Family, Friends Remember Clark Man Who Died in Avenel Motorcycle Accident

Barbara Urban never quite understood what brought her son Joseph A. Urban III to the  night after night, but she always knew where he was.

"It was, 'I’m going to Dunkin', I'm going to Dunkin'' all the time," says Barbara. "I would tell him to get a life, stop hanging out at Dunkin'. I finally convinced him to go out to Arizona at the end of July to a motorcycle repair school. I thought maybe he’d graduate from the Dunkin' crowd."

But when Joe, 26, died suddenly on Sunday morning after his motorcycle hit a curb, throwing him off and into a telephone pole on an Avenel street, Barbara Urban soon learned that her son had more than just "a life" at the coffee hangout – he had a whole other family.

It was around 3:30 a.m. when her brother-in-law, a Rahway police officer, came to her door to break the news. Hours later, as Barbara was still coming to terms with the fact that her son was gone, she was comforted by a constant stream of Joe's friends from the Dunkin' Donuts crowd. They would pay their respects at the family's Meadow Road home, offering condolences to her, her husband, Joseph, and their four other children.

"On Sunday morning I must have had 50 or 60 kids on my front lawn," Barbara says. "He truly had a whole separate life there. And learning and meeting all the people, all the lives he touched, whether you talked to the kids that knew him well or barely knew him – I wouldn’t say he was a different person, but it's a whole different side of Joseph that I didn’t know."

Barbara describes her son as a "good kid, sweet and loving." She worried more about him after he was diagnosed with diabetes at age 16 and hated having to watch him inject himself with insulin. But she says she can only speak about him from a mother's perspective. To really know Joe, she says, you need to hear about him from these friends.

And so on a balmy Tuesday night, just two days after the tragic accident, the Dunkin' Donuts regulars gathered to tell me about their buddy Joe, better known to them as "Urban."

I told my photographer I expected about 10 friends. When we arrived, there were at least 20, from ages 18 all the way up to 30, gathered on the tailgate, hood, and roof of someone's truck, waiting for us. After I started writing down names and asking questions, I suddenly turned around to see the group had doubled and then tripled. Those 50 to 60 friends who had showed up on Barbara Urban's lawn were here now, all of them – at 9:30 p.m. on a Tuesday, no less – just hours after one had told them a reporter was coming to hear their Joe stories.

"He had no enemies and lots of friends," says Brian Norman, 28, from Clark, explaining the turnout. "He was truly one of the nicest guys I've ever known.

The crowd became so large, with cars parked in every spot and overflowing into the next door lot, that soon Clark police kindly asked us to relocate to a vacant parking lot nearby.

The stories most of Joe's friends have to tell are about him being selfless and generous, the first to help you fix your car or computer – two of his favorite things. Joe Salerno, 26, from Clark says, "Urban had a gravitational pull. People who needed something would just find him, and he'd always want to jump in and help."

Each friend seems to have a story of a time Joe helped him or her, describing him as a "give you the shirt off his back" sort of guy, who would even let you borrow his prized possession, his motorcycle. "Bikes are like women," says Joe Pezza, 27, from Perth Amboy. "You don't share them. But Joe would just throw you his keys whenever you needed them." 

Joe was a jack-of-all-trades – or "half of all trades," corrects a friend, citing a computer repair that involved duct tape and cardboard. Melissa Siegelman, 20, from Colonia, had only known Joe two months when her car's brake line snapped. "He spent 10 hours fixing it in the Dunkin' Donuts parking lot," she says. "He had to go to different stores to get parts, he had brake fluid all over him, but he wouldn't quit. He never asked for anything in return. Lunch and a cigarette was all he would take."

Joe was the de facto computer repairman in the group and even turned his car into a mobile WiFi spot. Thomas Rodriguez, 20, from Kenilworth, had only met Joe last week. His laptop was broken and someone said Joe could fix it, which he did. "My laptop was brand new," says Rodriguez. "I was devastated and he just fixed it, no problem, wouldn't take anything for it. I said I owed him one."

Joe would even get you a job, like he did for Phil Donner, 23, who worked the night shift with Joe as a security guard at Rahway Hospital. "It was goofball stuff we'd talk about," says Donner. "Or we'd watch people doing funny things on the surveillance cameras and be hysterical. He'd have me laughing all night long."

