MOTHERS TO TELL HOW DRUG USE KILLED THEIR DAUGHTERS

Elaine Gohn and Roberta Lojack should have been sitting at the kitchen
table discussing how their 19-year-old daughters were doing in college.

Instead, over chocolate cake and coffee, they were comparing designs for
the girls' tombstones.

The two mothers had no idea of the devastation that drug abuse could cause
- -- until their daughters' deaths.

Now, they're trying to prevent others from experiencing the same loss.

The two girls, Elizabeth Gohn and Ashley Elder, died in the past 12 months.
Both had been using heroin.

The girls were friends when they were pupils at Fawn Elementary School in
the Highlands School District. In the school photo from 1990-91, Ashley and
Elizabeth are standing together in one of the middle rows. They played
together and were guests at each other's birthday parties, but their
friendship waned as they grew older.

They were members of the Highlands High School class of 2001 and both found
their way through school and to heroin.

The stories of how they died are horrible.

Their mothers will tell those stories tonight at the Alle-Kiski Drug Summit
at 7 p.m. in the Clarion Hotel in New Kensington.

The summit is sponsored by the Allegheny-Kiski Health Foundation. John
Pastorek, foundation president, said in part it took the deaths of three
young people, including Ashley and Elizabeth, to spur the foundation to try
to educate parents and teens about drugs.

"Every time you pick up the paper, if it's not drug overdoses, it's
drive-by shootings that are drug related," Pastorek said. "My niece was
good friends with Ashley Elder. Many of us were touched personally."

He said heroin has hit the Alle-Kiski Valley hard in the last two years.
While other drugs took decades to become entrenched, he said, the effects
of heroin have been immediate and devastating.

"Elizabeth Gohn and Ashley Elder, those were good kids, studious kids and
they're gone. Now all of our kids are at risk," he said.

In addition to the girls' mothers, members of law enforcement, such as
local detectives, U.S. Attorney Mary Beth Buchanan, Elaine Surma from the
state attorney general's drug task force and Dr. Neil Capretto from Gateway
Rehabilitation, will attend the summit.

This is the third time Lojack has publicly addressed drug abuse. She has
held forums at Highlands High School with District Justice Carolyn S.
Bengel to address the problem. The next talk at the high school is
scheduled for Nov. 14.

Gohn, 47, of Harrison, and Lojack, 43, of Fawn, have so many things they
want to tell other parents. There are signs they missed, they said. Clues
they might have noticed. Their daughters had been so responsible, they
never imagined where they were heading.

Lojack said the straws she thought were from fast-food restaurants were
used to snort heroin. Aluminum foil can be used to cook heroin for injecting.

Gohn noticed that Elizabeth's cell phone bills were skyrocketing because of
calls to places such as Cranberry and Pittsburgh -- places, she later
realized, where her daughter was buying drugs. Her daughter's checking
account was overdrawn, which had never happened before. Elizabeth was
complaining of flu symptoms, which are also symptoms of heroin withdrawal.

Lojack tried to get her daughter help. Ashley, who was a student at
Community College of Allegheny County, went off of heroin cold turkey with
her mother's support. Then she went to inpatient treatment at White Deer
Run in Allenwood, Union County, but she was released in 10 days and sent
home to attend outpatient treatment.

She was supposed to start her outpatient treatment last Oct. 1, which was a
Monday. But that morning, when Lojack went into Ashley's room to wake her
up, she found her daughter unresponsive, still holding the television
remote control in her hand.

"I just started screaming and trying to wake her up," Lojack said.

Ashley's fingernails were blue. Lojack, a nurse, tried cardiopulmonary
resuscitation. She called 911. She called her mother. Her daughter was dead.

Ashley had been out of the sight of a family member for about 15 minutes
between coming home Saturday morning and going to her room Sunday night.

Lojack said she knew where Ashley was the entire time, except the 15
minutes when she obtained the drugs.

Elizabeth Gohn, a student at Penn State's New Kensington campus, also was
killed by heroin, but not by an overdose. She developed a staph infection
in her blood from an injection. The infection ate away the valves of her
heart, which started to release clots into her bloodstream.

Elizabeth stopped injecting heroin on March 30. The next day, Easter
Sunday, Elizabeth and her boyfriend showed up at Gohn's house in
withdrawal. Six weeks later, she was sick. Gohn took her to an emergency
room, but they were both embarrassed by the drug abuse and didn't mention
it to the doctor. He saw a 19-year-old with a spot on her lung and
diagnosed her as having pneumonia.

The next week, on Mother's Day, Elizabeth was in the hospital again. This
time she had five spots on her lungs and they told the doctor about the
drug abuse. It was too late to help her. She had a stroke the next morning
and spent the next six weeks on a respirator. She died June 23.

Gohn said their embarrassment over admitting the drug abuse may have cost
Elizabeth her life.

She is not too embarrassed now to try to save someone else's child.

At the kitchen table last week, the two mothers cried. Lojack wore a shirt
with an "A" and an angel design on it for her daughter. Gohn had a
butterfly pin on her blouse. Elizabeth had loved to watch butterflies.

The woman who is designing Ashley's headstone, Lojack suggested, could put
butterflies on Elizabeth's. Gohn already had a design for Elizabeth's
marker: a heart-shaped stone with her name and the dates of her birth and
death set inside the outline of a butterfly.

When Gohn and Lojack speak tonight, they know the information they provide
can help save someone else from losing a child. They just hope that person
is listening.