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 1 of 2)

“Please trust me,” fifteen-year-old Mike Neubauer begs his mother, Leslie, on April 30 of 2005.

“Please, Mom, you’ve got to let me go, I haven’t been able to do anything for eight weeks.”

It’s true, Leslie thinks—since surgeons screwed metal pins into metal plates in Mike’s hockey-injured shoulder, her son, sitting on the sidelines, had spiraled into a deep, deep depression. He was finally cleared yesterday, given the go-ahead to get on with his life, and now, after “promising this and promising that,” Leslie gives Mike permission to sleep at his friend Tyler’s house, along with his best friend Brenden McGonagle. 

But they never go to Tyler’s house.

Instead, Mike and Brenden knock between two high school house parties where the parents are, of course, out of town for the night—a blow-out kegger at one, a more intimate bash at the other. They pile into an Acura Integra at around 1:45 a.m. It belongs to the mother of their sixteen-year-old buddy Zach Stiness, but he had swiped the keys earlier, while she slept. He only has a provisional license, but the teenaged boys don’t give that a second thought. 

Nayatt Road is slick with rain, but Zach smashes his foot down on the accelerator anyway, crashing through thick puddles. The speedometer quivers up to seventy-five on the twenty-five-mile-per-hour road. Near Bluff Road, past the approach to the public beach, Zach loses control of the car. His foot never touches the brake as the car screams into the woods, hits a fallen tree and goes airborne before smashing into another tree, crumpling to rest at a forty-five-degree angle. The force of the crash causes the doors to pop open, and the engine is dangling by just a few hoses. Zach and Mike are both partially ejected from the wreck. A neighbor hears Brenden’s raspy, shuddery breaths squeaking out of his collapsed lung and calls 911.

Leslie Neubauer and her husband are sleeping soundly in their modest Old River Road house when the phone rings at 2 a.m. “Leslie, there was a bad accident and we are on the way to the hospital with Brenden,” Marianne McGonagle says. “We don’t think he’s going to make it.”

Leslie bolts awake. If Brenden was in the accident, then Mike probably was, too. She immediately punches Mike’s cell phone number into her phone. When he doesn’t answer, she calls information to get Tyler’s number. It’s unlisted. She and her husband jump into their car and race over to Tyler’s house, pounding on the door in the pouring rain. Tyler is home, but Mike is not.

He tells her about the parties. She calls one of the houses. Mike left with Zach, the kid says.

Zach’s dad, John Stiness, answers Leslie’s call to their house. Is Mike there, she asks frantically. “Zach is dead,” John says. “He’s just been in an accident.”

“Oh my god, you poor thing, oh my god,” Leslie sputters. Was Mike with him? 

“I don’t know,” John says.

“Please, John,” Leslie begs.

“All I know is that there was somebody else in the car and they couldn’t get him out.”

Leslie is not ready to give up on her only son. She calls his cell phone. Calls it over and over and over. She waits.

Back on Nayatt Road, rescue workers finally remove Mike’s dead body from the front seat of the Integra. Police Chief John LaCross slides the ringing cell phone out of Mike’s pocket. He looks down at the caller ID. MOMMY, it glows in the blackness.

As Leslie sits, zoned out, listening to the hollow ringing, finally a voice.

“This is Chief LaCross.” 

Leslie Neubauer knew, from the day her son, Mike, was born, that she would hear those four words someday. And not for the first time. Ever since her teenaged brother was killed by a drunk driver while growing up in Barrington, she had this vision that her own children would meet that same fate. Her husband would try to comfort her. Lightning doesn’t strike twice, he’d say.  

But in Barrington, it does.

