FOOTBALL STAR COULDN'T OUTRUN HIS ADDICTION

[PHOTO CAPTION] Eric Mickens, once a star running back for the Butler High
School football team, runs for a 72-yard touchdown against Cedar Grove.
Eric Mickens, 21

Eric Mickens was at the top of his game in 1994.

The Butler High School senior was a star running back who rushed for 1,000
yards and powered the Butler Bulldogs to an undefeated season and the state
Section II Group I title in that championship year. The slim, brown-haired
teenager with the buzz cut, thin mustache and beard had a steady girlfriend
and enough friends to fill the school auditorium.

Four years later and three days after his 21st birthday, his mother found
him dead in his bed. Heroin killed him.

Family and friends still don't understand how a young man with talent,
determination and ambition slipped away during the early hours of April 24.

Mickens' slide began sometime after the championship football season ended.
His grades slipped and he didn't graduate with his class. Mickens ended a
relationship with a longtime girlfriend. And he also started hanging out
with people who experimented with drugs more than his high school pals.

Like other teenagers growing up in the borough, Mickens experimented with
drugs. His friends said he smoked marijuana.

But when Mickens took the playing field in the fall, his drug use declined
and his grades improved.

Football was his passion. His uncle, Mark Mickens, a coach for the Butler
team, got Mickens interested in football early on, tossing passes to him as
a toddler on the front lawn.

Mickens' natural father left his mother, Linda, soon after she became
pregnant in 1977. Mark Mickens moved in with his sister soon after Mickens
was born. He became a role model.

Mickens' mother married Joseph Krowska when he was 7 and Krowska then took
on the father role.

"Eric loved Joe," she said. "Joe was a father to him."

Mickens and Krowska remained close even after the couple divorced eight
years later.

But when Mickens reached puberty, he became more argumentative with his
mother and teachers and his school work went from mostly Bs to Cs and Ds.

When he reached Butler High School, evaluators discovered his body was
either producing too much or too little of a certain chemical, creating an
imbalance that made it difficult for Mickens to control his emotions. He
would snap at his mother for something as trivial as being told it was time
to get up for school.

Although he was technically enrolled in high school, he attended Clearview,
a school for emotionally disturbed students in Wayne.

But that never got in the way of football.

Mickens' grades always seemed to improve a few notches during the season.
He also never missed a practice.

Coach Bob Jones recalled Mickens was always the first to arrive at practice
and among the last to leave. And he never missed a curfew call from coaches
the night before games, Jones said.

"He was a gentleman. He appreciated everything we afforded him," Jones
said. "If one of his teachers met him on the street, he would greet them.
And he asked about other people."

His best friend, Kevin Decker, called Mickens a natural athlete.

"He was real athletic. He was just a natural football player," Decker said.
"And the guy never worked out like the jocks."

But after the season, the poor grades and discipline problems would return.

Although Decker declined to say whether Mickens had ever used heroin, he
remembered acquaintances as young as 14 experimenting with drugs, some
smoking combinations of marijuana and PCP.

"I know he smoked a lot of pot," Decker said. "I know it wouldn't be past
him to experiment with anything. But he wasn't a hard core user."

At home, Mickens displayed a love for his family that equaled his
enthusiasm for football. His three pets -- a ferret, a cockatiel and a cat
- -- still look for him. His ferret, Michele, still tries to squeeze under
his bedroom door, expecting to curl up on Mickens' chest to go to sleep.

nnn

Being an only child, he and his mother had grown extremely close.

"He loved his mother," Decker recalled. "He was definitely a mama's boy. He
never acted like it, but he was."

A photo Linda Mickens snapped of her son on an impulse captured him
practicing his disc jockey moves, scratching records on a turntable -- in
his underwear. The walls of his room are painted black and dotted with
white stars. An image of Earth hangs above the turntable next to a clock.

She knew her son smoked marijuana and she didn't like it. She tried putting
him through treatment programs when he was 15, to no avail. He was kicked
out of one because of his behavior. She took some comfort in believing that
marijuana was the strongest drug he would ever take. That is until six
months before his death, when he admitted to her that he had tried heroin.
It made him sick, he said, and he swore he'd never try it again.

Linda Mickens was so concerned, she called her ex-husband Krowska, a
recovering heroin addict.

Krowska told Mickens that taking heroin would either kill him or ruin his
life. Mickens again promised to avoid heroin. He didn't.

The tiny Central Avenue apartment Linda Mickens shared with her son is dim.
Pictures of her son cover the wood-paneled walls and fill a bookcase set in
one corner.

A long-haired black and white cat Mickens called a "throw rug that eats"
stretches out on the brown carpet. His cockatiel gazes out from a cage
perched in a corner over the couch.

Mickens' bedroom sits locked at the end of a short hallway past the kitchen
and bathroom. His mother hasn't been in there since Eric died on April 24.
A towel shoved under the door keeps Michele the ferret from crawling
underneath.

