HEROIN'S STING

Looking back, Teri Appleton sees lots of red flags.

Like the times Appleton discovered money missing from her purse or
couldn't find a piece of jewelry.

She had trouble rousing her teenage daughter from sleep. While
driving, Appleton recalled looking in her rearview mirror and seeing
the girl nodding off in the back seat.

When Appleton opened a roll of coins, she found them stuffed with
tinfoil and hardware bolts.

But the moment she knew - really knew - came on an average ho-hum
morning inside Appleton's comfortable split-level home in Pennsauken.

Appleton went to wake her daughter, who worked an early shift at Hair
Cuttery. She walked into her bedroom, steaming coffee in hand. When
the girl wouldn't wake up, Appleton pulled back the bed covers to sit
her up and shove the coffee mug in her hand.

That's when Appleton saw four bags of heroin. The baggies were
stamped with skull and crossbones and street names that "sounded like
death," Appleton said.

In nicely decorated homes all across the Delaware Valley, parents
like Appleton are quietly fighting to save their children from a
vicious and deadly drug. They are the new face of heroin addiction -
white suburban youths from loving families. They defy the stereotypes
of heroin addicts.

Appleton's 22-year-old daughter, Jessica Paolini, has been missing
more than six months. With each passing day, Appleton becomes less
hopeful - and more desperate.

Appleton has spent hours each night after work driving the streets of
Camden in search of Jessica. She'd scan the faces of prostitutes and
slow her Ford Taurus at drug corners.

In January, Appleton took her search to North Jersey, where someone
reported seeing Jessica at a KFC in Elizabeth.

Last week she convinced the Camden County Prosecutor's Office to put
out a missing-persons press release.

"I've done everything," Appleton said. "I can't think of anything
else anymore."

Though she knows it sounds awful, Appleton says she wishes her
daughter was stricken with cancer instead of heroin addiction. Then
it would be easier to get help.

"It just seems like there is more of a support system when an illness
is diagnosed," Appleton said. "And there is no shame . . . Instead
[heroin addicts] have leprosy."

Appleton, who has two other children, sat inside her home last week
and wondered where she went wrong. She would do anything, she said,
to find Jessica and try to make it right.

"I think people think you don't love your children as much when they
are on drugs, but that is not the case," said Appleton, 51, a
clerk-typist who works for the Borough of Haddonfield.

While national statistics suggest that heroin abuse has remained
steady or trended downward in recent years, experts say an increasing
number of young people from affluent and middle-class communities are
getting ensnared by heroin.

"We are seeing a different population nowadays," said William J.
Lorman, clinical director of residential services at the Livengrin
Foundation in Bensalem.

"People have this picture of a heroin addict, the track marks on the
arms, the filthy, dirty, malnourished person living on the streets,"
Lorman said. "It's not like that at all."

Lorman said he is seeing a lot of young people, ages 18 to 25, at
Livengrin. Many are struggling to stay in college or to keep good
jobs. They come from supportive families.

A lot like Andy Reid's boys.

The two eldest sons of the Eagles' head coach seemed clean-cut and
"yes-sir, no-sir" polite. When they got caught with drugs, neighbors
in the cul-de-sac where Main Line homes go for $6 million expressed disbelief.

Last month, Garrett Reid, 23, entered an out-of-state drug-treatment
facility after admitting he was high on heroin when he ran a red
light and injured another driver. His father took a leave from work
to escort his son to rehab.

Britt Reid, 21, got caught with small quantities of cocaine,
marijuana and oxycodone, a prescription painkiller, in the SUV he had
been driving during an alleged Jan. 30 road-rage incident in which he
allegedly flashed a silver pistol at another driver.

"A well-off white kid from the suburbs, with a stable family
background and a successful father, who is doing heroin - that's not
shocking at all," said Bill Shralow, spokesman for the Camden County
Prosecutor's Office.

In a sting operation targeting heroin sales in North Camden last
year, undercover police arrested 51 people - 76 percent came from
towns outside of Camden, tony places like Cherry Hill and Medford.
Twenty-one of those arrested were under age 30.

George Wilhelm's kids went to Harriton High School with Garrett and
Britt. Wilhelm's son Joey was friendly with Britt, who would sleep
over occasionally at their Upper Merion home. The teens stayed up all
night and slept all day. Wilhelm suspected drugs and confronted them.

"[Britt] said, 'What are you, crazy? I'm not on drugs. I don't do
drugs,' " Wilhelm said in a recent interview.

Wilhelm would soon learn that his son was doping on OxyContin, a form
of oxycodone.

"That was the drug of choice at that high school," Wilhelm said.

