Series: The Perfect Drug

METH FATALITIES

Methamphetamine is number-one with a bullet when it comes to violent
death in Phoenix

The six members of the Phoenix Police Department's C-32 homicide
squad, plus their sergeant, gather at a midtown diner for their usual
early lunch.

It's 11 a.m. on May 6, a mild day for Phoenix when the temperature
will only reach 81 degrees.

Three of the detectives are on call until the following dawn, which
means that any murder within the city's limits between now and then
will be theirs to try to solve.

One of the cops, 27-year veteran Alex Femenia, will be the detective
assigned to head the case if someone dies violently, which he is
certain will occur.

"It's a Friday in May in Phoenix," says the detective, who looks and
sounds much like Dennis Farina of Law & Order fame. "The beer will be
cold and the meth will be flowing. Somebody's bound to get whacked.
I'd bet on it."

Sure enough, about 5:20 p.m., a pizza deliveryman dials 911 with an
emergency: A heavyset Latino is unconscious and bleeding profusely in
the middle of North 87th Street, a residential neighborhood in west Phoenix.

The neighborhood's Block Watch coordinator, Fay Russell, runs out of
her nearby home to assist the injured man. She instantly recognizes
the victim as someone she'd just seen in the front yard of a
neighbor's home, horsing around with a boy who lives there.

Russell feels for the man's pulse, which is weak.

"Can you hear me? Can you hear me?" she asks him.

He tries to speak, but it comes out garbled.

Then, according to her account, he takes his last breath and dies.

Joey Borunda, age 34, of Tolleson, is later officially pronounced
dead at a hospital.

An autopsy will confirm that Borunda has died of blunt-force trauma
to his face after someone took an object -- possibly a lead pipe --
and smashed it into his face.

"This one has meth written all over it," Femenia pronounces, as he
and two other detectives scan the crime scene, just north of Thomas
Road. "Meth for sure, maybe some Bud Light, and definitely a lot of rage."

The cops identify two suspects before Borunda's substantial pool of
blood has even dried.

Their names are Mario and Michael Ortega, two brothers in their early
30s whose mother owns the house where Joey Borunda and 9-year-old
Mario Ortega Jr. were fooling around just before Borunda got whacked.

The brothers have well-documented, violent criminal histories, and
records indicate they are chronic abusers of methamphetamine and
other illegal drugs.

Mario Sr., the elder of the two, is known as "Bear," while his
brother answers to the nickname "Psycho."

"The brothers have been a pain in everyone's butt for years," Block
Watch leader Russell tells Detective Femenia. "They've always dealt
drugs out of their house, and there's violence there all the time.
The police have been out here many, many times. They're a blight on
our neighborhood."

Bear's girlfriend Cynthia Tovar lives at the 87th Street home with
her four children by him, but she later swears to Femenia that she
hasn't seen either brother for weeks.

The leads in the murder case, while tantalizing, aren't enough for
police to make any arrests. Bear and Psycho, however, are jailed on
other charges, including possession of meth.

Femenia gets a crack at the pair after their arrests. In separate
interviews, both swear they don't know who killed their longtime pal.

Borunda's family and friends mourn his loss. They say he was a decent
man who loved his six children, despite longstanding issues with meth abuse.

But he'd been in trouble with the law for years. In 2002, one of his
sisters asked a county judge for leniency after Borunda's felony
conviction in a case involving meth and guns.

"I understand my brother is not the angel or possibly the ideal
citizen," she wrote. "However, he isn't the hardcore criminal [that]
appears on his record. He has been a victim of situations and doesn't
know when to step back or say no. . . . He needs to start a new life
away from his old friends and environment."

The judge sentenced Joey Borunda to 18 months in prison for
misconduct involving weapons. And Borunda never did find that new
life after his release.

It comes as no surprise to Alex Femenia that toxicological testing by
the county Medical Examiner's Office reveals the presence of a large
amount of meth in Borunda's body.

"Seems like every victim we're seeing these days has that crap in
them," the detective says when he gets the postmortem report.

Not every victim died with methamphetamine in him or her, according
to a New Times computer-assisted analysis of every autopsy performed
in Maricopa County since January 2004.

