THE NEEDLE AND THE DAMAGE DONE

As The Beach Flats Heroin Trade Grows Unchecked, Violence And Crime Are On
The Rise

SANTA CRUZ - The story of Jose Avalos, shot to death in a gunfight with
police, is tragic but typical, police say. Develop an addiction to heroin,
and there's a good chance it will kill you.

But that can hold true for places, too, and police say they're worried the
side effects of rampant heroin dealing in the Beach Flats neighborhood,
already a major problem, is spilling into nearby areas.

Police point to these incidents:

In May, a man was stabbed in front of a downtown bookstore. Police say the
attacker accused his victim of dealing bad heroin to a friend, who was
found a day earlier in a portable toilet, dead of a heroin overdose.

Residents on the south end of Pacific Avenue complain of prostitutes
turning tricks to buy heroin.

Police say there has been a rash of auto burglaries on both the Eastside
and Westside. They suspect junkies are stealing car stereos to get cash for
their next fix.

"People don't understand you can trace so much violent activity back to
drugs, especially heroin," said police Sgt. Steve Clark. "These gangs are
financing themselves by selling heroin, and they are buying guns and they
are shooting and stabbing each other. A heroin addict has to steal $1,000
to support his habit, and he's not stealing in the Beach Flats, he's
breaking into cars on the Westside stealing car stereos."

County health officials back up police claims that heroin use is rampant
locally. Ambulances have been called out for 936 drug overdoses in the past
four years, said Betsy McCarty, public health chief, and the vast majority
of those were from heroin.

"It's a big problem," she said.

A road to violence

Avalos, 27, a Mexican immigrant, took classes at Cabrillo College, worked
hard, had a daughter and tutored neighborhood kids in math, said Sarah
Young, a Santa Cruz teacher who knew him.

But he also had a problem, said his former attorney, public defender Lisa
McCamey. Avalos had been addicted to heroin since his teens, and little by
little it took over his life.

He began to hang with gang members. He tangled with the law. HE was
eventually convicted of several drug and violent crimes, and he was once
deported, only to work his way north again, back to Santa Cruz.

McCamey guesses it was probably Avalos' heroin addiction that had him
sitting in an abandoned car in a Beach Flats alley on Aug. 1, with heroin
needles and a loaded .45-caliber pistol, when police officer John Pursley
approached him.

Within seconds, police say, Avalos had shot Pursley in the side. Pursley
and his partner returned 25 shots and killed Avalos.

It was certainly the most eye-opening violence in the troubled neighborhood
in recent months, but it was no isolated occurrence. There have been three
homicides in the 9-acre Beach Flats neighborhood so far this year, and
police say each death stems from the area's growing heroin trade: It's
either gang members fighting for control of the trade or junkies violently
lashing out, police say.

A battle over the heroin trade is suspected in the May 30 slaying of
23-year-old Pablo Lopez Jarquin, who police say was a member of the Brown
Pride Sureno street gang. He was shot once in the back of the head at
Rosy's Taqueria just around the corner from where Avalos was shot. Another
alleged gang member, 19-year-old Gabriel Alexander Garcia, is charged with
participating in the killing; another man is sought.

On Jan. 1, 33-year-old Miguel Delgado Mendoza was found shot to death in a
ditch between Bixby and Canfield streets, just blocks from Beach Flats.
Heroin and cash were found in his pockets. Police believe Mendoza was
killed by a gang trying to control the drug trade in that area, Clark said.
No arrests have been made.

Also in January, police charged two Kaye Street residents, 30-year-old
Paula Burnson and her 43-year-old boyfriend, Robert Charles Beckwith, with
strangling Burnson's mother, and trying to burn and dump her body near
Boulder Creek. Clark said both defendants were heavy heroin users, and that
the slaying of 64-year-old Elvira Burnson of Gilroy was motivated to get
control of a trust fund so the couple could continue to support their habits.