In the living room, Linda -- about 5-foot-8 with short curly black hair --
shuffles through more pictures of Eric as she talks about him.

She rubs her bare feet on the brown carpet her son used to vacuum.

"I never realized how much he did around here until he was gone," she said.

Mickens used to bring friends to the house after school -- friends from
different social circles.

Nearly every day Mickens' mother would come home from her job as a waitress
at the Butler Restaurant and Riddles in Pompton Lakes to find the house
packed with his friends and the music blasting.

"One time I said to him that I feel like a tenant here, that I'm intruding
on something," she said.

Like most teenagers, Mickens was constantly worried about his appearance.
His receding hairline worried him so much that he recently shaved his head.

And once the outwardly tough football player got home, he acted more like a
doting father with his pets. When the ferret knocked over the garbage can
one day, his mother overheard him chastising her.

"Didn't daddy tell you not to go near the garbage?" he scolded the pet.

But after high school, Mickens began to slip again. After not making the
grades to graduate on time with the rest of his class, he turned down a
recruiting offer from Jersey City State College, a Division III school that
would have paid his tuition, because he wasn't sure what he wanted.

When Decker moved away, Mickens began to hang out with a different crowd.
His mother still doesn't know the last name of his friend Andy, who was
with him the night he died. He also broke up with girlfriend Daria Ferrari
during his senior year.

He worked part time sorting papers at a weekly newspaper and occasionally
worked as a disc jockey at parties. He often didn't come home until late at
night.

"The only person Eric battled his whole life was his own self," Linda
Mickens said. "In his heart he knew what was right. He was helping everyone
else, but he had a hard time helping himself. For some reason he just
couldn't find his way in this world. I don't know why. I don't think he
knew why."

A drawing Mickens made in junior high school appeared to show his solitude.
It was a long stretching asphalt road winding past open fields under a
dark, star-filled sky.

nnn

But that all changed in 1995.

His uncle, Mark Mickens, had some contacts with other football coaches at
Jersey City State College. The school still wanted to recruit him. All he
had to do was apply.

Excited at the opportunity, Mickens applied, was accepted and made the
team. He also inherited money from an aunt who passed away and he used it
for books and to live in a school dormitory.

Mark Mickens, who works for a car dealership in Netcong, helped his nephew
buy a Mercury Cougar. He began taking art classes.

Mickens started practicing but died before he could ever play a game.

"I'm sure if he had been able to do some of the things we'd have liked him
to, he would have played this year," Mark Mickens said.

But at the time, things were looking up.

Despite breaking up with Ferrari, he kept in touch with her. He recently
told his mother that "she's the girl I'm going to marry."

Ferrari could not be reached for comment.

Although he seemed to be back on track, Mickens still smoked marijuana and
was evidently experimenting.

At 10 p.m. on April 23, a couple days after his 21st birthday, Mickens told
his mother he was going out with his friend Andy and some other friends and
that he'd be home late.

About 5 a.m., his mother woke up to hear him violently ill in the bathroom.

"He was sick. He was really sick," she said. "He said go back to bed, don't
worry about me. I'm fine."

She woke up again at 8 a.m. to get ready for work and stood in front of her
son's bedroom door where she heard him snoring.

It was such an odd snore that she couldn't help smiling.

She looked under the door and saw his feet on the bed. She finished getting
ready and left for work.

When she returned at 3 p.m., the bedroom door was still closed. And her
son's feet were still in the same position as when she had left.

Andy stopped by about that time and forced open the door with a knife.

Inside Mickens was on his bed, a stream of blood that had trickled from his
mouth had dried on his face. Plastic bags containing residue of a white
powder were at his bedside.

His mother learned later that the strange snore she heard -- called a death
chatter -- means that the body is taking its last breath, the lungs
struggling to get air.

Police declined to say whether they knew how Mickens had taken the heroin
or where he got it.

His mother said police questioned Andy but did not arrest him. Since then,
Andy has apparently moved away with his girlfriend, Linda Mickens said.

"Every kid is going to get to a crossroads when they are going to have to
choose," Mark Mickens said. "...I think Eric made a choice. And it was the
wrong choice. I miss him."

As she learns to cope, Linda Mickens' friends make sure she isn't alone.
Friends still check on her each day.

"This past Mother's Day a group of his friends chipped in and bought me a
gold locket," she said.

She brought it out of her room, still in the box, a tiny heart-shaped
locket on a gold chain.

At Calvary Cemetery off Bartholdi Avenue, Mickens' grave sits on a hill
near Butler High School. That way, his mother said, he can still listen to
the games. Fresh flowers surround the grave. A picture of Mickens and a
football emblem are engraved on the black headstone. Just yards away in the
mid-afternoon sun, the Bulldogs huddle in formation, practicing for another
season.

Checked-by: Mike Gogulski