MANY DISAGREE HOW PORTER COUNTY'S DECADES-OLD HEROIN EPIDEMIC BEGAN
TO GET OUT OF HAND IN 1995

Something strange started happening in Porter County in 1995. The
undercover officers whose job it is to keep drugs out of the county
began seeing a drug they hadn't seen in years - heroin.

Its scourge spread like lightning. Within a few years, hundreds of
people - most in their late teens and early 20s - were hooked on the
highly addictive drug, and many were overdosing and dying each year.

Authorities said they traced the start of heroin's surge in Porter
County back to Sandra Stephens' home in the Mink Lake area of
Valparaiso. They labeled Stephens the root of the county's heroin
problem - the woman who got numerous kids hooked. She ended up going
to prison for more than six years.

But Stephens said the county's heroin epidemic was well under way
before her involvement, and obviously grew while she was locked up
far away from Porter County.

Stephens is speaking out for the first time - for many reasons:

To make it clear she wasn't the Pied Piper that led young people to drugs.

To acknowledge she was an addict back then and made things worse by
letting young addicts live and party in her home.

To let people know she's been clean for nearly a decade and to
discourage young people from getting messed up with heroin.

"To rehash it has been hard for me, but I'm doing it in hopes it
might give the community information," Stephens said.

"I'd like to be part of the solution now ... because I feel like I
did take something from the community."

Stephens, 46, who still lives near Mink Lake Golf Course, did some
drugs, but never heroin, when she was younger, but gave it up in the
mid-1980s while she was pregnant and nursing her children.

In the early 1990s, she got divorced and opened a business -
Mancino's Pizza & Grinders on Lincolnway in Valparaiso. She said she
made the mistake of letting one of her young employees live in her
basement, and he soon brought over his drug-using friends to party.
At the peak, dozens of people young enough to be Stephens' children
came and went from her home.

One of the juveniles who partied at her home said Stephens was lonely
and wanted to party. The juvenile, "Rachel," who asked that her real
name not be used because she's now a college student and a mother,
confirmed Stephens' account that she wasn't the one who brought
heroin to Porter County.

Rachel confirmed other circles of heroin users already had been
established, and she said it actually was the guys who hung out at
Stephens' house that brought heroin there. But Stephens used her
family's trust money and bought and shared heroin, Rachel said.

"I'd say Sandy's house is where a lot of the addicts congregated, not
necessarily where it started," Rachel said.

Another young girl, who also asked not to be identified, said
Stephens was wrong, because she was an adult who failed to stop the
kids' behavior. But the girl said in many ways Stephens was
manipulated by young people who wanted to use her home.

That girl believes Stephens' house was a place where heroin use
spread, but heroin-using groups also were active in Hobart and
Portage, and other heroin use was going on in Valparaiso.

The girl said at one point, she felt she knew all of the area's
heroin users, but it spread fast and began involving others outside her circle.

Stephens said her problem was that she was a pushover. One day, the
young drug users at her home talked her into doing cocaine, then
talked her into trying heroin for the first time.

"I'd read an article in Rolling Stone magazine about the emergence of
heroin. For some reason, it piqued my curiosity," she said.

"I wasn't thinking clearly, because I'd been doing some coke."

Her own heroin use, which started in November 1995, turned into a
full-blown addiction by April 1996. Soon she was spending big money on heroin.

She would go on drug runs so the others wouldn't steal her money or
drugs. Then they would share their heroin and inject it into each
other. By law, that made her a drug dealer, but she is adamant in
maintaining that she wasn't pushing drugs on anyone.

"I'm not trying to shirk my responsibilities," Stephens said.

"I'm fully aware of my contributions, negatively, and I feel horrible."

Still, she believed she was painted as the root of evil, so
authorities could say they eradicated the cause of the problem.

Stephens said drugs led her to use up family money and write some bad
checks. But because her period of addiction was so short, she said
she never turned to prostitution or stealing or many of the things
other addicts turn to.

Still, the clouded thinking that accompanies drug addiction led to
events that likely never would have happened if she were clean. One
time, a young person partying at her home held her then-8-year-old
son over a balcony to get him to stop "being a brat," and it seemed
funny at the time.

"Now, I'm appalled," she said.

Stephens remembers that right before she was arrested, she prayed,
"Please let me be normal again."

After about nine months of heroin use, Stephens was arrested Aug. 22,
1996, on charges of purchasing and distributing heroin, and
maintaining a common nuisance.

Stephens pleaded guilty and one of the people who testified against
her at her sentencing was Rachel, who was 16 when she began hanging
out at her home.

"She put the needle in my vein and injected it for me," Rachel testified.

Then-Deputy Prosecutor Todd Shellenbarger called Stephens "the root
of a poisonous tree" and said she hooked numerous kids on drugs. But
Stephens' attorney, Larry Rogers, said Stephens was doing fine until
she allowed her employees to live at her home. Rogers said the young
people provided drugs, and she immediately spiraled out of control.

The judge said that even though Stephens wasn't 100 percent
responsible for what happened to the teens, she was wrong for sharing
drugs with them and doing things like pretending to be a parent to
get them excused from school.

Stephens was sentenced to 20 years in prison. With credit for good
behavior and taking part in prison education, she was released June 2, 2003.

Robert Taylor, Porter County drug unit coordinator, said authorities
underestimated heroin's scope and power, and they wrongly thought the
end of a party house spelled the end of heroin. But while Stephens
was locked up, young users who once partied at her home spread heroin
to others, and Stephens said groups not affiliated with her also
fueled the epidemic.

"It spread like wildfire. There ended up being several groups of them
who were into it," Taylor said.

One of the people who once hung out at Stephens' home, Nate Bauer,
eventually died because of heroin. Others landed behind bars or began
taking methadone, a heroin-replacement drug. By 1999, Taylor had a
list of 250 heroin users in Porter County. Now the estimate is more than 1,000.

During the time Stephens was locked up in Porter County Jail and in
Rockville Correctional Facility in central Indiana, her ex-husband
took custody of their children - Josalynn, now 20, and Ross, now 17.

She got out of prison the day before her daughter graduated from high
school, but "nobody would pick me up, so I missed it."

Josalynn since has moved back with her, while Ross remains with his father.

"Both of my kids are great. Some people whose kids have done heroin
might resent it," Stephens said.

But she said drugs cost her so much.

"The humiliation of prison, being away from my family, loss of money
and self-esteem ...," she said.

"When I got out of prison, I wasn't going to go down that road ... I
don't have any cravings for it."

Stephens said anyone thinking of using drugs should keep in mind they
could become addicted. They should "play the tape to the end" - in
other words, think about what the end result of drug use will be -
not just the temporary fun.

"Don't do it," she said

"It's stupid. It's not going to bring you anything you hope. It might
bring you temporary relief, temporary fun. The problem with drugs is
. what it can bring you at the end."

Heroin keeps growing, she says, because police have been unsuccessful
in infiltrating heroin circles, and because kids are bored, have too
much money and aren't being monitored closely by their parents.

"You go to parties and it's there and you say you're never going to
do it, but you do," she said.

Stephens doesn't think heroin will ever go away here. But for her,
she's focusing on her family, her dogs, her job managing a pizza
parlor in Porter County, her role in community activities and her
goal of owning her own business again.

"I have a million and one things I want to do," she said.