There have been probably eight such fatalities since 1966, Leslie says, “and I’ve known every single one of them.” And since her own son was killed nearly three years ago, there have been two more: seventeen-year-old Patrick Murphy while wakeboarding on the Barrington River last July (the driver of the boat has been charged with second-degree murder and underage possession of alcohol), and sixteen-year-old Jonathan Converse, a nearby neighbor of the Neubauers, in exactly the same stupid car-meets-tree accident as her Mike. Nobody in this town of roughly 17,000 was really all that surprised. It’s what kids do here—they drink and they drive and they die on these picturesque streets. Always have.
Which is why Leslie Neubauer is exasperated. Pissed, really, and ready to get the hell out of Dodge. She and her husband had struggled to stay rooted here, barely managing the ungodly taxes on educators’ salaries, so that their kids could have that Blue Ribbon education. As she smashes spices with a mortar for the Food & Wine apricot-glazed ribs she’s making for her daughter’s family, she lets loose. “I am just angry, I am angry,” she says of the small-town politics that squashed her family’s plans to build a teen center in Barrington—a place where you can’t even rent a Friday-night DVD—in Mike’s memory. “How many other kids have died since then and they still don’t get it?” she asks with another forceful grind of the wrist. And, sure, having a booze-free place to hang might not stop kids from smashing through car windows on rain-slicked streets—when has it ever?—but it would be something. 

Because ever since she was the sister, instead of the mother, of the latest dead boy, nothing has changed. “I don’t think it’s going to change until the mindset of the parents changes,” she says. Today’s adults are yesterday’s teens, and they hold tight to the belief that kids are going to experiment—are going to throw-up pastel-colored wine coolers on imported Oriental rugs—just as they did. And even now, even when the very real consequences of their kids’ brand of partying—the heightened binge drinking and increased access to fast cars and empty homes—can be seen daily in roadside shrines, parents still live in denial.

Years of open-casket funerals and front-page photos of far-too-young pallbearers prematurely called to duty have yet to usher in an attitude adjustment. Parents continue to look the other way or, in some extreme cases, sanction the beer-pong-charged fetes. Kids continue to get drunk off mixed messages. In fact, there’s a subset of parents in town who call themselves the Group of Twenty, Leslie and other Barrington residents say, who let their kids and their friends drink alcohol and smoke pot in the house, buoyed by the notion that they’re going to do it anyway. It’s well-known around town that the underground group exists, but to date none of its members have publicly surfaced to defend their position. Leslie, for one, is baffled by their legally questionable logic. “It’s still considered a teenage rite of passage, ‘well, kids will drink and so how do we deal with that?’ Not, ‘they should not drink,’ ” she says.

And yet she knows exactly how hard it is to stop kids from drinking. The night before her son died, he had a party at their house when she and her husband were actually home. “We ran around like idiots; it was a nightmare,” Leslie says, as Mike’s friends tried to sneak sips of the alcohol they had squirreled in. After spending the evening confiscating contraband beers out of kids’ hands, the Neubauers were planning a big sit-down with Mike. “But we didn’t have another decision to make because our son was dead twenty-four hours later,” she says.

Despite Barrington’s rising death toll, kids simply fail to grasp the severity of the situation. The very night of Patrick Murphy’s funeral, a group of teens chose to drown their sorrows at a house party eventually crashed by Barrington police. Surprisingly casual sympathy notes posted on the website Facebook suggest the teens are in denial. “hey buddy, i am going to miss you. RIP bro,” wrote one friend to Jon Converse. “…i love you buddy you just chill with [Patrick] murphy till im up there too,” wrote another. Jon’s parents, Terry and Dan, have witnessed it first-hand. Kids still stop by to visit with the family, but the Converses know Jon’s friends don’t fully understand the heartbreaking finality of death. “These kids come over, and I swear they think he’s on vacation or something,” says Terry. 

