Pavle Jovanovic completed her Rutgers title in 2010 and began working with her brother on the family metal work, where they made steel framing and also managed craft projects.
“The guy could look at a map and do all the calculations of what we needed in his head,” said Nick Jovanovic about his brother. No matter how complex the job is, in those early years, Pavle could always find the answer.
However, as the years passed, Pavle Jovanovic became someone Nick did not recognize. He drank a lot and was in a bad mood. He has never had trouble with the law before, but police in his Jersey Shore city have received more than a dozen complaints about him, from drinking and harassing restaurant customers to conflicts with ex-girlfriends.
At work, he began to lose his ability to do the simple mathematical calculations necessary to cut metal correctly.
On a Saturday afternoon in 2017, Nick Jovanovic stopped at the metal shop, where Pavle and two employees were working on a railing. Nick told Pavle that he was not doing it correctly. Pavle grabbed Nick and threw him against a wall, then pounced. Only when he saw his older brother’s face bleed did Pavle emerge from his fury.
He did a series of periods at a mental health center, where he was treated for alcoholism, depression, and bipolar disorder.
After his last period there, in 2018, he seemed to show progress. Last fall, he and his brother went to dinner in Atlantic City. “It was a decent night,” said Nick Jovanovic.
But during the winter, Pavle began to fade away. He got rid of his cell phone and started sleeping on the couch in the metal factory. Then on April 6, Nick Jovanovic noticed his brother shivering under a trailer while holding a welding torch, trying to do what would be their last job together.
“I kept asking him if he was okay, telling him he could stop and it would be over,” said Nick. “He kept saying, ‘Don’t worry about it. I have it.'”
Reviewing his brother’s recipes after his suicide, Nick Jovanovic found bottles of pills to treat his mental health problems, and one for Benztropine, a medication used to treat tremors and tremors that people with Parkinson’s or antipsychotic medications have often experience.
“I think he knew things were not going to get better,” said Nick Jovanovic. “I no longer had an answer.”
