FAST TRAIN ENDED COUPLE'S FREEFALL

Drugs, Legal Ills Spurred Elizabeth Suicides

They were a young couple whose lives were unraveling fast.

Straining under a $300-a-day drug habit, evicted from a $750-a-month
apartment and on the run from the law for a burglary at a relative's home,
Theresa LaMarca, 22, and Damien Connors, 26, went to their deaths together.

The pair walked onto the railroad tracks at the North Elizabeth station
Monday afternoon holding hands. They crouched and then embraced as they
waited for the speeding Amtrak train. The train's engineer told police
there was no way to stop in time.

LaMarca's family said yesterday they had been desperately trying to contact
their daughter for several months. When police officers came to the door of
the family's home in Hillside and told them how Theresa had died, said her
mother, Barbara LaMarca, her worst fear came true.

"They got on the tracks and felt that was the only way out, that they had
reached the end of the rope," she said. "When I saw so many police officers
in front of my house, I just knew something terrible had happened."

Police said it appeared that the couple had planned their deaths. Although
neither had written a suicide note, each left a gym bag on the train
station platform. Their driver's licenses were inside the bags.

Police were unable to give an account of how the couple spent their final
hours, but Barbara LaMarca has no doubt that her daughter and the young man
she had been living with since moving out of the family's home in August
had been on a downward spiral.

Drugs had sapped her daughter's desire to follow her dream of landing a job
in computers, she said. Although she took classes at Union County College
after graduating from St. Mary's High School in Elizabeth, Theresa LaMarca
never finished.

"Instead of focusing on her life, she was focusing on drugs," Barbara
LaMarca said. "And the drugs were doing the focusing for her."

Her family suspects that a $58,000 court settlement Theresa LaMarca
received from a car crash several years ago was spent on drugs.

"She was going to work part-time and go back to school, but then she got
that money and every day was party time until the money ran out," said her
father, John LaMarca.

The couple was suspected of burglarizing the LaMarcas' home April 29 and
making off with a stack of blank checks. More than $5,000 worth were cashed
before the LaMarcas closed the account.

Although police had not caught up with the couple, authorities told
LaMarca's parents that their daughter and Connors had a $200- to
$300-per-day drug habit and it was likely they used heroin and painkillers.

"She was desperate. She knew the police were looking for them," Barbara
LaMarca said.

Court records show LaMarca and Connors were evicted from their apartment on
North Broad Street in Elizabeth in late April. They owed more than $2,300
in rent and failed to appear at a court hearing, according to court records.

Even before the burglary, Barbara LaMarca, 57, a seamstress, and her
husband, a 61-year-old machinist, believed their daughter was in trouble.

The LaMarcas had last seen their daughter and Connors at Christmas. In the
days after that, Theresa LaMarca broke a date with her father. She had
bought him a car stereo and arranged to meet him to have it installed.

When his daughter never met him or called, the couple began to worry. Over
and over they called. Their daughter was never home. Cards were sent. They
went unanswered.

"I wanted her to know that we were there for her. That we would help her,"
her mother said.

The LaMarcas did not know their daughter's boyfriend well.

LaMarca told her parents that she and Connors had met at a bar in
Kenilworth and that he had a good-paying job as a butcher.

"He has a good job. He makes a good living," Barbara LaMarca remembers her
daughter telling her.

"I guess they hit it off," Barbara LaMarca said. "She thought she was in love."

It seemed that the couple had music in common.

Theresa LaMarca's passion was music, rock music -- Pink Floyd, Nine Inch
Nails -- the harder and louder the better.

As a senior at Roselle Park High School, Connors had talked about his love
for music. "I dreamed of one day of owning a drum set and playing in a
heavy metal band," he wrote in a school essay.

On the street in Roselle Park where Connors grew up, neighbors remembered
him as a nice kid who cut the grass and shoveled snow for neighbors.

"He hasn't been around much in the last couple of years," said Fred Miller,
a Pershing Avenue resident since the 1950s. "This is a terrible shock."

Connors' family declined to comment.

Yesterday, Barbara and John LaMarca tended to the details for their
daughter's funeral and burial. They were helped by their son, Michael
LaMarca, 19, a swimmer at Montclair State University, and his other sister,
Anna LaMarca, 23, who recently graduated from Montclair State.

Michael LaMarca said Theresa had struggled with life since the car crash.

"She had this vision that everything was going to work out," he said. "But
something always came up and it never seemed to work out."