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1969 Ny times~ Walter Vandermeer was a 12 year old boy who died on a Sunday morning in a locked bathroom in Harlem of an overdose of heroin. He was the youngest person to die from a heroin overdose, according to city medical officials, and had been taking heroin for perhaps two years. Dr. Michael Baden, associate city medical examiner, said yesterday that the number of children and teen-agers dying from heroin overdoses had increased as much as 300 per cent in the last year. Neighborhood children, according to Dr. Baden, knew Walter as a successful seller of drugs who sold heroin to support his growing habit. The boy, who was 12 years old Dec. 1, was found Sunday afternoon in the second-floor common bathroom at 310 West 117th Street, around the corner from his home. Equipment at His Side He had entered the bathroom about midnight Saturday night and locked himself in to take drugs, Dr. Baden said. Two glassine envelopes that had contained heroin, a syringe, a needle and a bottle cap, used to cook heroin, were found at his side by the police. Mrs. Elinor Williams, a resident of the building, found his body at 4 P.M. Sunday after she had forced the lock on the bathroom door. The boy was wearing a Snoopy sweatshirt with the inscription on the back: “Watch out for me. I want to bite somebody to release my tension.” Walter’s mother, Mrs. Lilly Price, interviewed in the crowded four-room apartment of a friend at 371 West 116th Street, said she had not known that Walter was taking drugs. Mrs. Price, a welfare recipient who receives $412 a month, had moved to her temporary home with several of her 10 children, including Walter, a month ago after she was evicted from her six-room apartment for nonpayment of rent. She had last seen Walter at 10 P.M. Saturday, several hours before he died. The light-skinned Negro boy, who was 4 feet 11 inches tall and weighed 80 pounds and liked to wear his hair in an Afro hairdo, promised to bring back a Sunday newspaper. Mrs. Price, 45, did not report Walter missing when he failed to return home Saturday night. She assumed he was staying with one of his friends. Mrs. Price said that she had seen no sign that Walter was a heroin addict. Dr. Baden reported that the boy’s body bore no marks from unclean needles but that it was still possible that he had been addicted to heroin for some time. Dr. Baden said that Walter had been arrested for possession of drugs. Mrs. Price, who said that Walter’s father was deported to British Guiana shortly after the boy was born in 1957, also said that she could not say for sure whether Walter had been attending school for the last two years. But the boy’s godmother, Mrs. Barbara Banks, who lives at 305 West 117th Street, said that Walter had not attended school in a “couple of years.’ He had been expelled from Public School 76 when he was nine years old, she said. “His mother took him to court quite some time ago,” she said. “He had been having trouble. She was supposed to take him to a psychiatric clinic, but she never followed through. “The boy was starved for attention and affection. It just got to the place where he just roamed the streets.” ‘Just Like a Little Hustler’ What Walter found in the streets, Mrs. Banks said, were friends who introduced him to heroin. “The crowd he was with—men on the avenue let him hang on the streets just like a little hustler,” said Mrs. Banks. Mrs. Price’s eldest child is 20 years old and her youngest is 4. A 19-year-old son, according to Dr. Baden, is being held on Rikers Island on a narcotics charge. About 50 children between the ages of 14 and 16 died this year from overdoses of heroin, Dr. Baden said. Last year there were no deaths of children under 15. About 800 heroin addicts of all ages died this year from overdoses, according to Dr. Baden. More than 200 of them were 19 and younger. The number of such deaths among teenagers has risen threefold from last year, when 72 of 700 heroin deaths were among individuals 19 and younger.