When I asked the crowd to give me adjectives that described Joe, nearly in unison the first word they came up with was "goofy."

Joe had a few, quirky signature moves. There was a monkey face, the one where you pull your ears away from your head and fill your cheeks with air, and an affectionate purr, his "growl" he would make when greeting friends.

"He'd do absolutely anything to make someone laugh," says Pezza – including donning a cape, dubbing himself "Super Urban" and tackling a bush in the Dunkin' parking lot. Joe never turned down a dare. The group has hundreds of stories like this. "How much paper do you have?" Pezza asks, as I scribble notes.

"There was no situation he couldn't walk into and make someone crack a smile or make the place light up," says Ed Lindsey, 21, from Westfield.

And his antics were done soberly, they say, telling me Joe was by no means a big drinker. Mike Norman, 30, from Westfield, met Joe at the  "We got into a conversation about drinking, and he tells me his 21st birthday passed eight months ago, and he'd still never been to a bar," says Norman, who was flabbergasted Joe had missed such a rite of passage. That weekend Norman and a few friends took Joe to the Rathskellar in Cranford and showed him the ropes.

Nikki Matear, 28, from Cranford, calls Joe the love of her life. They dated and remained friends after their breakup. Matear has just learned that Joe was recently considering rekindling their romance. "When he got out of work at 6 a.m. he'd pick me up and and we'd lie in bed and watch movies," says Matear, who describes him as an excellent boyfriend – attentive, sweet and funny, with a sensitive side that led him to write poetry, be a good listener and counselor and bond with her two children. Their love story began, of course, at Dunkin' Donuts.

So why, of all places, does this group come here from Perth Amboy and wherever else (where there are certainly other coffee spots and even Dunkin' Donuts franchises)?

"For the Clark kids, it was a meeting place in the center of town after school," says Ryan Cutrona, 26, who graduated from Arthur L. Johnson with Joe in 2002.

"You can get away from home and it's our own little family," says Anthony Ferretti, 23, from Union. The main group of friends have been hanging here for more than 10 years. "Usually we wouldn't even tell each other we were coming," he says, "but we'd wind up here at the same time. Or all it would take was seeing a car you knew in the parking lot."

"It's cheap," says Greg Fedorchak, 26, from Colonia, who was traveling in the car behind Joe at the time of the accident. "Why spend money at the bar when we can sit here for free?" 

The employees at Dunkin' Donuts knew Joe well and were devastated by the news. Anthony Rinon, 18, remembers what Joe would usually order: a large blueberry coffee with Splenda and cream. He would see Joe at the beginning of his night shift and then usually again at the end of it the next morning. Rinon remembers Joe as a jokester, one who'd mess with him about exactly what he was going to order.

Rinon says he is "perplexed" as to why so many folks hang out here, but says the employees don't mind them at all – "as long as they don't make a mess."

Fedorchak says there is just something about this Dunkin' Donuts. "It's magnetic," he says. "Remember that big snow storm where there was a state of emergency? We were still here. We couldn't stay away. We've got everything here you could want: coffee, food, friends."

Or maybe the draw was Joe. Although they are all regulars, the group agrees Joe was the one who was at Dunkin' every single day. "If you were in a bad mood, you could come here because you knew he'd be here – or would come in an instant if you called," says Siegelman. "Of all people this could happen to, it shouldn't have been him."

Dunkin', naturally, became the spot where the group gathered in the wake of Joe's death. Rinon was working and said the vibe was awful, quiet, sad. Sunday night the friends organized a vigil at the accident site with the pole Joe struck now a makeshift memorial, lined with Dunkin' Donuts items.

But tonight, as the group received the news that one of their friends just went into labor, they cheer and clap – a quick break from the sorrow. They are self-described as "one, big, dysfunctional family" and call Joe the glue that held them together and the peacemaker of the bunch whenever there was a disagreement among them. Other words come up as they attempt to describe him: unique, a dreamer and special with an infectious laugh.

"There's not a single other person on earth like him," says Ferretti, as the others nod in agreement. "You could search this whole world and never find another Joe again."