By Theo Francis
Daily Record
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.
nnn
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?"
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theo@theowire.com