Of course, teens drink and drive and die everywhere. Always have. But, for whatever reason, it seems to happen more often in Barrington. And grab more headlines. Maybe that’s because this sort of ugliness isn’t supposed to happen in such a bucolic town, a peaceful haven with a quintessential New England white clapboard church, miles of scenic coastline and an active garden club. Maybe it’s because an 02806 zip code carries cachet—after all, it’s one of the state’s most affluent suburbs (though it also comes complete with underlying pressures: When gossip travels faster than a late-model Volvo down County Road, it’s important to share the stands with the right parents at a high school lacrosse game, and equally important that your kid gets some playing time). Maybe it’s because Barrington has always been known as a dry town. It’s a sick irony that underage drinking runs rampant in a suburb that boasts only four liquor licenses and not a single package store. Maybe it’s because this is a place to which families flock in order to send their kids to stellar schools. Not to an early grave.

“This is a new year and we have to change,” says Kathy Sullivan, the head of Barrington’s substance abuse task force, on the first Monday in January. She sounds tired. Like she’s uttered this exact phrase many times before. “Remind me in a few more weeks when I’m feeling more cynical that this is the year that we need to make change.”
She passes around little strips of paper to the two-dozen or so people seated in the stark-white conference room of the new Public Safety Building eating packaged gorp and tootsie rolls and mini chocolate bars. The papers say, simply: Hope: Hope is a belief...that a positive outcome is possible even when there is some evidence to the contrary.

This past year has certainly provided plenty of hope-crushing evidence to the contrary. Evidence that the media’s klieg lights have focused on like some “Entertainment Tonight” looping of Brit-Brit heading to rehab or Anna Nicole’s last days; evidence that has given a free pass for other towns to pig-pile on the richy-riches next door in some giddy explosion of schadenfreude. (“There’s an AA chapter in Barrington isn’t there? The AA standing for Affluence and Arrogance,” read just one post on the ProJo website. “The result of having zero fear of one’s parents,” read another.)

Lost in the headlines is the fact that Barrington does not own the problem, a fact the chief of police, John LaCross, who took the reins in 2002, is eager to point out. Why, then, have the media’s lights shone a little brighter on Barrington? LaCross’s answer is two-fold. He acknowledges that the town has had an unfortunate number of deaths (“too many”) in the past three years, but he also considers the bad press a byproduct of trying to amp up awareness among parents and teens. “Instead of burying it and putting underage drinking underground, I’ve personally brought it above ground,” he says. 

While, ridiculously, no one seems to be keeping thorough statistics on teen drunk driving fatalities (in a state that has one of the highest numbers of overall drunk driving fatalities in the country), hunting through recent news clips does, in fact, tell a more democratic story. In 2006, for instance, three teens in Lincoln died in two separate alcohol-related crashes, more than any one-year tally for Barrington. Last year, there were thirteen such teenage fatalities in Rhode Island—including two boys who were burned alive in a Chevy Blazer after driving it into a tree in Glocester just nine days before Patrick Murphy’s body was pummeled to death in Barrington by a boat propeller.

Still, Sullivan and Chief LaCross are frustrated as they face their equally frustrated audience today, and the meeting rambles aimlessly. For hours. The problem is that while every single person in the room really, really wants Barrington teens to stop mangling themselves in two tons of steel, no one quite knows how to accomplish that.

While the police have stepped up efforts, says LaCross, there’s no way to tell if the initiatives—a zero-tolerance policy for underage drinking, an anonymous tip line, and “you-should-know” letters mailed to the parents of anyone associated with underage drinking (even if they’re not charged)—have been successful. “One thing we can never do,” says LaCross, “is quantify our efforts. Did we save a life? That’s frustrating….We keep moving forward. We’re optimistic.”

Other people aren’t feeling as positive about the future. Hence the back-and-forth sniping at today’s meeting between an adult MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving) representative (“Why would you even go to a party where there’s alcohol?” she asks snippily) and a teenaged SADD (Students Against Destructive Decisions) representative, who admits she hangs with the party crowd and sometimes drinks but usually doesn’t, preferring to drive instead. “They are going to drink anyway,” seventeen-year-old Becca Miller, the SADD member explains later. “Would you rather have them drink and get into accidents, or drink and have a safe ride home?” The irony seems to be lost on Miller that SADD backs a staunch no-use policy when it comes
to teens and booze. After all, it is illegal.