HEROIN MAY BE TIED TO 2 WAYNE DEATHS

WAYNE Police detectives are investigating whether a new brand of heroin
for sale on the streets of Paterson may be responsible for the apparent
overdose deaths of two men in separate incidents in the township.

On Monday morning, a 28yearold North Carolina man was found dead inside a
locked bathroom at the Kings Inn on Route 46 by a maid and a maintenance
man, according to Detective Capt. Donald Stouthamer. And early Saturday, a
19yearold Wayne resident was pronounced dead at Wayne General Hospital
after apparently snorting a quantity of heroin, Stouthamer said.

The North Carolina man's name was being withheld by police pending
notification of his next of kin, but Stouthamer said the cause of death
probably was heroinrelated. A small glassine envelope of heroin, labeled
"New Arrival," was found in the bathroom with the man, along with a syringe
and needle, the captain said. He said additional narcotics paraphernalia,
including several empty vials of crack cocaine, a filtering screen, and a
grinding device, were found hidden above a ceiling tile in the bathroom.

The man, an employee of a South Carolinabased construction company who had
been working on textile machinery at a plant in Paterson, lived in Room 212
at the motel for about three weeks, Stouthamer said.

"New Arrival" is a potent brand of heroin that has turned up within the
past three weeks in Paterson, and narcotics detectives there said they have
sent recently seized samples of the drug to a police laboratory for
analysis.

Paterson Police Capt. William McElrath, who is in charge of the
department's narcotics unit, said it was unclear where the new heroin had
come from or whether it was cut, or mixed, with any potentially deadly
ingredients. Stouthamer said that the North Carolina man may have been
mixing cocaine and heroin together to make a drug combination called a
"speedball."

On Saturday morning, Wayne police and paramedics responding to an emergency
call from a resident at a house on Hillside Terrace found 19yearold
Edward Santos, of Oxbow Place, "unconscious and unresponsive" in a bedroom,
Stouthamer said. A friend of Santos' who lives in the Hillside Terrace
house told police that Santos had "experimented with some recreational
drugs" and apparently had used heroin earlier in the evening, Stouthamer
said.

The Hillside Terrace house is owned by Penny Vander Pool, Stouthamer said.
Contacted Monday, Vander Pool declined to comment. But Santos' stepmother,
Barbara Santos, said Monday that Edward did not have a drug problem and
vehemently rejected the notion that his death was caused by heroin.

"Absolutely not, no way," Barbara Santos said on Monday, her voice cracking
with emotion. "I know Eddie didn't do heroin."

She added that Santos was employed as a customer service representative
with IBM and that he had graduated recently with the rank of sergeant from
Valley Forge Military Academy in Pennsylvania. "This kid didn't have a drug
problem that we knew about," she said.

Vander Pool's 19yearold son, Philip, is the one who found Santos
unconscious about 3:30 a.m., Stouthamer said. Although Philip Vander Pool
and several other people who had been at the house late Friday and early
Saturday said Santos had used drugs there, no narcotics were seized and no
charges have been filed, Stouthamer said.

The captain added that investigations of both deaths are continuing.

"It's unusual that we had two overdoses in one weekend, and one of them is
'New Arrival,' " Stouthamer said, adding: "Absent the medical examiner's
final autopsy results, we can't say for sure what caused the deaths.

"It's worth an alert that anything that says 'New Arrival' on it is
something to be wary of," the captain said.

McElrath said police are investigating two recent deaths in the city
believed to have been related to heroin overdoses, but that neither death
apparently was caused by the "New Arrival" brand of the drug. "One of the
recent deaths was from an unknown drug, possibly heroin, and the other was
heroin, but not 'New Arrival,'" McElrath said.

"We are seeing some of it on the street and we're confiscating it," he
said. So far, Paterson narcotics detectives have seized between 40 and 50
glassine envelopes of heroin labeled "New Arrival," he said, and each
envelope holds about 0.02 grams of white powder.

McElrath said preliminary checks with area hospitals did not reveal an
influx of heroinrelated overdoses.

Members of the Passaic County Prosecutor's Narcotics Task Force said they
were aware of the emergence of the new brand. "We've come across it in
recent weeks," said task force Capt. Frank Failla. But Failla said there
was no reason to believe yet that the heroin is laced with anything
that would make it more dangerous.

Copyright 1997 Bergen Record Corp.