Driven to Drink

Barrington has become a hotbed of underage drinking—and driving. Kids are dying, parents are turning on one another, and the experts are baffled. Is it too late to save this bucolic little town from itself?

(page 2 of 2)

It’s an ideological stand-off—just like the safe sex versus abstinence-only dead-lock—that divides folks who should sit on the same side of the aisle. Some are fed up with it and ready to take matters into their own hands. Jeff Cohen, a father of teen boys who thinks it’s time for parents to take some responsibility for the problem instead of leaving it to administrators and cops to keep their kids alive, formed a group called the B-Dads in the wake of Jon Converse’s death to try to at least stanch the bleeding. “We’re focusing on drinking and driving,” he says. “To stop kids from drinking at all, that’s going to take a long, long time, that’s huge. Some kids are going to drink,” he says. His group is exploring a program called Safe Rides, which provides the caller with a lift home for whatever reason, no questions asked. “If it can save some kid from getting into a car then I guess it’s the right thing to do.”

But Joanne Royley, the high school’s student assistance counselor, who deals with student substance abuse as part of her job, and who was hired in 1999 after a student died in an alcohol-fueled, ninety-mile-an-hour crash into a stone fence, disagrees. “There’s this sort of acceptance, ‘Oh, kids drink, what are you going to do? We just want to keep them from driving, keep them safe.’ I’m not in favor of the Safe Rides. We would never support that as a school because for me there’s a little bit of giving up your parenting in that,” she says. “To me, it’s a desperate move, like we’re just going to keep it as safe as we can because we know we can’t control it.”

Problem is, even she admits that she does not know how to control it. “The ‘just say no’ and cramming it down kids’ throats, none of that works. Kathy Sullivan and I have a lot of expertise in this field and we are the first ones to tell you we don’t know what works,” she says. “If we knew what worked, we’d be on “Oprah” tomorrow. For people to say ‘I know what will work,’ they’re not telling the truth. They have an opinion.”
It’s true, everyone does have an opinion, and they can be overheard above the whir of the frother at the local Starbucks or between laps at the YMCA pool. What the town is short on is solutions. And accountability. When thirty-one LaSalle students were caught drinking at a house party in Bristol last November, officials at the Providence school got wind of it. Their response was swift: All were suspended for at least a day, and since most were jocks (a surprisingly common thread among many of these incidents), the students were barred from sports for five days and benched for a game.

LaSalle’s principal, Donald Kavanagh (who lives in Barrington and coincidentally was first on the scene the night of the Stiness crash), took some heat from parents for the decision, which is why some in Barrington believe their school would never send such a strong message. Providence restaurateur Bob Burke, who has two daughters at the high school, says, “Barrington has never suspended thirty kids and never will.” His reasoning? Parental pressure. On the police. On school officials. “The whole town is so focused on getting the kids through high school and into college, they really pull out all the stops to keep their kid from getting a record,” he says. In fact, according to Barrington High Principal John Gray, his hands are tied when it comes to punishing students for things that happen off school premises. “Being a private school, [LaSalle] has a little more latitude,” he says. The chief of police points a finger in a different direction all together. “A lot of parents send mixed messages,” LaCross says. “Parents want to be friends with their kids. They want to be cool.”  

Armed with vastly divergent opinions of what’s to blame—parents willing to go to bat for their kids at any cost; schools and police that don’t dole out harsh enough punishments; overindulged kids who have no respect for authority; a culture glorifying the boozy lifestyle—and no working solution to throw the weight of their sadness and fear and anger at, Barrington is turning on itself. Fighting each other instead of fixing the problem. And it’s ripping this sad little town apart. 

 “It’s almost like you have to get divided and let the kids who aren’t drinking get mad at the ones who are,” Meg Jones, a parent who is best described as Barrington’s anti-drinking crusader, says at the end of the meeting. “Let them be angry, let them tell each other off. More kids are coming out and being loud about it and pressing hard. Let the nondrinkers speak up.” In-fighting. Division. Rancor. It’s just the natural progression of things, she says.
She’s right about that.
   
Girls with beer. Boys with beer. Beer, beer, and more beer. The pictures posted by a student  on Facebook last summer, on a page called Intoxicate Oh-Eight in homage to the graduating class, were pretty typical high school stuff—for any other high school, that is. For Barrington High School, which had just lost yet another young boy, Pat Murphy, to an alcohol-infused incident, it set off a firestorm.

That’s because, in a related site on Facebook, Meg Jones’s daughter, Bianca Jones-Pearson, who’s a junior, and her friends wrote about how stupid it is to drink. To hear Meg Jones—who printed and distributed the drinking pictures around town— tell it, that’s all they did. Junior Kate Licciardello—another Barrington SADD rep who doesn’t seem to buy into the group’s no-use policy—says it was much worse than that. Licciardello, who was pictured holding a can of beer with Mike Silveira, the boy who was driving in the accident that killed Jon Converse, says that Meg Jones “is the most hated person in town among the teenaged population.” Becca Miller has similar feelings. “My main thing is just stay away from the Jones family. They accuse people of stuff…And it became this witch hunt in Barrington and it was just awful.”

