HOMESICK BOY WHO WAS LIVING IN AFRICA RISKED DEATH AS HEROIN 'MULE' TO
RETURN TO MOM

After two years in Nigeria, 12-year-old Prince Nnaedozie Umegbolu was
desperate to see his mother in Atlanta.

So desperate, he said, he agreed to become a "drug mule," a smuggler who is
paid to swallow condoms filled with drugs. Before leaving Nigeria a few
days ago, Prince swallowed 87 heroin-filled condoms in exchange for airfare
and $1,900.

His mother, Alissa Walden of Norcross, said her son's desperation made him
a perfect target for Lagos drug dealers looking to smuggle high-grade
heroin into the United States.

"He is a child, they used him," said Walden, who was packing frantically
Friday to head to New York, where her son was hospitalized and under arrest
as a juvenile for drug possession.

Walden hopes to see her son today in his hospital room, which is guarded by
two police officers.

Prince swallowed the heroin-filled condoms a few days before beginning his
17-hour trip to New York, said Walden, who spoke to her son by telephone
Thursday. He was to deliver the drugs to a contact after arriving, but
things went wrong and the boy ended up under arrest. Walden said she did
not know of her son's plan until he phoned her from the hospital.

"He told me, 'Mom, I want to be reunited with my family,' " Walden, 33,
said. "But I didn't have the money to get him."

The federal Drug Enforcement Agency has a term for drug mules such as
Prince. They call them swallowers. John Andrejko, the DEA chief in Atlanta,
said smuggling rings often use children.

But in 33 years with the DEA, Andrejko said, he has never seen a swallower
as young as Prince. "But it doesn't surprise me in this day and age,"
Andrejko said.

Andrejko, who headed the African DEA office in Egypt in 1982, said
Nigerians have became notorious middlemen for the heroin trade, supplying
mules to move the drug into Europe and America. The heroin that goes
through Nigeria is high-grade, from Laos and Thailand, Andrejko said.

"International drug trafficking has reached a new low of degradation for
exploiting a 12-year-old boy," said Queens District Attorney Richard Brown,
whose office participated in the investigation.

"The true criminals in this terrible and tragic case are the cold-hearted
and greedy dealers of death who risk a child's life in the relentless quest
for dirty money," Brown said.

Walden had sent her son to live with his paternal grandparents in Abuja,
the Nigerian capital, so he could get to know them and attend school in
Africa. But Prince, the oldest of five children, hated Nigeria. He missed
his three brothers and his sister.

She said he cried on the phone from his hospital bed as he told her how
drug dealers had approached him at a school choir performance. The boy said
the dealers complimented him on his singing and asked whether he was American.

Slowly the men gained Prince's trust, his mother said. Earlier this week,
they took him behind a house in Lagos and had him swallow the condoms,
Walden said. She wasn't certain what day that was. Prince was to get
airfare -- worth about $2,800 -- and $1,900 in cash, she said.

Walden called Prince's grandfather in Lagos on Thursday night to find out
what had happened. He told her Prince had left for school and disappeared.

"But he was on Easter break, he wouldn't go to school," she said. The
grandfather told her Prince had left a note and taken his passport. Walden
said she ended the conversation without telling the grandfather that Prince
was in America.

"He is never going back to Nigeria," Walden said as she prepared to leave
her clean, modest home in a poor Norcross neighborhood.

Doctors said Prince was lucky to be alive. By noon Friday, he had passed
all but three condoms, his mother said.

There are two ways people who swallow packed drugs can die, said Dr. Robert
Geller, director of the Georgia Poison Center.

If the balloon or condom breaks, massive amounts of heroin enter the system
all at once. "It can be an instant death," Geller said, even if the patient
is in a hospital emergency room at the time.

The other way to die is if the bags of drugs block the intestines. In those
cases, doctors must operate, Geller said.

The likelihood of the balloons or condoms' breaking depends on the
thickness of the latex, how long stomach acid has worked on them and how
much churning the stomach does, Geller said.

Because it is unclear when Prince swallowed the condoms, his stomach acid
could have been working on them for days. The condoms were in his system at
least 17 hours by the time he got off a British Airways plane at 10:43 p.m.
Wednesday. Prince cleared customs without a hitch and caught a cab to
Brooklyn, said Steve Coleman, spokesman for the Port Authority of New
York-New Jersey, which provides police for New York's airports.

When Prince got to what was supposed to be a Brooklyn delivery address, no
one was there, Coleman said. The boy called his drug contact in Nigeria and
was told to meet a woman at LaGuardia Airport.

But the pounds of heroin in his belly began to cause problems. On the way
to LaGuardia, Prince began to bleed. He asked the cabbie to stop; he had to
go to the bathroom.

When he came back to the cab, he was holding a tube sock, which contained
40 condoms the boy had passed. Cabbie Ronald Manning didn't know what was
in the sock, but he began to suspect something was wrong.

At the airport, there was no one for the boy to meet. Manning stopped and
asked two police officers what to do. They told him to take Prince to the
Port Authority police office.

"The kid gets real uptight," Manning told Newsday. "He said, 'We really
don't have to go to the police.' "

"Are you a runaway?" Manning asked Prince.

Prince confessed to Manning and showed the cabdriver the tube sock, Coleman
said.

In 1994, when Prince was very young, DEA agents arrested his father in
Atlanta in connection with a heroin-smuggling operation. Chukwunwieke
Umegbolu was sentenced to 10 years and is now in a federal prison in Virginia.

Walden said she divorced her husband before he was arrested and didn't know
of his involvement with drugs.

But she doesn't believe her son was trying to follow in his father's
footsteps. "He was just a baby when his dad was arrested," she said.