Mystery: Trashed

IN MARCH, JUST shy of the two-year anniversary of their son’s death, Susan and John Fiocco Sr. filed a wrongful-death suit against the College of New Jersey and the state. They claim the school failed to protect their son, and that the campus police’s delay damaged the investigation.

The suit seems odd, given that investigators still can’t say for certain how Fiocco died. But the motives behind it are more complicated than just assigning blame. It’s also an attempt by the Fioccos to wrest possession of their son’s story from all those who’ve appropriated it (including me), and in so doing to reclaim the narrative not just of John Fiocco Jr.’s death, but also of his life. For the one completely knowable thing about how he died may very well be that it is forever unknowable — that despite what CSI and Law & Order suggest, even in the face of a thorough investigation and ample evidence, suspicious deaths often make no sense.

In the days immediately after John went missing, his family received a call from another friend claiming to have seen him, this time in a Manhattan restaurant. As Nancy Grace was broadcasting the breaking news that the blood from the container had come back as John’s, the Fiocco family and 20 friends and volunteers were scouring Manhattan, taping missing posters with John’s face on telephone poles and store windows, believing that at any minute he might turn up.

Recently, John Fiocco Sr. wrote me a long letter; it was addressed “Dear Friend.” He said he knew intuitively, in his heart, from the moment he received the first phone call, that John was gone. But he still believes that John’s friend did see him in the cafeteria that day at school after he’d gone missing, that he was in that New York City restaurant that night. John’s parents believe he was there spiritually if not physically, offering them one last bit of hope to hold onto.

Two years later, Susan “cries every day, sometimes all day.” “As for me,” John Sr. wrote, “I cry in church and when I hear a Green Day song on the radio. John’s favorite band.”

He described a precocious son who took his first steps on the day of his first birthday, who at six got kicked in the face playing soccer but refused to cry and continued playing, who graduated in the top 10 of his high-school class. The kid who busted out of his shell during a hysterical performance in a contest for Mr. Clearview Regional High School for which he dressed as Britney Spears, and whose truck his father now drives, still with John’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles stuck to the windows, and the Batman steering-wheel wrap.