Heroin is silent scourge of sheltered Springville

SPRINGVILLE — The spoons mysteriously disappeared like socks in a washing machine.

There were fewer and fewer to put in the silverware drawer each time Sandi Daoust unloaded the dishwasher. The forks and knives didn't come up missing, just the spoons. At one point, there were only two. The children said they didn't know anything about it.

"We were totally perplexed," Daoust said of herself and her husband, Don. "We just thought they were eating cereal and throwing them away."

It wasn't until two years later that the mystery unraveled, as did life in the Daoust family. Her 16-year-old son, Robby Nunes, told her he was addicted — not to cereal but to heroin. In gutting his bedroom while he was in rehab, Daoust found a sock stuffed deep in a drawer. Inside was a syringe, a lighter and a burned spoon.

"That's one of the missing clues that I would know so obviously now," she said.

Heroin is the silent scourge of Springville.

Teenagers and young men are taking the highly addictive drug at an inexplicably alarming level in this tree-covered, upper-middle-class community 45 miles south of Salt Lake City that bills itself as Utah's art capital. They're committing petty thefts and home and car burglaries, even stealing from their own families to support their habits. And they are dying.

"It used to be that kids would only get into that in really tough neighborhoods in New York and Los Angeles," said Dr. Joseph Miner, executive director of the Utah County Health Department. "I mean, it's just not the thing you would expect from a little Mormon Utah town."

No one seems able to answer the looming question: Why Springville?

Getting an exact count of heroin-induced or heroin-related deaths in Springville is difficult. Death records are not public. State and local health agencies track drug deaths, but often the cause is listed as something else, such as heart failure. In addition, the data is usually one or two years behind.

BORDER="0">

BORDER="1"> FACE="Verdana,Helvetica,Arial" SIZE="2">Additional information: FACE="Verdana,Helvetica,Arial" SIZE="2"> June 10: Heroin takes toll on families June 11: Residents remain in denial