HEROIN TAKES DEADLY HOLD ON MD. COUNTY

Today, Kristi Ziemski will not speak of the time between March 15 and April
9 of last year. The feelings she has - about killing her mother, about the
days afterward spent in a drugged haze, about stepping over the corpse as
she went in and out of the house - are "unexplainable in words," she said
softly.

But she will speak of heroin, the drug she believes imprisoned her at the
Maryland Correctional Institution for Women in Jessup. Now 20, Ziemski
looked pale and drawn as she sat in the visitor's room in a baggy sweater,
a far remove from the pampered teenager she was, a Sunday school aide with
the "face of an angel" as her father puts it.

"Heroin ruined my life," she said. "It has ruined my family's life. It took
me away from me. It took my mother away from me."

Doris Ziemski was killed with a butcher knife and left sprawled for days in
her foyer in what Kristi's prosecutor calls a heroin-related slaying. But
her mother's life is hardly the sole one to be taken by the drug in Carroll
County, Md., an otherwise tranquil place of farms and subdivisions 50 miles
north of Washington.

Seven of its young people have died of overdoses in the last four years.
Dozens of other residents in heroin's vise have turned up in emergency
rooms. The county of 152,000 people has Maryland's first and only probation
officer devoted solely to helping heroin-addicted youths, and bright
yellow-and-black "Heroin Kills" billboards and bumper stickers have become
common as residents fight back.

"It's a plague that has come upon Carroll County," said local state Del.
Carmen Amedori (R). "It has really, really taken its toll."

Carroll has sorrowful company, in Maryland and beyond, as heroin has
migrated from its traditional enclaves in city neighborhoods to scattered
suburbs and towns nationwide. Four other counties that orbit Baltimore -
Anne Arundel, Cecil, Harford and Howard - have suffered double-or even
triple-digit percentage increases in treatment cases, although the absolute
number of addicts remains low. And nationally, opiates - overwhelmingly
heroin - account for more new cases now than marijuana or cocaine.

Long stigmatized as a dirty drug because it had to be injected to produce a
swift and blissful high, heroin from South America is now so potent that
inhaling the powder works just as well, making it easier to use and
enhancing its appeal among young people looking for a thrill, experts say.
On average, users are less than 18 years old when they first try it, nine
years younger than in 1988, according to the National Household Survey on
Drug Abuse.

Kristi Ziemski was 14, and not even a high school freshman.

She didn't know it was heroin that older boys were offering in the back
seat of a car on a trip to Baltimore's gritty Park Heights neighborhood.
They simply called it "raw." Whatever it was, Kristi knew she wanted a high
that would obliterate her typical teenage worries. Using a straw, she
snorted the powder from a dollar bill.

"When I found out that it was heroin, I was shocked," she said. "I was
like, 'Oh my gosh.' I thought heroin was bad. For junkies using needles."

The realization didn't deter. "I don't want to glamorize it," she said, but
heroin made her feel great. Warm and hazy and contented. So there came
another time, and another, and soon she was expelled from Westminster High
School for truancy.

"The stereotype has been this down-and-out person with open, running sores
and track marks," said Lt. Terry Katz, the Maryland State Police commander
in Carroll County. "That's not what it is anymore. The face of heroin right
now is a middle-class kid, race irrelevant. It's the all-American kid,
except they've now done the dance with death."

Said H. Westley Clark, the director of the federal Center for Substance
Abuse Treatment in Kensington: "Heroin is being embraced by white suburban
kids, as well as Hispanic and African American kids. That's the key message."

The scope of that embrace is elusive, because studies that seek to capture
heroin trends often conflict. But Clark and other experts said that
although the drug is still not nearly as prevalent as marijuana or alcohol,
the number of heroin addicts has risen nationwide. In testimony at a Senate
hearing last month, officials of the Office of National Drug Control Policy
put the total at 980,000, up from 630,000 eight years ago.

Surges, however, have not been universal. Heroin admissions and overdoses
have dropped in Virginia. Prince George's and Montgomery counties have not
experienced what Baltimore area counties have, officials say, and treatment
admissions are down in Maryland outside the Baltimore area, according to a
January report by the University of Maryland's Center for Substance Abuse
Research.

"No, there is not a statewide heroin epidemic," said Erin Artigiani,
coordinator of the substance abuse center's Drug Early Warning System.

But here and there, in Maryland and elsewhere, problems mount. In Plano,
Tex., police say that since 1997, 17 teenagers have died of heroin
overdoses either at home in Plano, partying in nearby Dallas or while away
at college. About 15 Fairfax County teenagers a year seek treatment for
heroin addiction from the county's Community Services Board, whereas "five
years ago, we didn't see any," said Patrick McConnell, director of youth
services for alcohol and drug abuse.

