PHILADELPHIA (PA)
Newsworks
Arthur Baselice Jr.’s grief has pushed him into a self-imposed exile.
Almost 10 years after his son died from a drug overdose with links to his abuse by two Franciscan clergymen in Northeast Philadelphia, Baselice rarely leaves his house.
“I don’t want to go nowhere,” said Baselice.
Walking through the Baselice home in suburban South Jersey is like walking through a monument to their lost son, Arthur Baselice III. Pictures of him are everywhere. The urn with his ashes sits on a table at the entrance to the living room, where each night his father and mother light a candle in his honor.
Arthur’s bedroom, covered in sports memorabilia, is exactly the way he left it on the night that he died.
“Nothing’s changed,” said the father. “Same sheet, same bedspread. Everything is the same.”
Baselice Jr., 67, a retired Philadelphia detective who grew up a Catholic school kid in South Philadelphia, has a tattoo of his son’s face on his left forearm. Some of his son’s ashes rest in a bracelet on his right wrist.
All these years later, the pain hasn’t dulled. Baselice often wakes up in the middle of the night gasping for breath, tormented by what happened. Sometimes, as he jogs through his Gloucester County neighborhood – seemingly out of nowhere – he bursts into tears.
His wife, Elaine, and his daughter, Ashleigh, he says, are no better.
“Do I cry a lot?” said Baselice. “Yeah, most of the time.”
Baselice says he didn’t used to be an emotional person.
“Emotional?” he scoffs with the jaded laugh of a policeman. “Not at all. But this hit home.”
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