr. Thayer.

He thanked God that his computer programming job at Alcatel provided
medical insurance. Weekdays, he went to work. Every night and on
weekends, he cared for his ailing wife.

"I was not focusing on the kids too much, and that may have led to
their drug use and the things they got into," he said.

In May 2002, he lost his job. Without a paycheck and health
insurance, he faced bankruptcy.

Gradually, it became clear that Carolle Thayer needed round-the-clock
care. He couldn't do it. He had to make money to maintain any sense
of normalcy for his family. Brenden and Carissa were 12 and 10,
respectively. Their family members in New York could not help.

Backed in a corner, Mr. Thayer reluctantly divorced Carolle Thayer
for financial reasons in December 2002. Now, with no means of
support, she qualified for nursing home care under Medicaid, the
federal government's health plan for the poor.

"I wrestled with it for quite a while," he said. "I didn't want to do
it, but I had to put our lives back together."

Soon, Brenden and Carissa learned that Huntington's is fatal and that
their mother might linger for five or 20 years.

They also learned that they have a 50-50 chance of inheriting the
disease - a possible death sentence.

"I always believe that this has been at the root of all our
problems," Mr. Thayer said. "At the time, I had no appreciation for
what all of this must have sounded like through 12-year-old ears."

For a while, the entire family was taking anti-depressants.

I want to let go of the fact that we had to put my mom in a nursing
home because none of us could manage to take care of her and how
we're the only people who visit her and how we weren't able to take
her home at Christmas because she wasn't able enough to leave the
nursing home. - Brenden's journal

The fireplace mantle in the Thayers' den has become a memorial to
Brenden. A photo of Carissa sits on one end and a photo of Brenden on
the other.

In between is a bronze-colored metal box. An engraved likeness of
Brenden's bass guitar adorns the front along with his name, birth
date and date of death. His ashes rest inside the box. An 8-by-10
portrait of Brenden drawn by Carissa, a talented artist, hangs on the
wall above it.

Another part of the den houses musical instruments and recording
equipment. Mr. Thayer says he never lost his love for music, even
after he realized he couldn't make a living in a rock 'n' roll band
and became a computer programmer.

Brenden inherited his passion, Mr. Thayer said.

"Sometimes, I sit out in the back yard and think about what kind of
kid he would be today. I wonder how far he could have gone in music."

One night, he and current wife Carolyn sat in the den and recounted
their struggle to make a life for themselves and for Brenden and Carissa.

Craig, 54, and Carolyn Thayer, 51, had been high school sweethearts
growing up in New York before they drifted apart.

"He was my first love," she said.

Carolyn Thayer has two grown daughters from a previous marriage. She
works as office manager for a small company related to the
petrochemical industry.

"I'm not sure the kids ever really accepted me as their stepmom," she
said. "I told them I was not here to replace their mom but to help
take care of them."

Mr. Thayer, now an independent contractor with Fujitsu, said he wants
to share his family's story so others might learn from his missteps
and insights.

"I haven't done a lot of things right as a parent, and I don't want
my business all over the news," he said. "But if reading my story can
help just one family sort out their problems, then it's worth it."

Most kids start using alcohol and marijuana and then go to harder
drugs. It's sad that some parents are desensitized to this fact. The
kids have tequila bottles lined up on their bookshelf or a poster of
a marijuana leaf on their wall. What does that tell you? - Courtney
Pero, Plano narcotics detective

Looking back, Mr. Thayer regrets telling Brenden and Carissa about
his own youthful drug use. He also told them drugs are mentally and
physically destructive and put you at odds with the law.

"I thought honesty was the best policy," he said. "But they didn't
hear the disapproval part. They only heard the part about me doing it
when I was young.

"So, when I started getting on their case about smoking pot and
drinking, they threw it back at me that I was being hypocritical," he
said. "The mistake I made was thinking that teenagers think logically."

By the time Brenden was 13, beer and wine started disappearing from
the refrigerator. When his parents locked the alcohol in their
bedroom, someone broke the locks and stole it.

Then, his dad caught him smoking dope in the house.

Unbeknownst to his parents, Brenden had introduced Carissa to illegal
substances. Things continued to worsen for the family.

Mr. Thayer bought Brenden an expensive amplifier for his bass guitar.
It soon disappeared. He said he had left it at a friend's house.

But he had sold the amplifier for $700 on eBay. He went to school and
bragged to friends about how much cash he had stashed at home. Turns
out he bragged to the wrong person.

"We had a break-in at the house," Mr. Thayer said. "Someone kicked in
the back door. They stole all of our alcohol, all of our CDs and the
Sony PlayStation and all Brenden's cash. That's when he 'fessed up
that he had sold the amp.

"I thought I could handle it all on my own," he said.

Things were bad enough. But they would get much worse as Halloween
approached in 2004.