DRUG VICTIMS' FRIENDS PLEDGE VIGILANTE ACTION

Arrests Lauded, But Grief Remains

One week after 15 fatal overdoses in the Houston area, the arrest of four
people charged in some of the deaths brought little comfort to grieving
friends and families. Some vowed vigilante justice for the drug dealer.

"Why did you do it, Clif? You know I'm hurting," said Evelyn Holt,
80-year-old grandmother of Clifton Love, 22, one of the overdose
fatalities. "I'm trying to handle it, but it's hard."

Holt sat on her bed swaying slowly, whispering her grandson's name over and
over and looking at his photograph.

Dr. Joye Carter, Harris County's chief medical examiner, confirmed Friday
that Love and 14 others overdosed on the same mixture of highly potent
heroin and cocaine, known as "speedball" among drug users, between Aug. 11
and Aug. 12 mostly in northeast Houston.

Carter said final toxicology reports will be completed next week on two
other overdoses reported to her office Thursday and Friday.

Harris County sheriff's deputies and Houston police announced Friday
afternoon they had arrested four people accused of supplying the lethal
narcotics in at least four of the deaths.

Carter said she hopes the arrests and the news accounts of the lethal drug
concoction will discourage other people from using the narcotics.

The heroin found in the victims and in samples confiscated near some of
them appears to be very high quality and may have been the reason people
overdosed. They used too much of it in combination with cocaine, she said.

It was unusual that the deaths were clustered in a small area, but it
showed the way drugs are distributed and helped focus attention on it, she
added.

"We are trying to learn from the dead to help the living," Carter said.

Love's friends were relieved police had arrested people possibly involved
with the drug deaths, but worried they may not have found the culprits.

They plan to find the dealer and exact their revenge if police don't have
the right people, said Charles Patterson, one of Love's close childhood
friends and next-door neighbor.

"People on the street are looking for the guy and you know they will get
some justice," he said.

Patterson, 32, said Love and several friends were at another neighbor's
home for a party last weekend when a man sold or gave them drugs.

He said the man lived in the neighborhood, but Patterson refused to
identify him.

Another of Love's friends at the party overdosed on the drugs, but survived
because he was treated at a nearby hospital, he added.

"He was smart," said Patterson, a security guard at Memorial Hermann
Northeast Hospital. "He was feeling sick (after taking the drugs) and went
straight to the hospital."

Patterson said a woman at the party who lived across the street from him
brought Love to his house in her car, but he was already dead.

"Hopefully these guys they've got here are the right ones," Patterson said.

Love grew up with his grandmother and dozens of caring friends in the 4800
block of Hollybrook.

Patterson said he and other children in the neighborhood played baseball,
football and other sports "in every front yard" along the street.

He said Love was younger than most of the children in the neighborhood, but
he never shied away from playing with them.

"Everything we did, he tried to do," Patterson said.

Over the last eight years, Love began using drugs, he said.

Kenneth Nichols, who lived across the street from Love, remembered him as
"good kid."

Love and Nichols' daughter were friends since they were children, he said.
He said he was shocked Love used drugs.

"He was really a friendly guy," he said. "Everybody seemed to like him."

Holt, curled up beneath sheets on her bed Friday afternoon, said Love will
be buried today.

She said she may move away from her house because it reminds her too much
of her grandson.

She remembers how he slept in her room on a small bed near her air
conditioner and how he talked with her in the mornings.

She said she thought she had learned to overcome loss after her mother and
her husband died, but Love's death hit her even harder.

"He's everywhere in here," she said. "He's in the kitchen. He's in the
yard. He's everywhere I go."