Meth's Path Of Destruction, Part 4 of 7

PARANOIA AND VIOLENCE ARE PART OF METH'S WORLD

Even when meth makes people feel like they can conquer the world, they
often act like idiots. Or worse.

Among the recent incidents:

A Silverton trucker hauling bathroom fixtures to California drove his
18-wheeler onto a Long Beach airport runway, rolled the big rig, then ran
naked down the tarmac. Police said he was suffering from extreme paranoia
brought on by meth use.

A Washington man, camping at the Oregon coast, suffered serious burns to
his hands, stomach and face when a meth lab blew up in his tent at South
Beach State Park in Newport.

A Keizer man, described by friends as a mentally disturbed meth user, shot
and killed his mother before setting fire to her house. He died in the blaze.

The meth subculture breeds paranoia and violence.

"People become very, very paranoid when they use it," said Gunson, the
state medical examiner. "Sometimes, they kill themselves. Of course, when
they're paranoid and aggressive, they get into confrontations. They can
die, or kill other people, in those situations."

In this way, too, innocents suffer. Daniel Wayne Kirkland, 29, of Keizer,
was high on meth and visiting a Salem adult store early Oct. 11, 1998.
After calling for a cab, Kirkland pulled a .380-caliber handgun and told
the driver, "This is a robbery."

Michelle Howard, who had just started driving a taxi two weeks earlier,
responded by accelerating and keying the cab's microphone. The dispatcher
heard Kirkland say, "I'm going to kill you."

Moments later, he pulled the trigger.

Howard, 36, a writer and adjunct economics professor for Willamette
University's graduate school, died from a bullet to the back of her head.
Kirkland fled with the gun and pornographic movies, leaving behind any money.

Now locked up at Oregon's Two Rivers Correctional Institution in Umatilla,
the convicted killer tries to cope with the "sobering reality" of life
behind bars.

"I've challenged myself to rise above the pain which I have caused,"
Kirkland wrote in a recent letter to the Statesman Journal. "Day by day, I
claw my way out of this hole I put myself into."

Meth casualities keep piling up. Four of the five murders committed last
year in Salem had some sort of meth connection.

Jodie Schneider's life quickly fell apart after she entered meth's world of
paranoia and violence.

After separating from her husband of 17 years, Schneider, a Salem mother of
three, took up with Vincent Pawloski, a longtime criminal and meth user. He
introduced Schneider to the drug.

In October 1999, less than a year after Schneider met Pawloski, her body
and his were found in the Columbia River Gorge. Both had been shot three
weeks earlier in what police and prosecutors described as a drug deal gone
awry.

The accused killer, Humberto Castro Soler, assisted by members of his
methamphetamine ring, dumped the bodies over an embankment, police said.

In a failed attempt to hide the victims' identities, Soler reportedly
poured 10 bottles of Red Devil lye — commonly used to make meth — onto the
corpses. So disfigured were the bodies that Schneider was identified by a
heart-shaped tatoo on her ankle.

Next: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v01/n1878/a07.html