Eagle Mountain family opens home to children from drug homes

EAGLE MOUNTAIN — Detective Earl Rose is in the middle of his drug presentation — the part where he shows the picture of a heroin addict whose arms are covered with oozing sores — when a girl in the front row turns pale, stumbles out the door and faints.

Good, he thinks. Let the students see what drugs can do to you. Let them see how your arm can smell like death, how a 40-year-old addict can easily look like she's 70. Let them see how innocent the toddlers look in the video, how filthy the houses are when police officers come to take the children away. He hopes the images will stay with the students for the rest of their lives.

Earl Rose has been a Salt Lake City undercover narcotics cop, so he's seen a lot of drug users up close. Now he works as a resource officer at Highland High in Salt Lake City. A drug addict, he tells the students, can leave behind a trail of victims, including children who struggle to recover from their own early childhoods.

Look at my own family, he says.

The first two foster boys who came to live with Earl and Tifiny Rose were 5- and 7-year-old brothers. They looked like prisoners of war, Earl says. Like a lot of meth users, their mother was often too strung out to eat, much less cook, so the boys had to look through the neighbors' garbage cans if they wanted a meal. For family fun, the mother and her boyfriend let the boys watch pornography.

Earl and Tif have since adopted the boys, plus five other siblings who also came from a meth home. Together with their own three children, and two more foster sons, that makes 12, ages 2 to 17.

When she was younger, Tif vowed she would never marry a man named Earl. And never drive a Suburban or live in Tooele. Later, when she and Earl were living in Tooele and driving a Suburban, Tif realized how silly — maybe how tempting to the Fates — it is to say "never."

"I've kind of changed my wording now to I'd rather not," Tif says. As in I'd rather not drive a 15-passenger van.

She mentions all this because the other thing she said she'd never do is take in foster children. But then late one night nine years ago, after five miscarriages and the birth of her daughter, Tif was home watching a movie and the movie happened to be about foster children. She cried through a lot of it, and as soon as the final credits started rolling she called Earl, who was working the night shift. She said, "We're going to do foster care." And Earl said "OK."

That's how it is at the Rose home: Tif says "let's" and Earl says "sure."