JOE LOIA, 23

Studious and reliable, `he was not a junkie'

Joe Loia stumbled, haggard, to the doorway of a friend's Whippany house one
December night last year.

He had taken heroin in Morristown earlier in the evening, Loia told his
friend, Greg Gutjahr. When he collapsed, someone had called police. Loia
woke up in the hospital. No one knew who he was.

"He just said he ran the first chance he got," Gutjahr, who knew about his
friend's drug use, remembered. "He was looking like hell." After a two-hour
nap, Loia went home to his parents' house in Morris Plains.

About a month later, Vincent and Anna Loia returned home from work to find
their son dead -- 17 days from his 24th birthday, more than a decade after
he served as an altar boy at St. Virgil's Roman Catholic Church and just a
few months before he was to graduate from Montclair State University, where
he was on the dean's list.

Police found a syringe near the foot of his bed. The medical examiner found
heroin in his bloodstream, along with butalbital, a habit-forming
barbiturate. The combination killed him.

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Joseph Vincent Loia -- poet, musician, cook, painter, good with his hands,
an avid reader who seemed to know a little about everything -- was nearly
all his parents could want. In a portrait hanging on their living room
wall, he looks out from eyes set deep in a fine-boned face, framed by a
mane of tawny hair.

The stories told by his friends, family and a thin court record are echoed
across Morris County and the country: Good kid, good neighborhood, good
family -- killed by heroin.

At his death on Jan. 22, Joe Loia's parents did not know he was still
getting high despite their son's previous trouble with drugs. His friends,
some of whom did know, thought he had it under control.

"He was not a junkie," his mother, Anna Ciavattone Loia, said nearly six
months after her son's death. "He gave us no reason to suspect anything....
Sometimes I thought I was so lucky to have a son like that."

"It didn't bother me," said Gutjahr, "as long as he was all right. I didn't
think it was something that would really kill him."

Born Feb. 8, 1974, Joe Loia was gentle, conscientious and respectful in
ways many children aren't, Anna Loia said. He mowed the lawn before he was
asked, and she and her husband often awoke to find he had brought the
papers inside.

"When he was a little boy," she said, "we never had to say `Go do your
homework.' He always knew what to do."

Loia first stumbled when he went to Morristown High School, confused by the
large high school after the intimacy of St. Virgil's Academy, a Catholic
elementary school in Morris Plains.

"It was a little difficult for him to adjust," Anna Loia said, so, for his
sophomore year, they sent him to Bayley-Ellard, a Catholic school in Madison.

He didn't find that school challenging enough, she said, so he returned to
Morristown High, where he began doing much better. He graduated in 1992
with good grades and a steady stream of friends.

Many of those friends were among the group other students sometimes called
burnouts, Matthew Dougherty said. He and Loia railed against a popular
clique they called the Proud Crowd, but even the students who styled
themselves rebels didn't seem dangerous to Anna and Vincent Loia.

"They all came from good families, the kids," Anna Loia said. "We had no
idea what they were doing."

At least some of them were doing drugs, Dougherty said. He and Loia had
grown up on the same street. They attended St. Virgil's together and soon
became close, often standing late into the evening under the street lamps
of Jaqui Avenue, talking until their cats came to find them.

Loia's drug use started long before his family ever found out, Dougherty
said, in eighth grade. He and his friend began to smoke marijuana and drink
together, eventually trying -- and liking -- LSD.

Even as an adult, Loia wouldn't drink much, though -- an occasional glass
of Vincent Loia's homemade red wine, maybe half a beer as he and Dougherty
watched Monday night wrestling. But he liked taking downers, the
barbiturates that he said helped with the pain, and when he did, Joe Loia
would gesture to his side below his belt.

nnn

The pain, Dougherty knew, stemmed from two operations that Loia didn't talk
about much. Robert Loia says a car accident when Joe Loia was 11 injured
him permanently, apparently causing a painful blockage and swelling in his
testicles. Two operations in early adolescence helped at first, but the
pain returned as scar-tissue built up. He underwent more complicated
surgeries in high school. "The pain never really went away," Robert Loia said.

Using drugs didn't just block the pain, though. It was also fun.

"It was something that was a part of us," Dougherty said. "We were the
burnouts, so we had to live up to that."

The two friends, who went to different schools after eighth grade but still
hung out regularly, got high two or three times a week, sometimes more,
smoking pot, tripping on LSD, even snorting cocaine now and again by the
time they were 18.

Some nights, Dougherty remembered, they would go on a "death ride" around
the county in Loia's car, both of them tripping on LSD or high on pot.

"We'd just laugh," Dougherty says now, describing LSD jaunts into New York
City, where they bought most of their drugs. "It was fun. We had good times."

By the time they were 20, the two had begun using heroin. It was unlike
anything else they had tried. "Almost like a bubble of protection,"
Dougherty said, an absolute feeling that nothing was wrong, could go wrong,
had ever been wrong.

"It just slaps you," he said.

By then, Loia had begun taking classes at County College of Morris. After
three rocky semesters and a few Fs, he stopped, his brother said. "He was
trying to figure out what he wanted to do."

