PAIN. ADDICTION. DEATH.

Friends knew him to be an upstanding Christian, but there was another side
to Cliff Rivera. Lately, the Mandeville man had been holding up pharmacies
- -- up to three a day -- to get pills he craved to relieve searing, chronic
pain. After the last robbery, police shot him when he appeared to point a
gun at them. Sunday, May 22, 2005 By Paul Rioux St. Tammany bureau

Cliff Rivera's aching back had gotten so bad a year ago that he lay
facedown on the floor at his church group meeting as the other members
knelt around him and prayed for God to ease the chronic pain.

A friend who took part in the faith healing said it was like trying to
exorcise a demon that was gradually taking over Rivera's life.

"Day after day, the nagging pain was taking a toll on him," said David
Ducote. "He turned to his faith for strength, but looking back now, you can
see that it was really starting to break his spirit."

Rivera, 27, ruptured a disc in his back a couple of years ago while working
as a carpenter in Metairie, friends said. Some nights he couldn't sleep,
and some days he never got out of bed as the pain radiated throughout his
body, they said.

Rivera, who moved to Mandeville about five months ago, found some relief
when he went to a pain-management clinic and got a prescription for the
painkiller Lortab. But he became addicted to the pills and started going to
other clinics to get multiple prescriptions for the drug, friends and
authorities said.

To support his habit, authorities said, Rivera embarked on a one-man crime
wave in February, committing as many as 20 armed robberies in less than
four months, including as many as three in a single night.

The downward spiral ended May 5 when Rivera was shot to death by Mandeville
police after he robbed the same pharmacy for the second time in 10 days,
Police Chief Tom Buell said.

The violent end to Rivera's crime spree came only 31/2 weeks after federal
agents raided three high-volume pain management clinics and four associated
pharmacies, and made several arrests in a high-profile assault on what
authorities described as illegal pill factories.

The New Orleans City Council and many other parish and municipal
governments in the metro area -- St. Bernard Parish was the first, in March
- -- recently enacted moratoriums to prevent new pain management clinics from
opening.

Meanwhile, four bills aimed at cracking down on the indiscriminate
prescription and dispensing of controlled-substance painkillers appear to
be on their way to easy passage in the current session of the Legislature.

All of the bills will help deal with the mounting problems, state Sen. Tom
Schedler, sponsor of two of the bills, said Friday. About 80 percent of the
problems arise from "lay-ownership clinics," or facilities owned by
nondoctors, he said.

"But none of (these) bills are a silver bullet that solves the problem,"
said Schedler, R-Mandeville.

The long-term solution, he said, is creation of a national database to
track prescriptions of controlled substances so pharmacists can quickly
check whether a patient is filling a prescription of the same medicine he
or she filled recently at a different drugstore.

Schedler said Louisiana hopes to have its statewide program in place by
late 2006 or early 2007, with the help of a federal grant.

The state and local action is designed to address cases similar to Rivera's.

A Different Man

On May 5, during a wild predawn car chase after the robbery at the
Walgreens drugstore on U.S. 190, police say, Rivera twice tried to run over
officers. They riddled his pickup truck with bullets before fatally
shooting him after the truck crashed in a ditch and he refused to
surrender, police said.

The news stunned Rivera's friends, who described him as an outgoing,
compassionate and devoutly religious man who often carried a Bible and
regularly attended church.

As the reality of Rivera's final days set in, his friends said the
gun-wielding robber who had terrorized employees at businesses across
eastern Jefferson Parish and in Mandeville was not the man they knew.

"Cliff was not some coldblooded criminal," Ducote said. "He was a decent,
average guy who got hooked on these pills, and that's what made him commit
these terrible crimes."

Thomas Lefeat, 18, who grew up in the Kenner neighborhood near The
Esplanade shopping mall where Rivera used to live with his parents, said he
and other teens on the block often turned to Rivera for advice about
adolescent problems.

"Cliff was the keeper of the neighborhood," he said. "He was a very loving
person who watched out for everyone. When he saw you, he didn't want a
handshake; he wanted a hug."

Friends said Rivera's appearance -- he had a couple of tattoos and an
earring, and often wore muscle shirts and a gold chain around his neck --
belied the warm person they knew him to be.

"I thought he was a gangster boy when I first met him," Ducote said. "He
liked to play the tough guy, but he was soft as a teddy bear inside."

Before he hurt his back, Rivera organized an effort to replace the roof on
the home of a family that could not afford to pay for the work, friends said.

Ducote said he got to know Rivera at biweekly prayer group meetings at
Celebration Church on Airline Drive in Metairie. He said Rivera, who worked
odd jobs when his back permitted, invariably prayed for an end to the pain
and a steady job.

"You get pretty depressed if you can't find work," Ducote said. "You take
that away from a man, and he starts to feel like he's got nothing."

Cycle Of Addiction

One of the bright spots in Rivera's life, friends said, was his engagement
to Melanie Barletto. The couple moved into a Mandeville apartment several
months ago with her two children from a previous marriage.

"He was a great guy who would do anything for anybody," Barletto said. "He
brought Jesus into my life and never would have hurt anyone. I think God
took him away before the devil could bring him down."

Barletto said Rivera built up a tolerance to the painkillers and
continually needed to take more for them to be effective.

"Whenever his pain pills would get low, he would get stressed out," she
said. "He would get worried and say things like, 'What am I going to do if
I start hurting again?' "

She said Rivera admitted to her that he had a problem and sometimes prayed
with her for the strength to end the cycle of addiction.

"He said he hated having to take the pills, but I never really knew how bad
it was," she said. "He was very hardheaded and wanted to handle it on his own."