In September, meanwhile, a man who confronted a group of men he believed to
be drug dealers near Third Street just outside Beach Flats was chased by
the men and stabbed repeatedly in the leg with an ice pick.

The heroin trade

In Santa Cruz, the drug trade is controlled mainly by gangs that make their
money selling small rocks of black tar heroin, Clark said.

They sell to high school kids, homeless addicts, businessmen and anyone
else who drives down Riverside Avenue in search of an 0.08 gram hit of the
drug, which sells for $20 to $40.

The trade is actually pretty sophisticated, and is run on pay phones, cell
phones and pagers, Clark said.

Most of the dealing - and resulting gang violence - centers on the
intersection of Riverside Avenue and Leibrandt Avenue.

Longtime Beach Flats resident Phil Baer said that's for an obvious reason:
addicts don't want to turn off Riverside Avenue and onto any of the nearby
dead-end streets, where they would be at the mercy of the dealers if
anything went wrong with the transaction.

Addicts usually frequent the same dealer. A dealer gives his customers
codes, and an addict will page the dealer with one code to identify
themselves and another to denote how much heroin they want.

Dealing is not a one-man operation, though. There's multiple people
involved so nobody is in too much danger when the police show up.

Several men act as lookouts, yelling out warnings if they see approaching
police or rival gang members. One man is approached by the customer, Clark
said, but the set-up man does not have any drugs, money or guns. He sends
the customer to a second man, who might take the money and send the
customer to another person who actually has the heroin.

Even the actual dealer rarely keeps more than a few small packets of the
drug on his person, Clark said. The drugs are hidden under an unsuspecting
resident's home or in a bush, where the dealer can get quick access to the
packets but not be connected to them if police catch him.

It's the same thing with weapons, police say. Guns are stashed where a
dealer can get quick access without the risk of a possession charge.

Neighborhood residents back up police accounts.

In August, property owner Dave Thomas was renovating a home on Raymond
Street, one block from where the police shooting occurred, when one of his
workers found a loaded .22-caliber pistol someone had hidden in the crawl
space under the house.

Thomas said it's not the first time he has found guns or drugs on his
properties.

During a tour of the Raymond Street house, Thomas pointed to a grate he had
bolted to the house. He used industrial bolts because drug dealers kept
prying off the grate to stash drugs inside. At another house he owns
nearby, he pointed to missing siding, where he said a drug dealer had stuck
a stash of heroin, then ripped the siding off to get to the drugs in the
middle of the night.

Thomas said he had to remove some brick walls near his homes after he
discovered someone - he suspects dealers and addicts - kept breaking the
bricks loose to use in fights.

"Everything we build has to be planned around this," Thomas said. "This is
a battle zone."

A bigger problem

Police say they are trying to clean up the streets, but admit results have
been mixed.

"We can't arrest this problem away," Clark said. "Even if we could go down
there and arrest everybody, it wouldn't do any good. More people would come
in."

The problem is complex, police say.

Beach Flats is a poor neighborhood, and many of the dealers are illegal
immigrants who don't have many opportunities to make the kind of money they
do selling heroin.

UC Santa Cruz sociology Professor Craig Reinarman, who has studied drug
policy for 30 years, agreed the main cause for drugs and gangs and violence
is poverty.

Many of the Beach Flats residents have fled destitution in Mexico and El
Salvador. Reinarman said many of the immigrants have no real shot at the
American Dream and they know it.

"They have no life except for an endless string of minimum-wage jobs - jobs
without dignity," he said. "Their only real avenue toward upward mobility
is drugs, and a minority of the poor struggling population take that avenue."

Reinarman said the immigrants who are not involved in the drug trade carry
extra burdens. Not only are they oppressed by poverty, they live with the
daily threat of violence because of the drug dealing that surrounds them.

Clean-up efforts

The Police Department established a specific Beach Flats patrol-car beat
eight years ago.