But the statistics confirm what Femenia and his colleagues on the
city's down-and-dirty murder beat increasingly have been seeing: The
incidence of meth-related deaths in Maricopa County, homicide and
otherwise, is on a precipitous rise, with no end in sight.

That said, it's impossible to know exactly how many people have been
committing murder while under the influence of meth. For one thing,
most homicides in the city of Phoenix remain unsolved, and even those
cases that are cracked often don't immediately result in arrests.

That means authorities aren't able to test a suspect's blood for meth
or any other substance in a timely manner, if at all. But in many
cases, such as in the May 10 execution of Phoenix police officer
David Uribe, detectives become aware that methamphetamine is a big
piece of the investigative puzzle.

The evidence is overwhelming that the accused cop killers were meth
freaks for whom the drug long had been a way of life.

The fact that Maricopa County's murder rate continues to be one of
the nation's highest isn't exclusively because of the onslaught of
meth use. Alcohol, crack cocaine and other variables also have caused
citizens to become instruments of violence. But the impact of
methamphetamine in the stark world of homicide cannot be denied.

"It's all about meth," Detective Femenia says. "Yeah, there's alcohol
mixed in, and crack cocaine still pops up here and there. And
sometimes, someone just gets pissed off at someone else and kills
them. But we know what we're seeing in terms of an increase in
murders where meth is involved, and it ain't pretty."

One of many cases in which meth allegedly provided the actual motive
for murder happened in September 2004, when three young Phoenix
residents were shot to death in their condo near Seventh Street and
Bethany Home Road.

A year later, last September 13, police arrested 22-year-old Michael
Craig Walton on first-degree homicide charges. Prosecutors have
alleged that Walton murdered the trio after smoking meth with them,
then stole the remaining stash and some money. (The murderer also
shot a pit bull in the head, but the dog survived.)

Toxicological testing by the medical examiner confirms that the
victims -- two men and a woman -- had used meth shortly before they
were murdered.

"This is a perfect example of the violence that goes hand-in-hand
with that kind of drug," Phoenix police Detective Tony Morales said
shortly after the murders.

New Times' research on death by meth shows that far more murder
victims have been dying with methamphetamine in their blood this year
than last year. This year's victims have had meth in them more than
any other substance, including the traditional standbys alcohol and cocaine.

For example, last May -- the month that Joey Borunda died -- eight of
21 murder victims in Phoenix had meth in them when they died, or
almost four in 10 victims. By comparison, only two of Phoenix's 13
murder victims died after ingesting meth in May 2004.

The New Times research suggests that the May 2005 statistics are no aberration.

Of the 115 murders in Phoenix in the first six months of this year,
38 people -- at least one in three victims -- had methamphetamine in them.

That was a distinct increase over the approximately one in four of
the murder victims during the first six months of 2004 that had
ingested meth, or 26 of 110.

During the first half of this year, 22 of the 115 murder victims died
after using cocaine, 26 had been drinking alcohol and 32 had nothing
in their systems. (Toxicological tests on 11 of the 115 victims
remain unavailable, so overall numbers aren't precise. In some
instances, victims had more than one substance in their bodies when they died.)

In other words, methamphetamine is number-one with a bullet when it
comes to murder in Phoenix.

And consider this stunning fact:

All but three of the 22 people shot by Phoenix police in 2004 (14 of
whom died) had meth in them at the time.

And every one of the eight people shot by the Phoenix cops in the
first six months this year (six of whom died) had consumed meth
shortly before they were shot.

Those few who engaged in violent clashes with city police and didn't
have meth and/or alcohol in their systems had long histories of
serious mental illness.

That list includes Douglas Tatar, who murdered police officers Jason
Wolfe and Eric White in August 2004 at the Northern Point Apartments
in north Phoenix. The 29-year-old Tatar committed suicide at the scene.

The New Times research also shows that people dying of meth-related
reasons who haven't been murdered has been rising at a faster pace.

Forty-nine people in Maricopa County died in the first six months of
this year of methamphetamine overdoses, meth-related heart attacks
and hemorrhages.

That was almost double the number of similar deaths for the same
reasons from January through June 2004. It's been a dramatic upswing,
even when accounting for Phoenix's 3 percent increase in population
from 2004 to 2005.

