JOHN WAYNE HEALY, 20

An `excellent father,' those few times he was free of dope

[PHOTO CAPTION] `He loved that baby so much,' a friend said of John Wayne
Healy's affection for his daughter, Alexis.

PARSIPPANY -- In the throes of his heroin addiction, John Wayne Healy was
driving with Jessica Hall, his on-and-off girlfriend and the mother of his
daughter, Alexis, when he happened upon a Denville church. On an impulse he
stopped the car, went inside, sprinkled holy water on himself, and knelt.

As Hall joined Healy in prayer, tears streamed down his face, tumbling over
the teenager's mustache and whiskers.

Some months later, on April 18, in an abandoned Mount Tabor pump house, it
was not tears but blood streaming down Healy's face. Foam formed at his
mouth and nostrils. He had just smoked heroin for the first time since
leaving drug rehabilitation two weeks before, and he was overdosing.

Just a few days earlier, Healy had been painting Easter eggs with his
friend Melissa Challan, a teetotaler and non-smoker he knew from Brooklawn
Middle School and Parsippany Hills High School. He hadn't touched heroin
since leaving the Hope House rehabilitation clinic, and he seemed a changed
man. "I'm making amends to everyone I've ever hurt," he told her.

He had hurt himself far more than anyone else in his 20 years. Healy was
just 14 when he began drinking, smoking marijuana and taking LSD. Heroin
dominated the last three years of his life.

Yet Healy had a compassionate side, and when he was not intoxicated or high
he was considerate, endearing and loyal.

"All you ever read about him was he was this raving lunatic. He wasn't,"
said Duane Carmody, Healy's friend since middle school. "He helped me a lot
when my mom died and my sister died."

Healy told Challan he had apologized to friends of Daniel Calderone for not
saying who was involved in the 15-year-old's fatal heroin overdose on March
18, 1997, in Parsippany. That had always been an unspoken topic, and Healy
wanted to clear his conscience.

His greatest regret was his distant relationship with his daughter, now 3
years old.

"He loved that baby so much," said Heather Ayres, 19, who knew Healy for
six years. "He would carry her picture all the time in his wallet."

"He was crazy about her," Challan said. "He didn't want to be involved in
her life when he was messed up on drugs."

Or rather, Hall, 19, wouldn't let him.

She did not want John Healy the heroin addict but rather the one who fawned
over Alexis, took her to Discovery Zone, and stopped randomly at
playgrounds when she was in the car.

"When he was a father, he was just the most excellent father you could
imagine," Hall said. "When he was there."

When he was a junkie, he was a disaster.

Eyes bloodshot, days from his last shower, he would run into Hall pushing
Alexis' stroller through the Rockaway Townsquare mall.

"He wanted to get back together and I wouldn't accept it," Hall said. "He
was on the dope again and I don't need that around my daughter."

Healy kept at it, leaving messages on Hall's answering machine. "I love
you, I love the baby," he would say. "You can't stop me from seeing her."

And Hall would wonder, "Why don't you stop doing drugs?"

Challan said Healy "would talk about how he wanted to do right by
(Jessica)." But he had been saying that for years, ever since she got
pregnant on Christmas Day, 1994, when she was 15 and he 16.

At first, Healy had been shocked when, at the end of a 12-hour phone call,
Hall said she was pregnant but not certain that he was the father. "I can't
believe you," he said. "I don't know that it's my child."

During a later phone call, Healy -- "totally trashed," in Hall's words --
laid the guilt on her. A sober Healy called back the next day and apologized.

"He said he'd be there for me, support me," Hall recalled. "That he loves me."

She and Healy spoke often by phone but never visited. "He was partying all
the time, in holding cells all the time," Hall said. "He would be gone for
two weeks. I would just assume he was in jail."

Alexis was born on Sept. 7, 1995. Healy met his daughter in November. For
two glorious months he visited daily, helping to feed, change and bathe
Alexis.

However, the pressures of motherhood got to Hall, and she and Healy broke up.

"I felt tied down," she said, "and I started to go out with someone else
and so did he. He was very upset with me for leaving him. He missed the
baby a lot. He told me he didn't care if it wasn't his, that he would
always be her daddy." (A paternity test later proved he was the father.)

When Alexis was 9 months old, her parents got back together. "We had a
really nice first birthday party," Hall said. "Joe Gearhart was there."

It was not a casual mention of Joe Gearhart. Gearhart was with Healy that
chilly night at the pump house. Bryan Pasanen, 16, and Jackie Smith, 17,
were drinking beer with them, Pasanen said.

"I didn't do (heroin), so they didn't do it in front of me," said Pasanen,
who left at 1:30 a.m. or 2 a.m., before heroin, purchased in Newark, appeared.

It was about 13 hours before 13-year-old Jarrett Cronk, who lives nearby,
and two friends found Healy against the west wall of the pump house. The
blood from his nostrils was partially dried, his skin cold and pale. There
was no pulse.

On the floor were two small glassine envelopes, a short yellow straw and a
small piece of tin foil with burn marks -- standard heroin-smoking
paraphernalia. An unopened six-pack of Budweiser and an orange syringe cap
was in a corner across from Healy.

The cause of death was ruled a fatal dose of heroin. Morphine and codeine
were also found in Healy's body, perhaps cut into the drug, authorities said.

A suspicion lingers among Healy's friends that he was abandoned by Gearhart
and Smith.

"They got scared because they didn't want to get in trouble," Carmody said.
"They didn't call 911 or anything. They left him for someone else to find
him. He definitely could have been saved. There was a pay phone about five
minutes away."

