When she woke up in the middle of the night, she immediately knew something was wrong.
It was 3 a.m. The lights in the house were still on. The bathroom door was still closed. And the water was still running.
She’d been tossing and turning in bed and when her 25-year-old son came home two hours earlier, she felt relief. She heard him go into the bathroom and she heard him turn on the water before she fell asleep.
The water is still running. A panicked internal voice told her that was not right. She jumped out of bed. The lights were still on. She turned the knob on the bathroom door and pushed — it was blocked. She pushed harder. It wouldn’t budge.
Nearly nine years later, Patricia Sapienza-Brown recalls in vivid detail what happened next — almost minute by minute.
She banged on the bathroom door, screaming her son’s name.
“George! George!”
She hollered to wake up her daughter Erica. “Call 911! Call 911!”
She knew, she says, she just knew — and the tears flow as she recalls the horror of March 7, 2007.
“I broke the door down,” Sapienza-Brown recalls. Her son’s strapping 6-foot-3 frame was on the floor, against the door. “When I tried to turn him over, I just lost it.”
Almost out of nowhere, Riverhead Police Officer Michael Mowdy was there.
“He picked my son up and carried him into the living room, threw him on the floor and began working on him. He tried everything…” Sapienza-Brown’s voice trails off. “I knew, though… You can just tell.” She pauses. “I think he must have been lying there for a while.”
A growing epidemic
From 2010 to 2014, overdose deaths — the vast majority of them from heroin — increased more than 50 percent in Suffolk County, rising from 189 in 2010 to 284 in 2014, according to the county’s medical examiner’s office.
The statistics for 2015 are not yet finalized, but the preliminary numbers show drug overdoses responsible for 317 deaths in Suffolk County last year, according to data provided by the medical examiner’s office. Most are from heroin and other opiates.
The magnitude of the problem comes into sharper focus when overdose reversal numbers are taken into account. The number of overdose deaths and reversals taken together, will likely exceed 800 for the first time in 2015.
** as of Nov. 30, 2015
Overdose reversals have risen sharply in Suffolk as the opiate antidote naloxone, used by EMS and hospitals for more than 40 years, has been made more widely available, thanks to new legislation and FDA approval of new, easier-to-administer forms of the drug.
“The reality is, you’d be hard-pressed to find someone who doesn’t know someone who is suffering from heroin addiction,” Suffolk County Deputy Police Commissioner Tim Sini said in an interview last month.
“It started in the ‘90s with an influx of powerful pain medication that was over-presecribed throughout the country,” Sini said. The widespread availability of those highly addictive opiate-based pain pills led to their widespread abuse. Government’s efforts to restrict their availability only led a rising number of addicts to turn to heroin to fill their needs, he said.
Many heroin addicts first became addicted to prescription pain pills — either because they were prescribed for an ailment or because they experimented with them as recreational drugs. But the high cost of those pills on the street — as much as $100 a pill — leads addicts to turn to heroin, available at a fraction of the cost.
That’s already an all-too-familiar story, one that’s been told over and over again to legislative task force members and a Suffolk County grand jury empaneled by District Attorney Thomas Spota in 2011 to investigate the issue.
Paul Maffetone, of Laurel, watched his older brother Michael become addicted to pain pills prescribed to treat a hand injury, then move on to heroin. Michael died of an overdose in February 2012 at age 29.
“I watched how his life became taken over by this drug. I watched him lose everything. Visits in jail, the day by day struggles when he was home, the withdrawals, the lies, the stealing, the pain in my parents and myself, then the ultimate consequence,” Maffetone said.
He has made it his mission to raise awareness about the horrors of heroin and the symptoms of use, which are not necessarily easy to recognize. To that end, he founded a nonprofit, Michael’s Hope, and is hosting educational forums and Narcan training across Long Island. One is scheduled in Mattituck on Feb. 4. See prior story.
‘Heroin? It wasn’t even on my radar’
One North Fork mother whose son is in the grips of heroin addiction said he became addicted to pain pills legally prescribed to him by a physician. Then he moved on to heroin.
“At first we didn’t even realize what was going on,” said the woman, who asked not to be identified because her husband is a police officer.
“It wasn’t even on my radar,” she admits. “Heroin? You just don’t think of it.”
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