"Deaths from methamphetamine use have been on a very steady rise for
about five years or so," says Norm Wade, Maricopa County's chief
toxicologist. "But what's really troubling is, we've been seeing a
much higher incidence in the last year or so. I'm not just talking
about homicides. A rule of thumb is, if you want to survive for a
while and you have any kind of medical condition at all, don't do meth."

Dr. Frank LoVecchio says 95 percent of the people checking into
Banner Good Samaritan Regional Hospital's emergency room complaining
of shortness of breath and showing signs of agitation and excited
speech are on meth.

"It's almost all methamphetamine right now, far more than crack or
anything else," says LoVecchio, the medical director of Good Sam's
Poison Control Center and an emergency-room doctor at the hospital.
"We see meth overdoses on a regular basis, and in all ages and ethnic
groups. People will come in denying at first that they've ingested
anything, before they may finally own up to it."

Norm Wade also points out that "the coming-down phase," when meth
users must endure the crash of crashes, sometimes has proved too much to bear.

"Sometimes suicide apparently seems like the best option to these
folks," he says.

Nineteen people in Maricopa County committed suicide under the
influence of meth in the first six months of 2005, compared with 13
during the same time period in 2004.

Another 27 people under the influence of meth died in accidents of
one sort or another from January through June of this year, an
increase of seven over 2004. Those accidents included car and
motorcycle wrecks (most of them single-vehicle), bicyclists and
pedestrians hit by cars, and drownings.

People on methamphetamine this year have died in hot tubs, in their
backyards, in motel rooms, in ditches, and on the toilet.

The oldest person with meth discovered postmortem in his system was a
66-year-old Phoenix man who succumbed in his backyard.

The youngest was a 14-year-old Phoenix boy who also died at his home.

Other recent typical examples of death by meth:

A 15-year-old Mesa girl under methamphetamine intoxication after
attending a party.

A 54-year-old Tolleson farm worker who suffered a cerebral hemorrhage
with a load of meth in him.

A 35-year-old man under the influence of meth who leaned against a
metal storage shed electrified by a live wire.

A 17-year-old Tempe boy who hanged himself in his bathroom while
coming down from a dose of meth.

A 34-year-old woman awaiting a liver transplant who smoked too much
meth and suffered a fatal brain aneurysm.

Transients have died of methamphetamine abuse, as have middle-class
citizens with decent jobs. Even the occasional person of means has
fallen victim to the drug.

Also, if the incidence of meth-related deaths in the first half of
2005 is a fair indicator, Valley Latinos are embracing the drug in
numbers not seen before.

Thirty-four of the 38 Phoenix murder victims who died with
methamphetamine in their systems through this June were of Latino
descent. That's almost nine of every 10 cases.

Beyond ethnic origin, the number of people over the age of 30 dying
of meth-related causes has grown.

"I recently signed off on a 63-year-old woman with a heart condition
who died with a great deal of methamphetamine in her," county
toxicologist Wade says. "And this isn't nearly as uncommon as most
people might think."

Wade says he and his peers have identified an increasing number of
older people whose bodies haven't been able to withstand the
onslaught of a methamphetamine high -- and low.

Probably most disturbing of the deaths by meth have been the five
babies that were stillborn or died moments after their births in the
first half of 2005. All turned out to have methamphetamine in their
tiny bodies.

The Phoenix mother of Caleb Davis "had a history of drug use and no
prenatal care when she reportedly described having cramps at a
friend's house and delivered the child stillborn" last March, a
medical examiner's report says. Caleb also had an adult-size dose of
methamphetamine in his system, which pathologists blamed in part for his death.

A Mesa baby named Joseph Reising lived for just 15 minutes last April
after he was born more than three months prematurely. Joseph also had
meth in him. Official cause of death: "Complications due to maternal
[methamphetamine] use."

And in May, Baby Girl Atkinson was delivered stillborn at a Phoenix
hospital after her mother said she hadn't felt the fetus move for
more than a day. The official cause of death was "placental
abruption," the early separation of a normal placenta from the wall
of the uterus. The mother later tested positive for methamphetamine,
as did Baby Girl Atkinson.

