The Daily Times' stark black-and-white facts was an elbow to the sleeping city’s heaving belly, a town-wide wake-up call, a smack in the pretty face of Gloucester that helped change the community’s course of hyperactive inaction.

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The call came to Cynthia Cavanaugh’s home on Sunday morning in March, three years ago. As soon as the phone rang, Cavanaugh knew it was about her son, Jay. Turning to her youngest daughter, she said, “I think your brother’s dead.”

According to his mother, Jay Cavanaugh started messing around with pot when he was 15 or 16. “It was part of the scene,” she says. When he was 17, she says, she became aware that he was doing pot and pills. When he was 18, his mother was called to the hospital from Gorton’s, where she worked as a packer. A motorist had found Jay walking around the second Route 128 rotary, defying the cars to hit him. His mother believes somebody may have laced his marijuana with angel dust. “He had a lot of adolescent problems, hang-ups, low self-image,” says Cavanaugh, 47, now divorced. “A lot had to do with his father. When he went to his father for help, he just turned his back on him.”

Jay quit high school in his senior year when he got into a little jam. Broke into some doctors’ offices and pinched some pills. Broke his mother’s heart. “You’re just devastated,” she says. Went to work for his father as a freezer man at Gloucester’s Quincy Market Cold Storage. He seemed to be doing okay. Then one day, in a Quaalude stupor, he broke into a CVS and took some watches. Three months in the county jail. Got his job back. He was also small-time dealing to support his drug needs. And then he was busted for pot and pills. Lost his job. His mother told him “It’s about time you smarten up. It can only lead you down a one-way street. A dead end.”

Meantime, he had married a Gloucester girl. He was going to be a father. Cynthia Cavanaugh remembers the phone call from her daughter-in-law about five years ago. Jay was at Addison Gilbert Hospital, trying to kick his heroin habit. Heroin? Cynthia Cavanaugh was in shock. “I never knew about heroin,” she says. “I didn’t know Gloucester had a heroin problem. Why did he do heroin? I’m his mother and I wonder about that myself.”

Cynthia Cavanaugh spent her next several evenings seeking solace at St. Ann’s Church. Says a close friend, “more than anything else, it’s a disbelief. You don’t want to believe he’s doing it. Or, he’s only doing a little, not one of those shooting two bags a day. You tend not to blame anybody—but you blame everybody.”

When he had a baby on the way, his mother once again told him, “I think you better start getting your act together.” He came out of the hospital clean, worked construction. Seemed to be doing all right. Then someone told the foreman Jay was a druggie. He fired him. Jay grew depressed. “He was very quiet, supersensitive,” his mother says. “He never thought that much about himself, and he didn’t like himself for being on drugs.”

He got close to heroin again, then tried to quit it. Around February of 1985, he and his wife and mother drove out to Worcester State Hospital. The hospital wanted him to stay 28 days. After about two weeks, he felt he was all right and wanted to go home. A week later, Cynthia Cavanaugh saw her son standing in front of a drugstore. He’d been arrested the night before for public possession of alcohol. When he got out of court he was worried they were going to toss him back in the stir over some old fines. His mother wasn’t happy but when she heard the word “alcohol,” she felt a strange sense of relief. “I though it was better than drugs,” she says.

The next night, a Friday, Cynthia Cavanaugh stopped at a friend’s house before heading over to her son’s place to baby-sit. There was a tap on her car window. It was Jay. “You’re supposed to be babysitting,” he told her, “why are you here?”

Why was he there? His mother knew. He’d been hanging around the nearby house of a known sleazeball, a guy who believed he was helping heroin addicts quit their habit by feeding them — for a fee — his prescription pills. She could tell he was on Percs, all scratching and itching. “I was disgusted,” she says, “knowing that he was bothering with that person and doing drugs.”

Two days later — on March 24 — she received the fatal phone call. She rushed over to Jay’s house. She started to cry when she saw her son lying on the upstairs couch, covered head to waist by his afghan. The medical examiner said he’d been drinking and had choked on his vomit. His mother believes he was depressed about the prospect of going back to jail, wanted to kick his heroin habit, and was using pills and drink as a substitute for the H-drug.