IN METH WAR, "WE'VE GOT TO HAVE SOME HELP"

In south-central Missouri, police say, they are outnumbered, outgunned

For years, southern Missouri's rural sheriffs - and policymakers from
Jefferson City to Washington - warned that production of the illegal drug
methamphetamine was growing dramatically and that violence would grow with
it.

This week's murder of three people near Salem, Mo., including Sharon J.
Barnes, chief deputy for the Dent County sheriff, appears to bear that out.

"It's such an awful thing to happen, but it's not a surprise. Something like
this was bound to happen," said Wade Dean Belshe, sheriff of nearby Texas
County. "We've got to have some help here."

Earl Mitchell Forrest II is accused in the killing spree over what police
said was a dispute about 1 1/2 pounds of meth, enough to keep hundreds of
people high for days.

The meth trade has been growing in Dent County. In an unrelated incident
last week, sheriff's deputies and Salem police raided a compound that
allegedly housed six separate drug labs.

"Meth is definitely picking up in Dent, along with the whole area," said
Michael Gaston, commander of the South-Central Missouri Drug Task Force and
a special agent for the U.S. Forest Service stationed in Mark Twain National
Forest. "The meth problem hasn't gone away, and it's not going away. It's
getting worse."

Still, meth arrests and seizures are low in Dent County - at least by the
standards of the Ozarks. About 20 miles southwest of Salem is Texas County,
regarded as the heart of meth production in south-central Missouri.

Sheriff Belshe has just two full-time deputies to police the state's largest
county. According to statistics released this week by the Missouri Highway
Patrol, this year the small force has raided 125 meth labs, ingredient
caches or dump sites - the fourth most in the state.

Police in Texas and Dent counties, and other rugged parts of the Missouri
Ozarks, aren't just outnumbered by meth cooks, Belshe said. They're
outgunned as well.

"Every place we go, we find guns. Most of the meth cooks are armed, and the
ones that aren't have guns nearby," Belshe said. "Obviously that makes a
particularly dangerous situation when they're on meth and we come to arrest
them."

Rural sheriffs cannot afford the tactical units used in larger cities,
Belshe said, and the big number of meth labs means that frequently, one or
two deputies conduct raids without backup.

That puts deputies in the same position that Barnes was in on Monday, Belshe
said.

More help could be on the way.

Asa Hutchinson, the head of the Drug Enforcement Administration, has
promised that the agency will use more of its resources to fight Missouri
meth.

A spokeswoman at the agency's St. Louis office, which oversees operations
across the region, said that the agency would continue to train police and
sheriff's deputies in narcotics investigation techniques and that the agency
was looking for other ways to assist rural law enforcement.

"DEA is committed to working with the Missouri law enforcement community to
identify, investigate and arrest those involved in the methamphetamine
trade," said Shirley Armstead, a spokeswoman.

Highway Patrol investigators continued to sort through evidence and
interviews to determine what exactly happened the day Barnes was shot.

Authorities say Forrest, 53, of Salem, killed a woman over a drug deal and
also killed a man who was dropping off a videotape at her home. Barnes was
fatally shot when she and other officers went to Forrest's home to arrest
him.

Forrest is charged with three counts of first-degree murder. Once he is
released from the hospital, he will be held at the Franklin County jail,
said Highway Patrol Sgt. Gene DeSalme.

Visitation for Barnes, known to family and friends as Joann, will be from
noon to 9 p.m. Friday at James and Gahr Mortuary, 101 West First Street in
Salem. The funeral will be 11 a.m. Saturday at Grace Community Church, 600
South Water Street in Salem.

Police cars from the area and firetrucks from Lenox Rural Fire Department
will lead a procession to the graveside service at Concord Cemetery, near
Highway CC in Texas County.

The family requests that memorials be made to the Lenox Rural Fire
Department, where Barnes was a co-founder and former chief.

She was the third woman officer in Missouri and the 188th woman officer in
the country killed in the line of duty, according to William Lee Wilbanks, a
retired criminal justice professor and author of "True Heroines: Police
Women Killed in the Line of Duty in the U.S., 1916-1999."

PROBLEM COUNTIES FOR METHAMPHETAMINE

Top Missouri counties in number of raids on drug labs or discoveries of
ingredient caches and meth-related dumps from January through October:

1. Jasper (151)

2. Jefferson (136)

3. Franklin (128)

4. Texas (125)

5. Greene (92)

Source: Missouri Highway Patrol

Heather Ratcliffe of the Post-Dispatch contributed to this report.