The event, held at Showcase Live at Patriot Place, was organized by Comcast, A&E, and the Tri Town Drug and Alcohol Awareness Partnership, an organization of Mansfield, Foxboro, and Norton officials, parents, and students uniting to fight drug and alcohol abuse in the area.

Matt Kakley of the Sun Chronicle writes that Isha Raval, a junior at Foxboro High, said she got involved with the partnership through her work with her school’s chapter of Students Against Destructive Decisions, and to show other students that alcohol isn’t needed for a good time.

"I don’t have to drink to have fun," she said. "There’s better ways to have fun."

The program kicked off with a screening of an episode of "Intervention," a series that deals with families and friends confronting their drug- and alcohol-addicted loved ones. The episode shown Thursday featured Jill, who began drinking in high school and became increasingly dependent on alcohol, causing her life to spiral out of control.

Kathi Meyer, whose 17-year-old daughter, Taylor, a King Philip Regional High School senior from Plainville, drowned last October in an alcohol-related incident, was featured in a town hall-style meeting after the screening, sharing her tragedy in the hopes that other parents do not have to experience what she has.

"She drowned because of the alcohol in her system, she got lost because of the alcohol in her system," Meyer said of her daughter.

Meyer told parents in the audience that the biggest regrets she had were not having access to her daughter’s Facebook.com account, the cell phone numbers of Taylor’s friends, and a better dialogue with fellow parents.

Meyer was joined on the panel by Bristol County District Attorney Sam Sutter and Jeff Van Vonderen, one of the three interventionists on the A&E program, and Cameron Clapp, a California native who, in 2001 at the age of 15, lost his right arm and both of his legs when he was struck by a speeding train after a night of drinking.

"I was in no conscious state to see or hear the train coming," he told the audience. "I should have been dead."

Thursday’s event drew so many attendees that only 400 could fit inside Showcase Live, with approximately 100 more watching a simulcast of the program in a nearby movie theater.
 

The sold-out concert featuring singer Kenny Chesney drew nearly 56,000 people. Of those, Foxborough police arrested 92 people and State Police arrested 23 people, most for underage drinking or trespassing. The others, most of whom were detained for rowdy behavior or being drunk, were released.

Boston.com reports that the show of force—there were more than 250 state and local police deployed at the New England Country Music Festival—resulted in what some law enforcement officials said was the largest number of arrests at Gillette Stadium in years.

“Clearly, at least in the last 10 years, this was the most arrests we’ve seen after an event at the stadium,” said David Traub, a spokesman for the Norfolk district attorney’s office. There was such a long line for arraignments at Wrentham District Court that many of the hearings were pushed back until tomorrow.

The crackdown at Saturday’s show came after police faced similar problems at last year’s concert where two women, Alexa Latteo, 19, of Mansfield, and Debra Davis, 20, of Milton, died when their car struck a tree off Route 1 in Wrentham. At last year’s concert, authorities detained 76 people and some of them faced minor-in-possession charges.

Foxborough Police Chief Edward T. O’Leary said the mass arrests were necessary as a check on the rowdiness during last year’s event. “It was necessary for the safety of the fans that didn’t get drunk,” he said. “In 2007, we had significant violence in the parking lot of the surrounding area for people without tickets, and we wanted to avoid that this year.”

He added: “Underage alcohol use is a significant problem in suburban communities. It’s believed that the two underage people who crashed and died last year were using alcohol.”