Police Chief Steve Belcher said he has pushed for years for the resources
to start a foot patrol beat in Beach Flats, too, but has had no success.

In the past, city officials have said it's up to Belcher to set his
priorities and decide where to assign his officers. Mayor Christopher Krohn
said this week, however, he supports establishing a foot patrol in the
neighborhood, and he thinks that the time is right for the city to help
Belcher start that patrol.

"If the funds aren't there, I think we should find the funds," Krohn said.
"I think it's that important."

Belcher said the car patrol has helped but is not solving the underlying
social problems that lead to drug dealing in the first place.

"Are things where we want them to be? No. Do we still have a lot of things
that need improving? Yes," Belcher said. "It has gotten better but you have
to understand that it's a very long yard stick."

The city, meanwhile, has done some things to help. It established the Beach
Flats Community Center in 1992 to help children in the area and to bridge
the gap between immigrant residents and city government by providing social
services and translation.

Center director Reyna Ruiz said children growing up in the neighborhood
feel a great deal of pressure because of the gangs and heroin they see
around them.

"We try to provide positive mentoring and a lot of outings," Ruiz said of
the center. "The center is really a pretty safe and neutral space. People
are very respectful of the center."

Also, for three years police have been funneling an $18,000-a-year state
grant into youth outreach efforts in the Beach Flats and lower Ocean Street
areas.

Last year, police teamed with the county narcotics team and agents from the
federal Drug Enforcement Administration on a major surveillance operation
in Beach Flats that led to dozens of arrests. In November, the county's
drug task force arrested seven people on suspicion of dealing after finding
a dealer's pager in the Beach Flats area and setting up deals with people
who were paging the number.

Belcher said getting help from the community has been an uphill battle. A
big difficulty is that tenants change quickly in the neighborhood. Belcher
said he is confronted by new faces at every community meeting he attends.

That makes building relationships with residents - a vital piece in
cleaning up any neighborhood - especially difficult.

Officers say many residents clam up after a shooting or other violence. One
reason is that many residents are not in the country legally, so they are
afraid to call attention to themselves.

The federal Immigration and Naturalization Service does not do random
sweeps of illegal immigrants anymore, said spokeswoman Sharon Rummery and
has not done any operations in the Santa Cruz area for some time. And even
when they did do them in the late '80s and early '90s, many residents
protested, urging the INS to stay away.

Caught in the middle

Asuncion Dorres, 32, is a carpenter from Mexico who has lived in Beach
Flats for 10 years. He said he has adopted a live-and-let-live policy with
the gangs, not because he endorses what they do, but out of a feeling of
fear and helplessness.

"If I see something, unless it's a shooting, I wouldn't call police,"
Dorres said. "I try to live. I just want to work and lead a peaceful life.
I don't want to be shot."

Thomas, the Beach Flats property owner, said the drug dealers have
intimidated much of the immigrant community into silence, but he added that
he also sees a disturbing culture of tolerance for the drug dealers from
some family members and neighbors.

"It's like a wink, wink, and I wish you wouldn't, but look-the-other- way
kind of thing," Thomas said. "It has to come from within each family down
here to say this isn't cool. If every family came out on their doorstep and
told these guys to get the hell out of here, imagine what kind of
neighborhood this could be."

Problems leak out

But the damage the drug dealing causes is clearly not isolated to the Beach
Flats neighborhood, and that has police worried.

In May, police charged transient Michael McClelland with stabbing another
man in a fight near the Borders bookstore, because McClelland thought the
man had sold his friend a bad batch of heroin.

Residents on the south end of Pacific Avenue, meanwhile, are complaining
about prostitutes near Laurel Avenue turning tricks for cash to buy heroin.

Santa Cruz also have seen a rash of car burglaries in residential
neighborhoods and in downtown parking garages in recent years, most of
which police attribute to addicts supporting drug habits.