A String Of Robberies

After the Walgreens robbery in which Rivera took three bottles of
hydrocodone, police searched the couple's apartment and found several
bottles of painkillers and two appointment cards in Rivera's name for
pain-management clinics.

Buell said a recent crackdown on some pain clinics, for allegedly
prescribing narcotics improperly, may have caused Rivera to turn to robbery
to support his habit.

He said Rivera is suspected of 20 business robberies, in Metairie, Kenner
and Mandeville, since February. Authorities have identified Rivera in
surveillance video from several of the robberies, and he fits a description
of the suspect in the others, Buell said.

Detectives said the robber appeared to be growing increasingly desperate
and brazen, committing multiple robberies in a single night and victimizing
one shop as many as six times.

"We were concerned this guy was going to end up killing someone if we
didn't stop him first," Buell said.

Several of Rivera's friends said the pain clinics share some of the blame
for his addiction and subsequent crime spree.

"It's like they want to get these people hooked so they can turn a profit,"
Ducote said.

Friends said they didn't think Rivera went to any of the clinics that were
raided, but they said he found it harder to get pills as some other clinics
began issuing fewer prescriptions in an apparent response to the crackdown.

Buell said that squares with a pattern in which Rivera allegedly switched
from robbing businesses for money to holding up pharmacies for pain pills
shortly after the raids.

"Cliff said he didn't think it was fair to just shut down the clinics and
make everyone quit cold turkey," Barletto said. "He thought they should
have detox clinics that people could go to."

Buell has said authorities need to monitor that unintended side-effect of
the pain-clinic crackdown to ensure that other users don't follow the path
Rivera took to continue feeding his addiction.

No Ammunition

While acknowledging that armed robbery is a violent crime, Rivera's friends
said they could not imagine him hurting anyone.

"I think the gun was just used as an intimidation factor so he could get
what he wanted," Lefeat said. "He would never have pulled the trigger."

After Rivera died, authorities searched his truck and found the weapon they
believe he used in the Walgreens robbery: a black pellet gun that resembled
a semiautomatic pistol, St. Tammany Parish Sheriff's Office spokesman James
Hartman said.

He said the gun was not loaded and did not even have a carbon dioxide
cartridge needed to fire it. But in the eyes of the law, the Walgreens
holdup is still considered an armed robbery, Hartman said, adding that
detectives don't know whether the same weapon was used in the other robberies.

Barletto said the revelation that Rivera apparently used an unloaded pellet
gun in at least one of the robberies supports her belief that he didn't
want to physically harm his victims.

"If he really intended to hurt them, he would have used a real gun with
real ammunition," she said.

Friends said that in a surveillance clip from one of the robberies that was
played on a local TV station, the robber, presumably Rivera, could be heard
reassuring the clerk that he wasn't going to harm anyone.

However, Buell said, Rivera was so forceful during the Walgreens robbery
that the victims felt certain he was going to kill them.

"He was very rough with them," Buell said. "He put the clerk in a headlock
and pointed a gun in her face, and he ordered a customer to lie on the
floor. They both said they felt like they were about to die."

A Robbery And A Chase

The 4:30 a.m. holdup was reported by a man who was about to enter the
pharmacy and realized it was being robbed.

Three Mandeville Police officers arrived within a minute and saw a man
running from the store, Buell said.

As the officers ran after the man, he got into a black pickup truck and
drove toward them in what they said was an attempt to run them over. The
officers fired several times at the pickup, which sped away, leading police
on a four-mile chase up and down North Causeway Boulevard.

Police fired about 20 shots at the pickup, peppering the windshield and
driver's window with at least a half-dozen bullet holes before the truck
crashed in a ditch south of Fairway Drive and got stuck in the mud.

Surrounded by officers with guns drawn, Rivera emerged from the truck with
a black leather jacket wrapped around his right hand. Ignoring orders to
drop what he was carrying and lie down, Rivera clasped his hands together
and turned toward the officers, police said.

Thinking he was aiming a gun at them, the officers opened fire, hitting
Rivera three times including once in the chest with a bullet that pierced
his heart and killed him almost instantly, authorities said. Police
determined later that Rivera was not carrying a gun when he was shot, but
they said he clearly implied he had one.

Some of Rivera's friends questioned why police didn't shoot out the truck's
tires or try to stop Rivera with a nonfatal wound. But Buell said officers
are trained to defend themselves with lethal force if they think a suspect
is trying to kill them.

A Sheriff's Office investigation is expected to be completed in about a
week. The preliminary findings suggest the shooting was "fully justified,"
Hartman said.

Ducote, a former reserve officer at the Covington Police Department, said
Rivera's actions were consistent with a so-called "suicide by cop" in which
a cornered suspect baits police into shooting him.

"He probably figured he had nothing to live for," Ducote said. "I'm sure he
was afraid he was going to spend the rest of his life in jail."

Buell said it's possible Rivera wanted officers to shoot him.

"He had to know they weren't going to let him keep moving around like that
in such a threatening manner," he said. "I don't understand why he didn't
just give up. He must have known he had nowhere to go."

Lefeat said Rivera may have put his hands together to pray for forgiveness.
But Buell said police videotape of the shooting shows a man who appears to
be making a last stand, not preparing for final judgment.

Tandy Farizan, a longtime friend of Rivera's, said drug addiction changes a
person and that even those who were closest to Rivera will never know what
he was thinking at the end.

"I would love to defend Cliff, but what he did was obviously wrong. I can't
deny that," she said. "That doesn't mean he got what he deserved, though.
He had a serious problem and he needed help. But he didn't deserve to die."