Why Did Walter Die?

In the bathroom of a Harlem tenement, Walter Vandermeer died last week from a dose of heroin. Some 800 others have died in New York City this year from the same cause, including more than 200 teenagers. What sets Walter's death apart is the fact that he was only twelve years old-- the youngest child on record to die from heroin in the city. John Schoonbeck of TIME'S New York bureau had worked with Walter as a counselor at Manhattan's Floyd Patterson House, a residential treatment center for emotionally disturbed children. Schoonbeck wrote this report:

When Walt was five months old, his father was deported to Surinam for violating immigration laws. The child spent the rest of his short life looking for a father surrogate. His search was limited to the area around Harlem's West 116th Street, where--like many children who grow up there--he learned about hustling, dope and sex before he was ten. Often he subsisted on potato chips, baloney and sodas.

At the Floyd Patterson House, Walt was the youngest of ten children in my group, but by far the toughest and most severely disturbed. Nobody knew quite what to do for Walt. He needed enough to eat, clothes to wear, adults to model himself after, toys to play with, a place to live. He needed and asked for lots of love, support and dependability. He got none of these--and it enraged him. He had learned to suspect everyone, and if he thought he was being crossed or cheated, his anger was uncontrolled. At first, he would kick a door, his eyes lowered; then he would smash things and curse. Eventually he would work himself up to a fight. Once I tried to get him in a shower to cool him off; after half an hour he succeeded in putting me in the shower. We knew that his emotional problems were beyond our capacity to treat. In October 1968, Family Court ordered Walt remanded to the custody of his mother, Mrs. Lilly Price. Neither the boy nor his mother was present at the court hearing.

Six in a Bed. Walt was the fifth of ten children from his mother's several marriages. Only Walt and four others still lived with her, and she supported them on a $412 monthly welfare check. About two months ago, after the family was evicted from their apartment for not paying rent, they moved into a single dingy room in a friend's home. There was only one bed for all six of them.

"Walter hadn't been going to school," says his mother, "but he went out and sold papers or carried groceries. He didn't support us--he just bought the things he wanted, like a pair of socks."

Snoopy Sweatshirt. Violence is a fact of life to the children of West 116th Street, but in the weeks just before his death, Walt had more than his share. Earlier this month, someone dropped a brick on his head, and the wound had to be stitched. A few days later he was hit by a car, suffering scratches and bruises. A week after that, he fell from a fire escape.

The coroner who examined Walt found scar tissue under the skin of the boy's arm, indicating that he had shot heroin before. There was no evidence of the needle tracks common to hardcore addicts. Still, Walter weighed only 80 lbs.; so a double injection of heroin --the suspected dosage--would have been enough to depress his breathing and kill him. Was he deliberately given too powerful a dose? Maybe he had threatened a pusher, many of whom are his own age. Or did he perhaps know exactly what he was doing?

One thing is certain--Walt had no trouble getting the stuff. Take a ride down 116th Street sometime; see the pushers openly peddling heroin to young blacks for $2 a bag. If you go on a mild gray day, you will see doped youngsters nodding listlessly in doorways. This was Walt's Main Street; it was all he ever knew.

When he was found on the bathroom floor of a neighborhood rooming house, he was wearing one of those Snoopy sweatshirts so popular with kids of his age. It bore the inscription: "I wish I could bite somebody ... I need a release from my inner tensions!" It was not just heroin that killed Walter. Maybe, like many another child born black in the ghetto, he died of his whole life.

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