Suspected Heroin-Related Deaths on the Rise

On Jan. 3, Frances Ann Waite-O’Shea was drinking beer with two male friends at her modest one-story North Olive Avenue home in Ventura, according to a Ventura County medical examiner’s report.

One of the men left and bought a small bag of heroin, police say. Waite-O’Shea, 49, shot up with a syringe in her left arm. Later, she slumped on her living room couch and stopped breathing.

One of her friends dragged her to the shower in an attempt to revive her. It was too late. At 4:25 p.m. a doctor at Ventura County Medical Center declared her dead.

Waite-O’Shea had become the county’s second suspected heroin-related death in the short year. Since then there have been four more, the latest a 42-year-old Camarillo man who died Jan. 20.

Heroin is strongly suspected to be the cause of the deaths, though officials are awaiting confirmation via toxicology results.

Still, authorities have enough evidence to call the six deaths in 20 days a “mini-epidemic” of suspected drug overdoses.

The county usually sees one or two deaths a month attributed to intravenous heroin use, said Dr. Ronald O’Halloran, the county’s chief medical examiner. Last year through Jan. 10 the county had recorded one heroin-related fatality.

“It’s a lot for our county to date,” O’Halloran said of this year’s deaths. “You never know whether it’s a statistical fluke, a little run, or it’s really something.”

For Kevin Waite, 25, of Oxnard, his estranged wife’s death is more than a statistic.

He said his wife was raped twice, the first time when she was 9, the second as a young woman by two men. She spent eight years in prison, including time on Death Row in the Midwest after a botched gas station robbery she committed that resulted in the clerk she had stripped and tied dying from pneumonia. She became a heroin addict, and the medical examiner’s report noted she had been treated for alcohol and heroin abuse on and off for 12 years.

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A few months after Waite and O’Shea met, in early 1994, they married. They separated a week before his Sept. 24, 1995 birthday.

Her habit of drinking two or three 40-ounce bottles of beer a day was draining their bank account, he said. But she never used heroin around him, Waite said.

“I knew she had a hard life and I thought I could make it better,” he said. “She never did heroin until that [last] time. I thought she would drink herself to death, to tell you the truth. I never thought she would OD.”

But drug overdoses among heroin users who have apparently beaten their habit only to relapse later are more common than among those trying the drug for the first time, O’Halloran said.

Bob Holland, community services coordinator for the county’s department of alcohol and drug programs, said this appears to be consistent with at least some of the recent deaths.

Holland said he has heard from clients that some people who kicked heroin and had returned to the habit were now using a purer form of the drug, and this has led to some of the overdoses.

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It’s unclear whether county deaths from heroin abuse have increased in recent years. Accurate statistics are nonexistent.

But the recent string of fatalities has caught the attention of police.

“I’ve been working narcotics now for a long time and I’m unaware of a rash of these where we’ve had five in the first 10 days of the year,” said Lt. Craig Husband, who heads the Sheriff’s Department’s narcotics bureau. “That’s one every two days. That’s pretty significant.”

Police are seeing a lot of heroin on the streets these days, he said. One indicator of just how much there is: Heroin prices have dropped by half in the past two years.

The ample supply may be a factor in the recent deaths, Husband speculates. Some dealers may sell purer heroin than usual in an effort to attract and retain customers. Moreover, users who switch sources have no way of knowing the purity of the heroin they are buying.

“There’s a lot of variability of heroin out there and that could be causing the problem,” Husband said.

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The recent deaths were sprinkled throughout the county.

The first fatality occurred New Year’s Day when 31-year-old Elizabeth C. Ortiz of Oxnard was found in the bathroom of her one-bedroom apartment on Occidental Drive, a syringe still stuck in her left arm.

“Works,” including a spoon with a burned underside, were found on her bathroom sink, according to the medical examiner’s office. Relatives told authorities the woman had battled alcohol and heroin abuse since the age of 15.

The third and fourth fatalities occurred Jan. 9 in Thousand Oaks when two 23-year-old men overdosed at a Newbury Road trailer park.

Witnesses told officials that Jason Christian Mix of Thousand Oaks and David Michael Roeber, a transient, had said they mixed heroin and cocaine--known as a speedball. Roeber’s father told authorities his son had a history of drug abuse, including heroin, the coroner’s report stated.

The fifth death occurred one day later when 42-year-old Genevieve Sosa of Oxnard decided to celebrate her Jan. 9 release from jail by partying with friends at a Johnson Drive motel, officials said.

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Sometime during the party she was found slumped over, sitting on the toilet unconscious, with heroin “works” nearby. She died at Ventura County Medical Center the next day. Her family told authorities she had been an intravenous drug user for years.

The last death occurred Jan. 20 when an unidentified 42-year-old Camarillo man died at St. John’s Pleasant Valley Medical Center of a suspected heroin overdose.

Husband wants people who may know where the victims got their heroin to call him at 654-2885. As with any purchase, the old caveat of buyer beware applies, officials said.

“It’s always easy to OD on heroin because you never know the potency of the stuff you’re ingesting,” said Sgt. Frank O’Hanlon, a detective with the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department.

Meanwhile, Waite is still mourning. He plans to rent a boat and sprinkle his wife’s ashes at sea.

“She never could forget her past, that was her problem,” he said.