Despite Joe Loia's troubles with school, his family never suspected his
drug use, they said. Even to Dougherty, who knew what his friend was
taking, Loia was in control. Or at least he put up a good front.

He was reliable, after all. He still mowed the lawn, helped his parents
around the house, cooked minestrone or pasta and sauce occasionally. One
summer, while his parents were away, he repainted their house, unasked.

Each summer in Madison, painting classrooms for the school district, Loia
was known as a meticulous, tidy painter who worked hard, even when tired
from staying out late, said his boss, Connie Rostiac. At bakeries and at
fast-food joints that hired him, everyone called him a dependable and
friendly guy, reserved but not shy, talkative once comfortable but not a
motor-mouth.

And he was always charming. "The kind of guy you wouldn't want to take your
girl around," Dougherty laughed, because he might win her over without even
trying.

Lisa Cunningham, a classmate at Montclair State, would later watch Loia
argue earnestly in classes, but without a whiff of pretension.

"He could say something really intelligent," she said, "and yet the whole
class would be busting up laughing."

In mid-1994, Joe Loia stopped snorting heroin.

It happened after Dougherty and some friends took a trip to Manhattan to
buy the drug one July night. When Dougherty came back, he overdosed,
slipping into a coma that put him in the hospital for more than a year.
Loia seemed sobered by his friend's brush with death.

"It scared him," Dougherty said.

It not only scared him enough to stop, but enough to tell his family,
Robert Loia said. He went to several different counselors and took a year
off from college. He tried culinary school but returned to the county
college, taking summer-school classes to recoup lost time. His grades
improved.

The improvement was lasting -- his grades would remain good, his school and
work attendance almost unblemished until he died -- but Loia returned to
using drugs, including heroin. Dougherty thinks his friend may have stopped
for as little as a few months.

In 1995, Loia was arrested. Police caught him and three others while
raiding a Morris Plains house. A man in his 40s was charged with selling
cocaine. Investigators thought Loia might have gone there to buy some of
the drug, but they had no proof, said Robert Weber, the assistant county
prosecutor who tried the case.

"To this day, I don't really know," Weber said. Loia, who was charged with
being under the influence of marijuana, fought the charge in municipal
court, with his mother in the audience every day.

He lost. In March 1997, Municipal Court Judge Donald Del Monte sentenced
the 23-year-old to a year of probation and treatment, including random drug
testing. He paid $780 in fines and court fees. But with Weber's agreement,
Del Monte also suspended the conviction. If Loia kept out of trouble, the
conviction would be set aside.

Throughout the trial and after, Loia attended classes, transferring to
Montclair State in the fall of 1996.

There, he met Cunningham, a 22-year-old student from Park Ridge, and dated
her for a while last fall. He took classes in literature, poetry writing,
classical guitar, photography, and filmmaking. In his free time, he read,
fixed up the three-story boarding house in Montclair where he lived, or
played his guitar with friends. Cunningham doesn't think he was taking
drugs then, but they never talked much about it.

They talked about almost everything else, one of them sitting on the bed in
Loia's room and the other sitting in his "Archie Bunker" chair.

"Any question you have, he would just somehow know something about it,"
Cunningham said. Frustrated with American government, she once wondered
what alternative there was. Loia began talking about French socialism. "He
was freaking out, saying, `I love talking like this!'"

He returned home often, however, and at the end of the fall semester moved
back in with his parents, who thought he wanted to save money. Cunningham
said he just liked living with them.

But the 24-year-old Gutjahr said Loia's heroin habit was becoming more and
more noticeable. The two had met on the job at a supermarket four years
before, and began playing in a band together. Gradually, his friend's
lethargy became a source of friction with other band members.

"Sometimes he would sound pretty good, sometimes he would come to practice
and he would sleep in the room," Gutjahr said, sitting in his bedroom
listening to Loia sing on a tape he was making for Anna Loia. "He would get
all moody. I guess he didn't even realize it."

nnn

The night before he died, Gutjahr and Loia got together to play some music,
and Gutjahr could tell his friend was a little high, though still alert. He
dropped Loia off at his parents' house at about 1:30 a.m.

At 7 a.m., Anna and Vincent Loia left for work, said Detective Edward
Dobbins of the Morris Plains Police Department. They returned at about 4
p.m. and found their son still in bed, wearing sweatpants and a T-shirt, dead.

"It's like he woke up and gave himself a hit," Dobbins said, "and that was
that."

The Loias begged the detective to find out who gave their son the heroin,
Dobbins said. But that isn't easy.

Other than the syringe at the foot of Joe Loia's bed, the police found
nothing suggesting chronic use, Dobbins said. No package that once held
heroin, no extra needles or other paraphernalia, no unused heroin wrapped
in glassine envelopes -- nothing that could link Joe Loia's death to a
dealer in Morris County or anywhere else.

"It could be in Newark," Dobbins said, sitting in the borough's small
police interrogation room with Loia's folder in his hands. "It could be in
Morristown, Irvington, anywhere."

He looked down at the folder as he closed it, then looked up again.

"What street are you going to start on?" he said. "My God, where do I
start?"

Checked-by: Mike Gogulski