"He was left to die," said Healy's former boss, Arthur L. Ayres Jr., an
electrical contractor and Heather's father, "and we're both upset about
that. That wasn't the way he should have gone."

Gearhart had left first, followed by Smith at about 6:30 a.m., Smith told
authorities. "She figured (Healy) was sleeping," said Deputy Chief Edward
C. Facas of the Morris County Prosecutor's Office. "She had no idea he was
dead. She left and got a ride home."

Gearhart did not return calls to his employer seeking comment. Messages
left for Smith through friends were not returned.

Healy and Carmody were in honors classes together at Brooklawn Middle
School, but drinking and drugs soon became their priorities. They got beer
by waiting outside stores and asking people to buy it for them, and drugs
from other kids.

"We started doing acid in, like, seventh grade," Carmody said. "A lot of
kids are like that. They want to do something -- smoke pot, drink."

Healy's promise as a student -- he was adept at writing and interpreting
poetry, according to his friends and high school English teacher Claire
Brown -- went unfulfilled. He dropped out of high school after his freshman
year and began having minor run-ins with the law.

"He didn't really start getting into trouble until he was, like, 17," when
he was caught with marijuana at the Rockaway Townsquare mall and went to
jail, Carmody said. "It messed him up, being locked up. He came out a lot
worse than when he went in."

Healy wasn't pleased serving 28 days at a since-closed Stroudsburg, Pa.,
rehabilitation clinic.

"If you're forced to go there it's really not going to work," said Carmody,
a rehab veteran. "He really said whatever he had to say to get out. You
just tell the people there you want to stop doing drugs, you want to quit,
you know where you went wrong.... He never thought there was anything
wrong with doing drugs."

But Healy had always avoided heroin.

"He always thought heroin was bad," Carmody said. "He never wanted to do it."

However, his conviction triggered regular drug testing that kept him from
using marijuana, which can be detected in the body long after use.
"Marijuana lasts for 30 days," Carmody said. "You can do as much heroin as
you want and it's out in two.

"That's why he started doing heroin."

The drug grabbed him and never let go. "Every night he would go to Newark
(to buy heroin). No fail," said Carmody, who added that Healy would hitch
rides to Newark with the last of his many girlfriends, a Jefferson resident
named Jen.

One night Carmody dragged Healy to a heavy metal concert in New York City.
The music was loud, but Healy, missing his heroin fix, heard nothing. "He
was out cold," Carmody recalled. "We had to carry him out."

Healy earned his general equivalency diploma while in jail and Ayres, the
electrician who employed him in 1996 and 1997, helped get him into the
Morris County School of Technology in Denville.

"You'd teach him something and it was amazing -- he'd actually remember,"
Ayres said. "The kid had the intelligence to do things properly. I always
had great hopes for him."

But Healy often missed work.

"I liked the kid," Ayres said. "But believe me, there were many times I
could have choked him. I'd sit here until 9 o'clock in the morning waiting
for a phone call. Then I'd call him."

"Oh, I'm sleeping," Healy might say. It got so bad, Ayres took to keeping a
log of Healy's excuses.

"I think he felt trapped in the lifestyle he was in," he said. "His
grandmother took care of him the best she could, but when he went out with
his friends it was another story. He kept calling me up with all these
problems. I finally said, `John, I can't take this.'"

Ayres drove to Healy's home and fired him. Healy said he wasn't surprised
"because you never gave me a raise."

"I didn't give you a raise," Ayres replied, "but I gave you a chance at life."

The Hope House in Dover was Healy's last chance.

Healy believed his heroin-snorting days were over. "We never thought he
would touch it again in a million years," Challan recalled. "He was so sure
about it."

In retrospect, Healy was at high risk for a relapse. He had had a difficult
home life -- his parents never married -- and virtually no adult guidance.
He saw his father, John F. Healy, sporadically, and his mother, Theresa
Ostendorf, rarely. His grandmother housed him in her Rainbow Lakes home but
could not keep track of him. And he was a follower by nature. He did what
his friends were doing, be it painting Easter eggs or snorting heroin.

He had used drugs since his early teens to escape from his problems, and at
the time of his death he was facing a seemingly unavoidable problem: jail.
In four days he was to be sentenced for eluding Denville police.

"He really shouldn't be dead right now," Carmody said. "He was just really
scared of being locked up."

Carmody, who was facing a drug charge himself, had encouraged Healy to do
his time. "We'll both be out by summer," he had said. "He was talking about
killing himself and I told him not to worry about it. He didn't want to go
back. He wanted to run away."

Healy dreamed of running away with Hall and their daughter. He would beg
Hall to move with him to a home of their own, away from the drug scene.
They would be a family, he would say. Hall always turned him down. She knew
it was impossible.

"He always looked to me to take him out," she said. "But there was only so
much I could do. He just wanted to leave everything and start over with me
and Alexis. But that's not the way you do it. Sometimes you have to face
your problems. He'd always run from them."

Still, when Hall recalls Healy's dream of being a family, tears well up in
her eyes. "I wish just one of those times I would have said, `OK, let's go
for it.' And maybe he wouldn't have ended up in this situation."

Hall knows better. Healy's death was a shock, not a surprise. Healy himself
sometimes spoke of his inevitable obituary notice.

"He used to say, `I'm going to make it into the papers before I'm 21,'"
Hall said. "He was helpless. He knew where he was going."

Checked-by: Mike Gogulski