Aaron Lockhart was a chef at Serendipity, the stylish ice cream parlor-cum-restaurant on the Upper East Side where well-to-do parents take their children on Saturday afternoons. Simon Tejada Matos drove a taxi. John Borland was a gifted musician who earned a living tuning pianos. Gregory Ancona worked as a clerk for an art-shipping company and tended bar to support himself as an aspiring sculptor.
The four men never met. But along with four others -- a lawyer, a carpenter who sometimes drove a limousine, a young man who wore expensive clothes and jewelry but did not seem to have a regular job and a man who is still unidentified -- they died sudden, agonizing deaths in the latter days of August in one of the worst cases of multiple drug overdose in New York City in more than a decade.
At first, the police suspected that the men, ranging in age from their early 20's to their late 40's, had all died after using an extremely potent blend of heroin called China Cat that is being sold on the Lower East Side. Now, the police and the New York City Medical Examiner, Dr. Charles S. Hirsch, say the men may have been victims of that brand or some similar, equally powerful blends of heroin that have begun showing up on city streets.
But as one police officer put it: "They're all still dead."
In the end, drug experts said, the brand name probably has little significance. New brands come and go at the whim of a distributor. But the surge in deaths spells out unequivocally that heroin, long overshadowed by the popularity of cocaine, is once again a serious problem. And, as the latest deaths again illustrate, heroin is no longer so predominantly the poison of the poor and the avant-garde, but rather is increasingly making inroads among the working and middle classes as well.
The eight latest victims of heroin overdoses covered the social spectrum, and their lives provide insight into how heroin can be an invisible and insidious part of almost anyone's life. Typically, they did not come from deprived backgrounds. Mr. Lockhart's father is a social worker who now teaches at a university near the city. His mother is the senior administrator at a private elementary school. Mr. Tejada, the taxi driver, was an immigrant from the Dominican Republic who shared a dormitorylike apartment in Upper Manhattan with a former correction officer. Mr. Borland, who at 48 was the oldest of the overdose victims, graduated from Boston University and had musical tastes running from Mozart to Scott Joplin. He and his wife, a Wall Street lawyer, had adopted a Peruvian child, and Mr. Borland flitted around the city on a BMW motorcycle. The body of one man, found sprawled near the railroad tracks at West 51st Street between 10th and 11th Avenues, has yet to be claimed.
A Drug-Based Game Of Russian Roulette
Although the overdose victims were strangers to one another, some shared common traits and histories. Friends and relatives described them as bright and generally charming, even beguiling. Several were particularly attractive to women, and some were remarkably generous, known for giving extravagant gifts and pitching in when friends needed a hand. But some had also dropped out of high school and taken up drugs at an early age. Some managed to lead nearly double lives, concealing their drug use from most friends and relatives. Others were less discreet. A couple of them had done time in jail for stealing to get money for drugs.
In many cases they betrayed a frailty and a vulnerability that may have inclined them toward the escape that drugs promise. All of them died ugly deaths. Several collapsed at home. Others died in the streets or in hospital emergency wards. Laboratory tests showed that seven of them had taken both heroin and cocaine in what is known as a speedball. Only Mr. Borland had stuck strictly to heroin.
All the victims, in common with nearly everyone who dares even to sample the most dangerous drug now available, apparently shared a streak of deep, nearly suicidal recklessness.
"It's like playing Russian roulette," said Dr. Hirsch, the Medical Examiner. People's ability to absorb the drug into their systems -- their tolerance -- changes from day to day, he said, and there is no way of knowing just what a heroin dealer has slipped into the packets he is hustling.
"It has the potential to kill them every time they use it," Dr. Hirsch said.
It is partly that danger, said Dr. Mitchell S. Rosenthal, the head of Gov. Mario M. Cuomo's council on drug abuse, that, for many, proves so magnetic. "They are seeking adventure, a kind of magic," he said. "They are looking for that release. They are sort of pharmacologically cliffhanging all the time."
Dr. Hirsch said a majority of the roughly 350 drug overdose deaths in New York City last year were due primarily to cocaine, which is still the most widely used hard drug. But he said deaths from too much heroin have been increasing as the popularity of the drug has been reviving.
Historically, heroin has been the most stigmatized of the illegal drugs. But in the last few years, cocaine has become a bigger villain for many young people. They have known of friends who have gotten in trouble with cocaine. They have heard repeated warnings about the drug on radio and television and in the newspapers. But it has been nearly 15 years since heroin had any prominence at all.
"There are a lot of young people who have no memory of earlier heroin problems," Dr. Rosenthal said. "They've sort of discovered heroin and found it chic."
A Long Struggle For a Whole Family
Although the unusually large cluster of overdose deaths has received considerable attention, all the victims fell in mundane ways. Aaron Lockhart, the chef at Serendipity, lost consciousness in a small treeless park in lower Manhattan, across from the Federal Court House, as the sidewalks filled with people heading off to lunch. He had gone to see his mother about an hour earlier and borrowed $25. She now thinks he may have used that money to buy the heroin that killed him.
Mr. Lockhart, tall and trim and talented with an electric guitar, had been struggling with drugs for nearly half his life, his family said. He was smoking marijuana when he dropped out of Seward High School on the Lower East Side in the 10th grade, and the family believes he started using heroin in his early 20's.