Heroin remains the "drug of choice" in Baltimore, and its use is rising in
the District, particularly among the young, said Larry Siegel, the city's
senior deputy director for substance abuse services.

When a suburb falls victim, the cause seems as simple as bad luck and
proximity to a city with a heroin problem. One, two or a handful of people
import heroin into a community, and use spreads like a virus. Recovering
addicts trace Carroll County's outbreak to an addicted teenager from
Baltimore who introduced heroin to a circle of Westminster High School
seniors in 1994.

A recovering addict, now 21, said two Westminster seniors approached him on
Halloween night when he was 14. Soon he and a friend, Scott Payne, also 14,
were using daily and trying to enlist friends old enough to drive into
Baltimore to buy.

"I'd be like, 'Want to make money real quick? I'll give you $15 to take me
into town,' " said the addict, who agreed to be interviewed only on
condition he not be identified "I'd peer-pressure 'em into going, because
we needed a ride." Eventually, he said, the drivers would end up hooked, too.

"We're a very rural area, and you have kids who don't have a lot to do,"
said Linda Auerback, founder of Carroll County's anti-heroin group,
Residents Attacking Drugs, whose Web site (www.heroinkills.com) and video
are now used nationally. "It's such a trusting community and still kind of
quaint in a lot of ways. . .‚. We had no public awareness of heroin at the
time. Heroin was introduced, and you had kids who had money and had cars
and were looking for something to do. These are the kids who are easily
infiltrated by anything."

Another recovering addict and former student at the county's Liberty High
School said she had barely even tried beer when a boyfriend gave her heroin
two years ago. Like Kristi Ziemski, the girl did not know what the drug was.

Despite warnings from other high school-age junkies, she became an addict
in three weeks, driving to Baltimore before school to buy. She would return
to school, but only for weight training and lunch, and then leave to do
more drugs. "I didn't care about anything," said the addict, who also
agreed to be interviewed only on condition she not be identified. "All I
cared about was heroin."

"When you first start out," Kristi Ziemski said, "you think you're going to
have fun and like the feeling, but it takes you over, it's so powerful.
I've been in rehab after rehab and detox after detox, and I always went
back to it."

As Ziemski's addiction deepened, she became pathetically skinny. Black
circles as big as 50-cent pieces underscored her eyes. She slept until 3
p.m. nearly every day at the family home in Finksburg, came and went as she
pleased, and took to scribbling her dealer's phone numbers on her bedroom wall.

Her parents, Lee and Doris, knew the cause was drugs but never suspected
heroin, Lee said. They didn't learn the truth until Doris found a note her
daughter had written but had thrown in the trash. "Mom," it said, "I'm on
heroin. I need help." The parents fought. Doris wanted to be lenient; Lee
didn't. Eventually, he moved out and they divorced.

Then Scott Payne died in his sleep on June 5, 1996, just a day after giving
his mother a urine sample and saying, "Now do you love me?" His mother,
Shirley Andrews, a nurse, said Carroll County considered his death a fluke,
not evidence of a county problem. But it hit Kristi hard, because Scott was
a friend with whom she had used heroin.

Clutching his photograph, she entered her first rehab program. The photo
didn't help: She relapsed within days of leaving. There was another rehab
effort, and another. None worked. Such failure is common among heroin
addicts, officials say, because most programs are not long enough or
intense enough.

Finally, Kristi entered a facility in 1997, emerged clean 30 days later and
did not relapse, at least not immediately. "By then," she said, "I had had
a whole lot more bad experiences. I'd gotten raped, and gang-raped. I had
done prostitution. Just terrible, bad things. I was really tired of the
lifestyle."

She moved in with a sympathetic cousin in Dundalk, Md. She got a job as a
waitress. She met a guy and fell in love. They got an apartment. The future
looked better.

Beyond her world, Carroll County was finally awakening to heroin's pull. In
January 1998, Liam O'Hara, 15, a Westminster sophomore and soccer player,
died in his sleep, having bought heroin at a Burger King where he worked.

Cory O'Hara, a Westminster graduate who is now 21, later told lawmakers
that until his brother died, he did not even known heroin was available in
Carroll County. "I was later to learn that someone from my homeroom had
died of a heroin overdose," Cory told a state hearing, "that one of my
soccer teammates was struggling with a heroin addiction and that another
classmate and neighbor had overdosed."