But Meg Jones says she and her family are the ones being harassed, with kids egging and beer bombing her house, swearing at her in CVS, beeping and screaming “narc!” in drive-bys, and they are now putting their house on the market, just like the Neubauers are considering. “I’m out of here, it’s driving me crazy,” she says. “I just can’t keep putting up with this all the time.”

And yet she continues to make incendiary statements. “They say you can’t label them bad kids, well they are,” she says one evening as she sits in her pottery store, Weird Girl Creations. “These same kids have been drinking since seventh grade and now they’re dying, so in my mind, they’re bad. It’s not bad decision making anymore.” And, anyway, she says that she “embraces narc, it’s better than murderer.”

That’s what the kids who don’t drink, like Bianca and her friends, call the ones who do: Murderers, Inc. “They are making people who drink out to be criminals,” says Kate Licciardello. “I feel like we’re just getting so much more divided. The drinkers versus the nondrinkers. There’s a lot more tension. You walk in the hallways, and people have said stuff or you know what people think about you, and there’s so much judgment. It’s a huge problem not just in the school but in the town. Everyone’s being so judgmental.”

Zach Stiness’s mom, Kelley, knows all about being judged, and just like Meg Jones, she feels like she’s been run out of town. “Because of the continued lies and cruelty and hate directed towards me, we had to uproot our family,” she says of her New Year’s Day move to Florida. “I guess you can tell I am a little bitter. God, the more I think about it, I’m so glad I got out of town. We left some good friends there who were nice, but a lot of people were pretty nasty. People suck [there]. Judgmental. Nasty people.”
After her son Zach died, Kelley says, she was targeted and blamed—someone had to be blamed, after all—the subject of mean-spirited letters to the editor that condemned her parenting, and the recipient of a few hate letters, “saying you suck, you deserve to rot in hell, you’re a terrible mother.”

On top of losing her son, the Neubauers and McGonagles are suing the Stinesses in civil court. Among other things, Zach has been charged with negligence and Kelley for knowingly allowing her son to use the car the night of the accident. “I was friends with Marianne [McGonagle], but since the accident, we’re not friends anymore; she won’t talk to me,” Kelley says. “I didn’t really know [the Neubauers], but they’ve been weird, too; they’ve been bizarre. If we’re out and [Leslie] sees me she quickly turns around and runs away.”

But life in Barrington got unbearable for the grieving mother when the cops showed up on her doorstep at 12:35 a.m. on July 7 of last year. There were fifteen kids and three different brands of beer in the backyard. It was a birthday party for her seventeen-year-old daughter, but also a get-together hosted by her of-age son, to whom a small keg was registered. The cops ended up charging three of the underage girls with possession but could not touch Kelley and John Stiness with a recent law that the death of their son, Zach, helped create—the Social Host Law, which penalizes adults who allow underage drinking parties in their homes. This party was held in the backyard, a loophole that legislators say they aim to fix this year.

Once the party made headlines, trashing the Stinesses came back into vogue. “People were talking about me on the radio, and that’s pretty much when we decided to move,” Kelley says. Her version of the story is different from the one that hit papers. The Providence Journal reported that she was upstairs asleep during the party, but Kelley contends that she and her husband hosted a cook-out for her daughter and then walked down the street to Chiazza with their older son and a few of his friends. When they got home, there were more kids at the house than expected, and they asked them to leave. She says that she and her husband were not aware that the kids had been drinking or that there was beer in the backyard. Then the cops showed up. “I feel like we were run out of town,” says Kelley. “I am so spiteful and I can’t wait for something terrible to happen to the chief of police and I will gladly be there saying, ‘Oh, how do you like it?’ I am. I’m so spiteful to those people. He’s an evil man. The whole thing about blaming the parents. I was just a terrible mother. There are certain parents that people single out and say they’re bad parents. I don’t know why. It’s stupid.” 

Those people would say to Kelley, simply, What the hell were you thinking? But not everyone would. “I don’t think the Stinesses were some crazy party family; they are just one of the families that doesn’t try to shy away from reality,” says Kate Licciardello. “This town should have been giving them nothing but support and understanding and love. You would think, you would hope, something like this would bring the caring out in people, the compassion, but people who don’t drink, I’ve just heard the most disgustingly offensive things. Like Jon Converse was an alcoholic, he deserved to die, he was drinking underage.”

Sixteen-year-old Jonathan Converse, along with sixteen-year-old Mike Silveira, two other buddies, and a female friend, pick up their thirty-pack of Busch Light from some hockey buddies in the parking lot of the American Legion Hall on Middle Highway. It’s a Monday, November 5—not usually a party day. But since there’s no school tomorrow, the girlfriend  shuttles the boys around the streets of Barrington while they drink their cheap domestic brew. They stop by a friend’s house around 7:30, where about a dozen kids have already congregated, but are kicked out once the parents discover the boozing. 

Around 8:30, Jon calls his parents, Dan and Terry. Relaxing in the comfy living room after a root canal, Terry answers the phone. “Can I sleep at Pat’s house?” Jon asks his mom. She passes the phone to Dan.

