Todd Gilmore pays ultimate price
after he can't elude heroin's grasp
By Maureen Boyle
ENTERPRISE STAFF WRITER
Todd Gilmore died on St. Patrick's Day, near the railroad tracks off Oak Street in Taunton.
It took two days before his body was found.
One of his brothers spent hours at a nearby laundry on one of those days, washing and drying clothes, as Gilmore's family waited at home, wondering if Todd was safe - and hoping that the knock from police would not come.
For Todd Gilmore, heroin was "a wife, a husband, a spouse, a good book, a glass of wine, a good friend," says his brother, Gary. Todd died of an overdose in 2006. Todd Gilmore was 33 when he was found dead on March 19, 2006. He left behind a son, three brothers and his mother. He had grown up in Raynham, later moved to Taunton with his family and worked for a moving company.
"As much as I expected it, when it happened, it still blows you away," Judy Gilmore, his mother, said.
When Todd was 2½, he cried when he watched a man inside a carnival dunk tank on a hot July day.
"He doesn't have a towel," he told his mother. "He'll get cold."
Todd, his family said, was a sensitive child who grew up to be an anxious and worried young man, turning first to alcohol then to heroin to quell the angst in his heart.
He would shoplift, then sell the goods to pay for what grew to be a heroin habit costing hundreds of dollars a day - it landed him repeatedly in jail.
In jail, he would get clean, reveling in the structure behind bars. He went to a prison boot camp in Bridgewater and earned accolades for his work and behavior. "He was valedictorian of his class," his mother said.
He would send letters home to his mother. "I know there is one person I can count on in this world, and it is a good feeling to have a mother like you," he wrote.
"I love you," he wrote in another.
Each time he got out of jail, Todd would struggle to stay clean. He lived with his brother in Rochester one winter after getting out, trying to stay away from the city streets and the temptation of drugs. His brother hoped it would be the step that would turn Todd's life around.
But the draw of the drug was too strong.
Todd borrowed his nephew's bike and rode to Taunton to buy drugs, then returned to greet the boy when the school bus pulled to the house in the afternoon.
Each time he sought help, his brothers and mother would take turns watching him around the clock, each calling in sick to work, until a treatment bed would be available.
And when he was released, either from detox or jail, his family braced for the eventual relapse.
"I would yell at him, 'You're going to die. I don't want to bury you,'" his mother said.
But the lure of heroin was too strong.
"He found his true love in heroin," his brother, Gary, said. "What heroin was to Todd was a wife, a husband, a spouse, a good book, a glass of wine, a good friend."
The knock on the door of Judy Gilmore's Taunton home came last year.
A state trooper and Taunton detective broke the news to her: Todd was dead of an apparent drug overdose.
"The hope," Judy Gilmore said, "is gone."
Maureen Boyle can be reached at mboyle@enterprisenews.com.
