DETROIT PIPELINE PLAGUES MIDWEST

West Virginia Not Alone in Feeling Sting of Drug Trade From Michigan

HUNTINGTON -- At the end of a church service, as funeral workers
carted away displays of red and white carnations, Dorothy Jackson
leaned into the coffin and rubbed her cheek against the youth's face.

She was his grandmother, the woman who raised him, the one he called
mom, the one who somehow shepherded him through high school.

And now she was saying goodbye after Donte Ward, 19, and three other
teens from the Huntington area were fatally shot in the driveway of
Ward's home five days earlier.

No arrests have been made, but police believe Ward had a beef with
Detroit drug dealers.

Huntington isn't the only city reeling from the effects of crack from
Detroit, according to law enforcement officials. Municipalities in
Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky and West Virginia are dealing with the
ramifications.

Detroit criminals deliver crack cocaine as successfully as the city
once exported cars, police said.

"Detroit drug gangs have a history for handling large amounts of
drugs," said Ross Parker, an assistant U.S. attorney in Detroit. "They
go into regional areas and take over."

From small towns to middling cities, crack has spread across the
Midwest like a prairie fire, police officials said. Communities are
dealing with the insidious impact. Sometimes it devours neighborhoods.
Other times, individuals.

Damon Core, 39, who lived above Ward, said he had moved from Detroit
to escape this type of thing. While he lived in the Motor City in the
1980s, someone murdered the person who lived next door. Now, once
again, death was a neighbor.

"These people have no morals, no regard for life," he said. "This is
not a Third World country."

For a tiny drug, crack cocaine is having a big impact through the
Midwest, police agencies said.

In its most popular size, 0.2 grams, the white or tan $20 crystals are
one-eighth to one-fourth the size of an M&M, police said.

In Mansfield, an old factory town of 50,000 in central Ohio, police
believe half of the crack sold in the region comes from Detroit. The
brother of a Detroit police officer was killed over drugs in 2002.

"A little bit of everything comes from Detroit," Mansfield Police
Chief Phil Messer said. "I've often said jokingly that if we could put
a fence around Detroit, we could solve half our murders."

In Lexington, the home of the University of Kentucky, police busted an
80-person drug ring with ties to Detroit several years ago.

In Bloomington, which holds the limestone-laden campus of Indiana
University in southern Indiana, a Detroit man pleaded guilty to a
quadruple shooting related to a drug deal gone bad in 2000. One of the
four victims died.

The drug-associated woes in those cities, along with Portsmouth and
Hanging Rock in Ohio, and Charleston and Parkersburg in West Virginia,
are varied, police said.

The drug leads to other types of crime, such as thefts, burglaries,
prostitution, armed robberies, assaults, shootings and murder, police
said.

As communities spend more money on police and social services to
counteract the presence of drugs, public money is diverted from other
services, such as libraries and schools.

The crime destroys the sense of security as residents of small towns
begin to lock the doors to their cars and homes for the first time,
police said.

The connections between Detroit and some of the cities under assault
were forged long ago and have nothing to do with crime, law
enforcement officials said.

In past generations, residents from the smaller cities moved to
Detroit for a better life and returned after failing to find it. Some
families have bounced back and forth. Detroit drug couriers are
visiting communities made familiar through family ties.

"If you're from Detroit, you're a suspect," an exasperated Huntington
Police Capt. Steve Hall said last week during a news conference.

The drug dealers like the smaller cities because they offer untapped
markets and less competition, which can be violent on Detroit's
streets, police said. Because crack is plentiful in Detroit, dealers
can buy it cheaply there and sell it for twice as much in other towns,
where it's scarce.

The drug dealers are so brazen that they sell their wares in broad
daylight, police said. Undercover officers in cars have been
approached by a half-dozen dealers at one time, they said.

Bob Martin, who works with local youths as director of a community
center in Huntington, said the area is being deluged with the drug
dealers.

"Our community, we've lost it," he said. "Everybody thought it would
never happen here. It did. We have things in society that stinks. This
is happening here."