Reporting from York, Maine — The obituary in the York Weekly was heartbreaking.
Just 17, Bethany Fritz was a high school senior hoping to study art at the University of Maine. She lived in an affluent coastal community of tidal pools, winding roads and thick stands of maple and oak. She loved her family and friends, her two cats and her dog, Farleigh.
Unmentioned was her cause of death: an overdose of heroin.
"We were completely flabbergasted that someone could get heroin here," said Sarah Lachance, one of Bethany's older sisters. "We thought heroin was something only junkies in the city did."
New England may be thousands of miles from the producers and brutal drug enterprises of Mexico and Colombia. But a busy pipeline from Mexico resolutely moves heroin and cocaine to emerging markets as far away as coastal Maine, where more and more addicts fill courtrooms, jail cells, treatment facilities and morgues.
"It's just unbelievable what we've seen here," said Edward Strong, police chief in nearby Kittery. "I can remember when people around here didn't know what the word 'heroin' meant. Now, it's everywhere -- cheaper, more available and demand is high."
When Bethany died in 2004, York's small police department didn't have a full-time narcotics investigator. Tom Cryan, the detective assigned to the case, admitted, "I wasn't getting anywhere."
Then he got an offer of help from Steve Hamel, the full-time narcotics detective in Kittery, another tiny coastal community one exit south on Interstate 95. Hamel already was working closely with a narcotics officer in the next town down the coast, Portsmouth, N.H.
Detectives from the three departments banded together to trace the source of the heroin and, eventually, helped send Bethany's boyfriend and his supplier to prison.
Now, the detectives have created an unofficial partnership, impishly dubbing themselves the Seacoast Narcotics Interdiction Force, or SNIF. Although their home cities have a combined population of only 40,000, they've shut down several local heroin and cocaine rings and racked up dozens of arrests in three states.
But, Hamel said, "you could have 30 guys at every police department doing drug enforcement and you still couldn't keep up."
Most days, southern Maine's preeminent narcotics officer looks like a suburban father on his way to the hardware store: blue jeans, work boots and a New England Patriots cap shading a sunburned face.