Now, like Garrett Reid, 22-year-old Joey Wilhelm is in rehab for heroin.

"Once he started doing heroin, he was taking it over the edge and he
was getting out of control," Wilhelm said.

Wilhelm's son's story is a perfect example of why heroin use among
well-off teens is on the upswing, according to law enforcement and
drug-treatment experts.

These days, the No. 1 drug problem among young people is the abuse of
prescription drugs - OxyContin, Vicodin, Valium, Xanax, according to
Jeremiah Daley, executive director of the Philadelphia County High
Intensity Drug Trafficking Area, a law enforcement clearinghouse.

Kids call it "pharming." It starts off as typical teen
experimentation and rebellion. They raid their parents' medicine
cabinet and take a few "Oxies" to a party.

Opiates like OxyContin and Percocet are physically addictive - and
expensive. One tablet can go for $80 on the street, said Lorman of Livengrin.

So heroin becomes a kind of Plan B for teenagers. Heroin - called
"smack" or "H" - is an opiate that mimics the euphoric high of
prescription painkillers. On the streets, it's cheap, easy to score,
and pure. One packet of heroin sells for as little as $10, said
William Hocker, spokesman for the Philadelphia office of the U.S.
Drug Enforcement Administration.

"It's really low-cost, high-purity South American heroin," Hocker said.

"It can be snorted or smoked, and it's really a threat to anyone but
specifically to the youth of America because it's so available and
low-cost and addictive."

As a kid, Appleton's daughter Jessica liked to play piano. She sang
in church and won a coveted spot on the all-state chorus. Aside from
her parents' divorce in 1997, Jessica's childhood was not at all
rocky. At Pennsauken High School, she marched in the color guard. She
ran with a popular, studious crowd.

"She was a normal kid - not the best but not the worst," Appleton said.

After high school, Jessica went to beauty school. There she met a
classmate who introduced her to heroin, Appleton said.

For two years, Appleton struggled to get her daughter help. When
Jessica got pregnant with her boyfriend's baby, Appleton made dozens
of calls before finding a detox center that took pregnant women.

Jessica gave birth to Kaia a month prematurely in January 2006.
Appleton and her new husband, Tom Appleton, are raising Kaia, now 14
months old.

Just before Jessica disappeared in September, shewas to enter a
long-term, locked-down drug-rehab center. On Sept. 11, Appleton took
Jessica to see her maternal grandparents to say good-bye. As they
drove home from the visit, Appleton looked over at her daughter and
felt sick at what she saw. She had never seen her daughter look so
vacant and zombie-like. It was obvious Jessica was lost in heroin's warm rush.

In a snap decision, Appleton turned the car away from home and drove
Jessica to a detox crisis center at Kennedy Memorial Hospital in
Cherry Hill. Appleton was angry when she left Jessica there. The last
thing she said to her daughter was, "I don't want to see you again
until you have a year clean."

Appleton hasn't seen her since. Jessica walked away from the
hospital. She was dressed for summer in a wispy green shirt, jean
skirt and tan slip-on shoes.

When winter came, Appleton grew even more frantic over her daughter's
disappearance. She worried her daughter would be cold. She had her
daughter's jacket dry-cleaned.

Jessica disappeared at the height of a 2006 epidemic in which as many
as 100 people from the Philadelphia region died from heroin laced
with a lethal dose of fentanyl, a powerful painkiller.

But Jessica wasn't among the victims. Still, her mom can't help but
think she's dead. Last year when four prostitutes were found dead in
a ditch in Atlantic City, Appleton called police to see if one was
her daughter.

"I just want to find her," Appleton sobbed. "I want to know what
happened to her."

Each night when the sun goes down, Appleton lays awake fretting about
her daughter's whereabouts. She shudders at images of Jessica passed
out, possibly being raped. Or as a prostitute. Appleton feels frozen
in a nightmare - one that won't end.

"I'm faced with three different scenarios: She could be found and we
would still have to continue to deal with the addiction, which is a
nightmare. Or she could be found and she may not be alive anymore,
which is a nightmare. Or she may never be found, which is another
nightmare," Appleton said.

Last week, more than 100 people combed the area around Camden and
Gloucester City, aided by a state police helicopter, searching for
Scotty, a missing German shepherd police dog.

"I don't want to offend animal lovers, but isn't my daughter's life
worth more than a dog's?" Appleton asked. "Maybe she doesn't mean
anything to anybody else but she means a lot to us."

Anyone with information about Jessica's whereabouts should call
Pennsauken Police at 856-488-0080 or the New Jersey State Police
Missing Persons Unit at 800-709-7090.