After Liam O'Hara's death, county prosecutor Jerry F. Barnes, using $4,000
of his own money, launched the "Heroin Kills" publicity campaign, and
Auerback and other parents formed Residents Attacking Drugs, or RAD. Lt.
Gov. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend (D) came to the county to announce a plan to
combat the epidemic in a variety of ways, including funding the position
for the probation officer.

Lee Ziemski began helping RAD make a video, "Heroin Kills," a tale of a
fictional youngster who dies after snorting heroin. He recalled thinking
that the video might help his daughter. He imagined her pitching in to make
it. What he didn't know was that, by then, Kristi had relapsed.

She and her boyfriend had stopped at a friend's house one day in February
1998. He was sitting on a couch with 10 clear capsules of heroin on a
coffee table. In the kitchen, Kristi saw another capsule. She went home
with one. She snorted the powder. And the spiral began again.

She lost the boyfriend, then the apartment, and began living on the street.
To support her $100-a-day habit, she stole money from the restaurant where
she worked. Now injecting the heroin, she used veins in her feet, where no
one would see marks. In November, she slashed her wrists.

"I didn't know any other way out," she said. "I was totally out of it at
that point. I totally lost my whole world. I didn't care about anything
anymore."

She was arrested for prostitution on March 15, 1999, and it was her mother,
now 52 and deeply involved in a religious group, who came to get her out of
jail. Now living in Hampstead, Md., after her divorce, Doris Ziemski was
"overboard with religion," Kristi later told Maryland State Police
investigators.

At her town house, Doris began reading the Bible to Kristi, interrupted
only by trips to church and visits from Doris's prayer group, who "laid
hands" on the girl and prayed in tongues. Kristi's father recalled that in
a telephone conversation, Doris told a relative that she had finally saved
Kristi. "She's a different person," Doris reportedly said. "You'll see her.
Maybe on Easter."

On Palm Sunday, March 28, Kristi and Doris began arguing about religion.
The mother said the daughter would have to move out if she did not read the
Bible and accept religion, according to a police report. Kristi said she
was sick of religion. They pushed, shoved. Kristi picked up an Army bayonet
- - a souvenir from her father's military days - and brandished it. Doris
fled downstairs.

Eventually, Kristi grabbed a butcher knife and stabbed her mother in the
chest as Doris "continued to scream that K. Ziemski was the devil,"
according to the police report. Doris tried to flee, but Kristi followed,
knocked her mother to the floor and stabbed her five more times.

Kristi later told police she was high on heroin, having bought earlier that
day from a friend. Barnes, who prosecuted the case, said he does not think
she was. "There was no indication she didn't possess the requisite criminal
intent," he said. But Barnes does believe the killing was drug-related,
because Kristi was suffering "severe heroin withdrawal" that produced
physical sickness and edginess.

Kristi washed off her mother's blood. She stole her mother's purse and
drove off in her mother's car. A few streets away, she stopped, because she
was crying too hard. She sat for a long time, then drove to Park Heights to
buy heroin. She remembers little about the next 12 days, she said. She
stayed in motels in Baltimore, doing heroin she bought with money from her
mother's bank account and returning to her house a couple of times.

The week after the killing, Lee Ziemski had trouble reaching his daughter
and ex-wife by phone. He went to the town house to check. Through a back
door, he could see a body on the floor in the front hall. It appeared to
have Doris's fluffy blond hair.

Maryland State Police detectives caught up with Kristi the next day, April
9, at a seedy motel in Baltimore. She told them she had no idea why they
were there. Next, she found herself in a bare room in the Carroll County
Detention Center. She had a paper gown; a cot; a mattress with no sheets or
blankets; a Bible; and overwhelming guilt. When she next saw her family, in
a courtroom, "hate was all I could see," she said.

Doris's service was held at the Pritts Funeral Home in Westminster. Lee had
been there just three months earlier, filming the climactic scene of RAD's
anti-heroin video, the funeral for the dead addict.

There are signs the county has checked its heroin wave: Hospital overdose
admissions held steady last year. But problems keep coming: The seventh
death was April 3, and the son of a Maryland state senator overdosed on
March 15, but lived.

In November, Kristi pleaded guilty to murder and was sentenced to life in
prison. She spends her days in the prison sewing shop, learning how to make
Maryland state flags.

She dreams about her mother. In the dreams, Doris is alive. "She's just
normal. She's my mom," Kristi said. The daughter was weeping quietly as she
spoke, wiping her eyes with both hands. "I really, really believe she
forgives me."

She added: "I feel terrible about myself. I feel so much guilt and shame. I
wish I could go back and change things, but I can't. I think about it all
the time. If I wouldn't have been high, would it have happened? I just know
that heroin turned me into a different person."