“No, no, no,” Dan says. “I know there’s no school tomorrow, you can have your weekend curfew of 11, but you’re not sleeping over Pat’s.”
“Okay, Pa,” Jon says, sounding just like his normal self.

The boys continue to drink their beer around a fire pit in the backyard of Mike Silveira’s house until about 10. Then the girl shuttles them to Taco Bell in Seekonk and drops them back at Mike’s car so that she can go home. They’ve all drunk about a six-pack each.  

Ten minutes before Jon’s curfew, at 10:50, Mike races his car over the bridge at Massasoit Avenue. After pausing at the stop sign, he smashes his foot down on the accelerator, burning rubber as he bangs a hard right onto New Meadow Road. As he pushes the speedometer needle up to 63 in a 20-mile-per-hour zone, Mike loses control, crosses over into the northbound lane and straight into a tree, leaving a 135-foot skid mark. Jon Converse has no seatbelt to restrain him and flies part-way out the window. He’s killed instantly.

Five minutes before Jon’s curfew, the phone rings in the Converse home. It’s Jon, says the caller ID. “Jon, where are you?” Terry asks, still sitting in the living room. But it isn’t Jon. She doesn’t know who it is. “You have to come here, Jon’s neck looks funny,” says the voice. The voice is not frantic. The voice is very matter-of-fact. “I think he’s passed out, you’ve got to come, just come.”  Great, Terry thinks. What did he do?

Dan and Terry drive out to New Meadow Road, to the home of one of Jon’s friends. But he’s not there. That’s when they notice the wreckage in the woods. They run over to it. An officer puts his hand out to stop them. “Are you the Converses?” he asks. Yes, they say. Jon’s not here, says the officer. “What do you mean? He’s on his way to the hospital?” Dan asks. “No,” the officer says. “He didn’t make it, he didn’t survive.”

Meg Jones’s daughter, Bianca, who had been driving a friend home until she was stopped by the accident, sees Terry crumpled into a ball, sobbing on the ground next to the road. It is the saddest thing she has ever seen.

Dan and Terry Converse do not get to see their son for two days. They see him at the funeral home. And then never again.

Sitting in that same room where they last spoke with Jon, Dan and Terry are wrapped thick in grief two months later. There are days, Terry says, where she literally thinks she might go insane. 

“I used to tell him, don’t sit in the passenger seat with your friends, it’s the death seat, remember Mike Neubauer,” Terry says through her tears. “We never left the driveway until seatbelts were on. That night he didn’t have a seatbelt on and he sat in the passenger seat. He was with his good friend, and he just thought, It’s not going to happen to me.”

That’s what all teenage boys think. Even with the ultimate example of Mike Neu-bauer haunting him from just two houses away, Jon Converse still thought he was invincible. Throw a fistful of beers into a brew of testosterone and that lethal cocktail ensures that boys will continue to say, Dude, it’s not going to happen to me.

It’s all hypothetical to parents, too— even in a town that should know otherwise. Dan Converse says he’ll never forget walking down the street after Mike Neu-bauer died and seeing Mike senior in the front yard. “I mean beet-red, crying, pulling his hair out, screaming,” Dan says. “I remember standing there and just being so sorrowful and just feeling so bad for him. And since this happened to us, looking back to how I felt then, I had no idea what he was going through. No idea the pain he was feeling as he was pacing back and forth in his front yard.”

And now, just like their neighbors Mike and Leslie Neubauer, Dan and Terry Converse wear rubber bracelets to remember their son. We love you Jon. Keep smiling. Katie McGonagle, the younger sister of Brenden McGonagle—who will never be able to move his left arm or hand again after the accident that took Mike’s and Zach’s lives—made them. The Converses are left as the latest tragic family, trying to piece together why this happened to them, why this keeps happening to this town.

“[The media] made it appear somehow Barrington parents are more negligent than other parents, which is so far from the truth,” Terry says. She and Dan—who does not drink—were always home, never leaving the house unattended or vacationing without their kids. “You can be the most protective, caring parent in the world and one wrong decision, that’s what it boils down to. You can educate them about binge drinking and drinking and driving, but you tell kids not to drink? I’d like to know when that has ever worked. The teenage brain goes, You say no, I’m going to do it.”

Maybe that explains how, less than two months after Jon was killed, another Barrington boy got behind the wheel, drunk and stoned, and led authorities on an off-road high-speed chase through Colt State Park in Bristol before finally crashing into a stone retaining wall, pinning a pedestrian under the vehicle and nearly killing him. “We were so disappointed,” Terry says of that incident. They really thought that Jon’s death would finally hit home with the town. “And when something else happens, you’re like damn,” she says. “What does it take? What does it take?”

That indeed seems to be the unanswerable question in Barrington. On New Year’s Eve, as 2007 bled into 2008—as friends of Jon Converse filled Dan and Terry’s home in an attempt to bring some measure of comfort to the grieving parents, as the Stinesses packed their bags to flee a town that ran them down—another Barrington couple hosted a boozy bash for their kids. At the party, captured again on Facebook, the parents smiled at the camera while in the background, their underage daughters and their friends welcomed the new year by playing beer pong.