June 10, 2013 — Richard Gaines, the award-winning 40-year New England journalist who spent more than a decade as staff writer with the Gloucester Daily Times and carved out a national niche with his local coverage of the commercial fishing industry, was found dead Sunday afternoon in the swimming pool outside his home in his beloved Bay View section of the city.
Gaines, who was 69, was found by his wife Nancy — also a longtime writer and editor and a Times correspondent — at around 2 p.m. yesterday when she returned to the couple’s Quarry Street home from Boston.
Nancy Gaines said she was initially surprised that Richard did not pick her up at the Gloucester commuter rail station as they had planned. She then made her way home, and found him already dead in the pool.
“We had plans to try to clean the pool,” she said Sunday evening. “And I’m guessing he either got up very early — as he often did — and was working on the pool, or was examining it. It looked as it he may have had a heart attack.”
Police and fire emergency crews responded to the scene as an unattended death. Authorities said there is no suspicion of foul play.
“I’d like to think that maybe the last things he saw were all of the trees and plants that he had worked on and cultivated all around him,” she said.
Gaines worked 11 years at the Times, delivering a passion to his news coverage and writing that led to a number of honors, and he was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize by the paper in 2010. In fact, two stories written by Gaines on Friday evening appear on Page 1 of today’s Times.
Read the full story at the Gloucester Daily Times