Clark, of the Police Department, said many addicts steal or engage in
prostitution to support their habit.

A typical heroin addict has about a $100-a-day habit, said Clark. He said
that for every $10 of stolen property a person can usually get about $1 of
value on the black market, so to get $100 to support a habit, an addict
needs to steal about $1,000 worth of car stereos or other property.

Police also see a connection between gang bangers in the Beach Flats
selling heroin to businessmen and addicts, and behavior problems the city
faces in the downtown area.

Clark said many city residents have a permissive attitude toward marijuana
dealing downtown, but most of those dealers are taking the money they make
selling pot to hippies and going down to the Beach Flats to buy heroin from
gang members, who then take that money and buy guns and drugs for
themselves, he said.

Police worry the cycle is getting harder and harder to break.

Two months ago, police were investigating gang members in the Beach Flats
area when they saw a 9-year-old boy arrange a heroin deal. When officers
stopped the boy, he not only swore at them, officers discovered he was
carrying a switchblade knife, Clark said.

That is how many of the dealers start, Clark said, as young boys working as
go-betweens for dealers. By their teen years, they are dealing, packing
guns instead of knives.

"These are people that are in perpetual desperation," Reinarman said.

Contact Jason Schultz at jschultz@santa-cruz.com.

SANTA CRUZ - Manny Solano was a rookie beat cop in Santa Cruz in the late
1980s. He worked the Beach Flats area, and watched as heroin use in the
city grew.

Solano, now a Watsonville police captain, was witnessing the start of an
alarming boost in heroin use statewide over the past decade, according to
the federal Drug Enforcement Administration. The spike followed a decade of
declining use in the late 1970s and 1980s, DEA spokesman Richard Meyer said.

The feds point to a particular type of heroin, a refined form of opium, as
the culprit of California's growing problem: black tar.

Meyer said while most heroin sold on the East Coast is highly refined white
powder, called "China white" on the streets because it mostly comes from
Asian countries, most of the heroin sold in Northern California is a dark,
sticky, unrefined heroin called "black tar."

Black tar is mostly made by drug cartels in Mexico, Meyer said, and
smuggled into California by low-paid, often illegal immigrants, called
"mules" by drug smugglers.

Because black tar heroin is so cheap, with kilograms selling for as little
as $1,500 in Northern California and single hits selling for as little as
$5 on the streets, according to the U.S. Department of Justice, teens and
sometimes even pre-teens are buying it.

Younger addicts are in part of what is fueling the demand for heroin.

Santa Cruz County has seen that first-hand. In April 1998, 15-year-old
Tyler McClellan died of a heroin overdose in Watsonville. He had been
struggling with addiction for years. In September 2000, 16-year-old Dustin
Arwine of Aptos also overdosed on heroin.

In response to their son's death, Tyler's parents, Tom and Jackie
McClellan, helped set up what has come to be known as Tyler House, a
recovery unit geared to young users.

The Tyler House reports that in the past two years, it has treated 23
juvenile heroin addicts, 85 percent of the total number of juvenile drug
treatment cases the 15-bed facility has handled.

"Kids are using it because it's cheaper than any other drug, and it's
easier to get," Jackie McClellean said. "We have a nice home. Tyler had
nice clothes, and we drive nice cars. But you should have seen the way he
would look when he would come home. His clothes were all unwashed for days.
He was sleeping on the streets. That's where it leads you."

Police Sgt. Steve Clark said heroin dealing and addiction is proving to be
deadly in Santa Cruz County.

Four homicides in the Beach Flats area so far this year have been linked to
the drug, Clark said. In addition, at least one person dies of a heroin
overdose in the city every two week, Clark said. In September four men died
of heroin overdoses in two weeks.

Clark said a big part of the problem is the lack of consistency in the
strength of the heroin being sold on the streets. Many dealers "cut" the
heroin with dangerous chemicals. In other instances, doses are close to
pure, which can also be fatal.