Mr. Lockhart's family was better equipped to deal with a son's heroin use than most. As a social worker, his father, George Lockhart, knew a lot about addiction. Although Mr. Lockhart and his wife, Etsuko, had divorced, they remained close and stayed in close touch with their son and his older sister, Mariko, who graduated from Yale University, went on to earn a master's degree from New York University and now works in a social service program in New Jersey called Newark Fighting Back, which strives to reduce drug and alcohol abuse by strengthening poor communities.
But the Lockharts acknowledged having had little success with Aaron, their only other child.
"For a long time we were simply not aware that Aaron was using drugs," the elder Mr. Lockhart said.
Several times the family helped Aaron get into rehabilitation programs. They had family meetings. They went with him to Narcotics Anonymous meetings. He had periods of sobriety, then relapse. To buy heroin, he sold some of his sister's books and a stack of compact disks that he was supposed to divide with his former girlfriend. Friends say he broke into cars. His father said he was arrested once with burglary tools and three times went to jail at Rikers Island.
Debra Christie, the general manager of Serendipity at 225 East 60th Street, said she never suspected that Mr. Lockhart used drugs. "Whatever was troubling him, he didn't show us," Ms. Christie said. "I can't help thinking he was enticed by the wrong person at the wrong moment. He never missed work. He was always on time. He was the epitome of a clean-cut guy."
Pure and Deadly, Even for Old Hands
Last Tuesday, the police began broadcasting warnings that a very potent blend of heroin was being sold. After having been notified by the Medical Examiner of a sudden spate of 12 drug overdoses in five days, three or four times the usual rate, detectives had reviewed the cases and discovered that four bags of China Cat -- two empty, two full -- had been found near the body of Mr. Borland, the piano tuner, in his TriBeCa apartment. The contents of the bags, instead of being the usual 45 to 60 percent heroin and the rest dilutants, proved to be nearly pure heroin, which can be deadly, especially for new users with little tolerance for the drug.
After a memorial service for Mr. Borland at a small, steepled Episcopal church in Middletown, N.J., his wife, Stephanie Cotsirilos, suggested that her husband had not been a newcomer to drugs. "He knew how deeply treacherous addiction can be," she said, adding that he had spoken of perhaps spending some time as a drug counselor.
William J. Becker. a heavy-set, balding 46-year-old lawyer practicing solo who specialized in personal injury cases, shared an apartment in a battered five-story tenement on St. Marks Place with a girlfriend and another lawyer and his wife. Ronald Levine, the other lawyer in the apartment, insisted that Mr. Becker had not used drugs. Some who worked with him said the same.
"He was a hard-working, dedicated lawyer," said Lester Kravitz, a former partner who had known Mr. Becker for more than 10 years and had continued to share office space with him at 51 Chambers Street.
But a neighbor, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that Mr. Becker had told him he had been in a drug treatment program. The Medical Examiner said he was sure there had been no error in the conclusion that the lawyer had died of a drug overdose.
Already Staggering, Then Snorting
As had been the case with Mr. Lockhart, at least two of the others -- Mr. Ancona, the sculptor, and George Markakis, 26, the carpenter and sometime limousine driver -- had been in trouble with drugs as young teen-agers. But Mr. Markakis's father, Andreas, a retired shipping executive, said his son, a giant of a man who stood more than six feet tall and weighed more than 300 pounds, had added heroin to his pharmacopeia only in recent years.
The police found his body at dawn on Tuesday on East 97th Street, near First Avenue, slumped behind the wheel of a Lincoln Town Car that belonged to the Southampton Limousine Company. On the front seat beside him lay a syringe streaked with the residue of a heroin solution. A traffic agent told the police that a man had rushed up to him saying he had tried to rob Mr. Markakis but had run when he saw that his quarry was dead.
Mr. Ancona had taken heroin in the past, friends said, but he favored cocaine and alcohol. Last Sunday night, they said, he and a young woman went to a club on the Lower East Side and went back to Mr. Ancona's apartment on East 12th Street. The woman injected her heroin, they said. Mr. Ancona, who they said was already staggering from the effects of cocaine and alcohol, snorted his. Soon after, he nodded off and never woke up. The woman, whom the police were trying to locate, suffered no more than the usual effects of heroin.
When Alex Bonfante, a former correction officer, returned home to his apartment on West 171st Street on Aug. 27, just before midnight, he found his roommate, Simon Tejada Matos, crumpled at the side of his bed. Mr. Bonfante said he did not know anything about his roommate's use of drugs. But he said the police told him they had found heroin in a pants pocket.
Mr. Tejada was 28. He had immigrated from the Dominican Republic and was planning a vacation back home in December, his roommate said. He was a man of simple tastes. "We used to sit and talk and watch television," Mr. Bonfante said. "It's hard to believe this happened."
Gastavo Aramburo, 23, was new to the brick apartment building at 315 East 77th Street. The superintendent said he had sublet a one-bedroom apartment a month or two ago from someone who had flown to Europe. Neighbors said they had caught only fleeting glances of Mr. Aramburo. But they had seen him at odd hours and assumed he did not work. Nevertheless, they said, he had always worn expensive jeans and sport shirts, flourishing lots of gold and silver jewelry.
Sometime after 1 A.M. last Sunday they heard a commotion in the sixth-floor hallway and saw a few strangers banging on Mr. Aramburo's door. The police arrived shortly, entered the apartment and found Mr. Aramburo dead.
