MOM OFFERS SAD 'FACE OF METH'

Julie Fatino stood in the back of the news conference Monday at the
Des Moines Police Department, clutching two pictures of her dead daughter.

One by one, police officers and prosecutors urged Iowa legislators to
pass a stronger law to combat methamphetamine manufacturing. Then,
when the nearly 30 men clad in dark suits had cleared the room, the
mother in the pink trench coat produced her own evidence of meth's horrors.

One picture showed a strikingly pretty 12-year-old girl, beaming in a
school photo. The second, taken roughly a year later at a Polk County
juvenile detention center, was haunting. Angela Fatino appears
rail-thin, her long brown hair sheared and dyed. Deep red circles
surround her eyes. Her gaze is empty.

"I want to make this the face of meth in Iowa," Julie Fatino said. "I
want Angie to become the poster child of meth addiction."

To Des Moines Police Chief William McCarthy and the many police and
prosecutors, Monday's news conference was an opportunity to drive
home for state legislators the need to better control sales of cold
and allergy medicines used to make meth.

For Julie Fatino, it renewed an old hope to bring peace to a memory
that will not die.

Angela Fatino shot herself to death in October 1997. Not two years
after the harrowing photo of her was taken at Meyer Hall, the
15-year-old Des Moines girl put a gun to her head one morning when
she was supposed to be in school. A Polk County toxicology report
showed the former Dowling Catholic High School and Scavo Alternative
School student had methamphetamine in her body at the time.

Angela's suicide was preceded by a mix of sad events - her parents'
bitter breakup and subsequent custody battles, a string of
delinquency and running away, heavy drug use and a sexual assault.
Now, however, when Julie Fatino thinks back upon the senselessness of
her daughter's death, she believes she knows the reason.

"She wasn't just another screwed-up kid in the middle of a custody
battle," the mother said. "It was meth."

A string of recent reports about meth in The Des Moines Register,
Fatino said, reopened deep wounds. Lately, the unemployed woman has
found herself traveling to the Statehouse, talking to lawmakers,
urging them to keep pseudoephedrine, meth's main ingredient, out of
the hands of drugmakers.

Lawmakers and others have told Fatino that passage of such a law
would not be a silver bullet to the state's meth problem. Even in
1997, when Angela died, a law restricting sales of the decongestant
would not have taken the highly addictive drug off Des Moines' streets.

"I don't care," Fatino said. "It's a baby step."

Fatino said she hoped legislators would look at her daughter's
pictures and remember that thousands more families across Iowa have
suffered since her daughter died. Removing pseudoephedrine, the
decongestant used to make meth, from grocery store shelves is only
one part of the answer, she cautioned. State leaders, she said, need
to make drug treatment more widely available and to provide more
safe, professional treatment for children.

"Those pictures are all people need to see," she said. "Back then, I
never brought up the meth. I just didn't believe anyone would believe
that a child that age could be involved that deeply with that drug.
Today, it's everywhere, and it's so severe."