Two other babies with meth in their bodies, Teresa Aguilar and Baby
Nissen, died in Maricopa County during the first six months of this year.

None of the five mothers has yet to be arrested for their roles in
their babies' deaths.

It's long past time to toss out the stereotype of the typical
methamphetamine user.

You know, the young pimply faced white loser dude who spends his days
bouncing off the walls of his single-wide in Apache Junction.

These days, it's clear that all manner of people are indulging in the drug.

Obviously not everyone who gets high on meth turns violent. But
Phoenix psychiatrist Jack Potts, who has interviewed hundreds of
tweakers incarcerated on criminal charges in the past decade,
testified earlier this year that meth "contributes to and causes
aggression. It causes an increase in violence in users."

Potts' observations are supported by recent studies, including one at
the East Bay Community Recovery Project in Oakland, California.

"[Meth-abusing] participants reported high levels of psychiatric
symptoms, particularly depression and attempted suicide," that study
concluded, "but also of anxiety and psychotic symptoms. [In addition,
participants] also reported high levels of problems controlling anger
and violent behavior, with a correspondingly high frequency of
assault and weapons charges."

The studies confirm what police in Phoenix and elsewhere have been
seeing since meth took over a few years ago as the hard-core drug of
choice: People on the drug tend to get violent and fatally stupid
when confronted by the cops.

Some clashes between the police and their meth-infused suspects since
the start of 2004 have been classic suicide-by-cop scenarios -- where
the suspect points a weapon at an officer as if to expedite his own demise.

Yet other clashes have happened by chance, as in March 2004, when
convicted felon Marty Baker tried to take a Phoenix cop's gun from
him during a routine stop. The cop shot him to death. Afterward,
authorities learned that Baker was on meth at the time.

The following month, Phoenix residents Adam Feenaughty and Rejane
Burgoyne stepped into a stolen car at a motel off Interstate 17. It
so happened that members of a Phoenix police auto-theft task force
were watching, and approached the pair.

The driver, Burgoyne, allegedly tried to run down the cops, who fired
and killed both men.

Both dead men had meth in them.

Just three days later, Phoenix police responded to a call about a guy
inside a home on North 40th Place who was acting crazy. The cops
found Daniel Lepker, who threatened them with knives and an ax.

An officer used a Taser on Lepker, to no avail. The suspect then
jumped through a neighbor's window wielding the ax. He pointed what
two cops later said they'd believed was a semi-automatic pistol at them.

They fired at Lepker, killing him instantly. The suspect's "pistol"
later turned out to be a pellet gun. His postmortem turned up a
mammoth amount of methamphetamine in his body.

Before the week of April 24, 2004, ended, Phoenix police had killed
two more men, Frank Romero and Rudy Chavarria, in separate incidents.
They had large amounts of meth in them.

By the end of 2004, two more men lost their lives after consuming
methamphetamine and getting into fatal run-ins with cops.

Though the number of Phoenix police-involved shootings has been down
this year (thanks in part to the successful deployment of
controversial Taser shocks), every such clash through June had been
with a suspect on meth.

In early January, meth user Edward Laborin committed suicide on North
59th Drive after he pointed a handgun at police. An officer shot
Laborin in the buttocks just before the 24-year-old killed himself.

The most controversial of this year's police shootings of suspects --
the May 3 death of another 24-year-old, Keith Graff, at a north
Phoenix complex -- had an almost-certain meth angle.

Graff died of cardiac arrest after police shocked him with Taser guns
for a deadly 84 seconds, far longer than the norm. Though
toxicological results of Graff's blood, urine and bile samples
haven't been released, court records show he'd long been a
methamphetamine abuser.

In July 2002, the former U.S. Army soldier admitted to Phoenix police
after getting stopped in a stolen truck that he'd just smoked meth.
That led to a nine-month jail term for car theft. And in June 2004,
police found meth in Graff's possession, and he was facing a prison
sentence at the time of his death.

Graff's survivors have filed a wrongful-death civil lawsuit against
the Phoenix Police Department in connection with the clash.

