Series: Wasted Youth -- Damage Done (4 Of 6)

A Gift Before Dying

HANOVER WOMAN WHO OVERDOSED "LEFT A PIECE OF HERSELF" BEHIND

Two summers before Jill Cairo died, the summer she was carrying the
boy that would be named Liam, was a season in the sun.

"It was the perfect summer," her mother, Theresa Cairo, said. "We
would just hang out by the pool, day after day."

It was, her father would later say, Jill's gift to them.

Two years later, Jill would be dead of a heroin overdose at age 24.

Her son, now three, is being raised by her parents.

"She left a piece of herself," Mrs. Cairo said. "Thank God for him."

Jill Cairo, blonde and beautiful, was, on the surface, the least
likely person to fall victim to heroin, her parents said.

She was smart -- earning As and Bs -- and a bit shy. She liked to
read. She loved to swim. She used to write and draw. When she walked
into a room, heads turned, but she didn't seem to notice.

"She was really a quiet girl," Mrs. Cairo said.

Jill Cairo had beaten heroin addiction once but was sucked back in
two years later. The family had moved to Hanover from New Jersey to
be closer to family while Jill was in high school after her father
retired as a liquor wholesale executive. She seemed to make the
transition well, her mother said.

They lived in a nice neighborhood, in a comfortable house. When she
graduated from high school, she took courses at a community college and worked.

But there were problems below the surface, problems her family
wouldn't discover until it was too late.

She began using OxyContin with friends. Then she began to use heroin.

Eventually, Jill blurted out the truth to her mother in the family
car. Jill had disappeared days earlier and her worried mother, after
making phone call after phone call, began driving the streets of
Brockton. "Someone had heard from her and said she was with people
who were in Brockton. I had no address," Mrs. Cairo recalled. "There
were some people that I would stop on the street and ask, "have you
seen a girl, her name is Jill?'"

Within 1 1/2 days, she found Jill walking toward WalMart with another
girl. She pulled over. "I just said, 'I want you to come home,'" Mrs.
Cairo said.

Jill got in the car. A few minutes later, she told her mother she was
addicted to heroin.

"I was so scared. I didn't know what to do. We couldn't get her into
a place for treatment until the next day. I just held her the whole
night long. I was so frightened. I was just so scared for her."

As Jill began to withdraw from heroin, her mother stayed at her side.

"She was just in so much pain. Her legs were killing her."

Jill would enter a treatment program. Then a halfway house. Then a sober house.

She was clean for six months before she become pregnant. She stayed
clean throughout her pregnancy, gave birth to a son and stayed away
from heroin for six more months.

"The summer she was pregnant was a gift," her father, Salvatore, said.

But heroin would ensnare her once more and, after going through
another treatment program, Jill went to a program in Lynn.

"It's funny, when she went to Lynn, I told my husband, 'She's never
going to come out of this alive,'" Mrs. Cairo recalled.

Five months later, the Cairos received a phone call. Jill had left the program.

Then police officers were at their door. Jill was dead. She overdosed
in a Lynn apartment. "She met somebody who was going to the NA
(Narcotics Anonymous) meetings but was still using," Mrs. Cairo said.

After Jill died in 2005, her family looked through her personal items.

"We noticed how many things had butterflies," her mother said.

The butterflies would adorn her headstone. Her family is making a
butterfly garden in the backyard.

"It makes us feel better," her mother said.