Just one week after Graff's death, Phoenix Officer Uribe died after
he was shot from close range during a routine stop of a late-model
Monte Carlo near the intersection of 35th Avenue and West Cactus Road.

Donnie Delahanty, now facing the death penalty in the murder with
co-defendant Chris Wilson, allegedly told several friends in the days
preceding the killing that he'd shoot any cop who stopped him in his car.

Delahanty and Wilson weren't arrested for a few days after the
senseless slaying, which cast a pall over the community. The pair
weren't tested for drugs after their arrests, and any methamphetamine
in their systems at the time of the murder would have dissipated by then.

The motive for murder remains a mystery, as the men hadn't done
anything overtly wrong that day other than driving with stolen
license plates. But they also were admitted tweakers who had been
running meth back and forth from Phoenix to Tucson at the time of the shooting.

Delahanty had the following exchange with Detective Jack Ballentine
shortly after his arrest:

"You know what you been livin' in, bud?" Ballentine asked the
19-year-old Phoenix man during an intense interview at the downtown
police station.

Delahanty shook his head in the negative.

"You been livin' in a tweaker's world. And what's the main thing that
happens in that world? What's it called? [How] does everybody get
when they're tweaking?"

Delahanty continued to stare blankly at the detective as his mind
stretched for the right answer.

Finally, he said, "Have to go to jail?"

"No, not that," Ballentine replied. "It's paranoid. Right?"

"Yeah!"

"Paranoia runs [you] crazy," the detective continued.

"Yup!" the accused cop killer agreed.

Delahanty and Wilson have pleaded not guilty.

A well-publicized shootout at Sky Harbor International Airport last
July 8 also had strong overtones of methamphetamine abuse.

Three Phoenix officers were wounded by gunfire during an extended car
chase with 35-year-old Jason Eugene Lee, who was driving a stolen
2004 Ford Mustang. The chase ended after Lee's car tires blew out
when he drove over concrete curbs at the airport.

Lee then shot himself to death. He was armed with a .12-gauge shotgun
and a .45-caliber handgun.

Toxicological tests revealed that he'd ingested a huge amount of meth
(more than any other individual in the New Times mortality database)
shortly before the shootout.

Another high-profile case with methamphetamine written all over it
was the shooting last August 3 of two law enforcement officers about
to take Joseph Spano into custody at a west Phoenix probation office.

Spano shot and seriously wounded a county probation officer and a
deputy U.S. marshal during the clash. The 25-year-old later killed
himself with his weapon as Phoenix police closed in on him near downtown.

At the time, Spano was on probation after serving more than seven
years for armed robbery, and was about to be re-arrested after
testing positive for methamphetamine.

Detective Femenia still hasn't gotten the break he needs to arrest
anyone in last May's head-bashing murder of Joey Borunda. But he's
not done trying.

The detective remains convinced that one or both Ortega brothers,
Bear or Psycho, is good for the killing. Femenia quips that the
brothers are the deans of the "Ortega Crime Academy," also known as
the "Ortega Institute of Meth-Related Criminal Acts."

The detective spoke in August to a few dozen of the Ortegas' worried
neighbors at a Block Watch meeting.

"My goal today is to stir things up here," he told the gathering at
the nearby Our Lady of Guadalupe monastery. "I know that our victim
in this crime isn't a saint. But our philosophy is that every victim
deserves our best effort, and that's why I'm here. This was a
senseless killing. Someone went into a sudden rage. Meth was involved
in this killing."

A woman asked if methamphetamine is worse than the other illegal
drugs out there.

"It's worse than anything we've seen," Femenia immediately replied.
"Some years ago, it was PCP, Sherm, crack cocaine. Let me tell you,
people on meth act extremely unpredictably. It's just as if they're
possessed. I mean it -- possessed."

The detective turned to the nun hosting the event, and said somewhat
sheepishly, "Excuse me, Sister."

She smiled and told him it was okay.

"I believe in evil," he continued. "I believe that evil exists. And I
think that meth can inject a big surge of evil in certain people."

After Femenia concluded, a woman warned him that "the Ortegas have a
pretty rough reputation around here with the meth and everything. You
have your work cut out for you."

"I know," the detective said.

Baylee Powell contributed to this report.