03 Feb Grieving Lowell mother aids in addiction battle after son’s overdose
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LOWELL — Danielle Cunningham sees her Joey in the patient. When’s the last time he called his mother, she asks.
When was his last overdose?
Ten days ago from fentanyl, the man responds.
Cunningham then points behind her — to a picture of her smiling, healthy, athletic, skateboarding Joey.
Her big-hearted, “beautiful bear” stone mason.
“Fentanyl got him, too,” the nurse tells the man battling addiction.
Cunningham keeps replaying the horror of Aug. 25.
Her son, Joey Buscanera, was couch surfing at the time. He arrived in Cunningham’s home in Lowell’s Highlands neighborhood that Saturday night in August, asking what’s on the menu. Cunningham could tell he was high.
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He left later that night, heading to Plaistow, N.H., to sleep in a trailer, located next to the house his father was building. He apparently visited a friend on the way up north, purchasing a lethal substance.
The next day, Cunningham wept as she laid beside her son in the trailer.
He was face down on the ground.
“Joey was good,” Cunningham says, tearing up before pausing for several seconds. “He was good. It just doesn’t make any sense.”
Last year as her son battled addiction, she changed jobs in the hopes of saving him.
She left a hospice palliative care corporate business, taking a significant pay cut to join Tewksbury State Hospital as a registered nurse in the treatment program.
One day he visited her in Tewksbury, driving 18 miles from New Hampshire for a five-dollar bill. She told him he could detox there, and then go on to halfway and sober homes.
But her son said he didn’t need the help.
Cunningham’s mission, now, is to help as many people as she can at the treatment center — doing all in her power to make sure no other mother loses her son.
“I just don’t want anyone to go through this,” she said, again crying at her kitchen table in the Highlands.
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Her other goal is to stop the stigma because her son was not a bad person, she reiterates — he was a sick person.
Thirteen years ago, the then-11-year-old boy was skateboarding around Hadley Park off Middlesex Street, getting photographed by The Sun.
Cunningham also shows a photo of herself in The Sun, next to her son outside church on Easter Sunday.
But as a teenager, he faced an anxiety disorder that went untreated, his mother believes. He never felt “totally good.”
She recalls his baseball coach coming to the house, and grabbing him by his ankles in bed to get him to the game.
He started drinking a few beers and smoking marijuana on the weekend, but Cunningham never had a problem with him doing that.
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She never thought he would transition from recreational substances to heroin.
“He tried it and the high was just so beyond what we can think of, especially when there’s something in you that doesn’t feel good,” she said.
She noticed the behavior changes about two years ago.
A stone mason who loved rocks, he no longer cared about his job, or heading to the skate park and gym. He stayed inside, not wanting to head out with friends.
The heroin took everything, she stressed.
“He just was not Joey,” she said.
After an overdose in his bedroom, he went to a rehabilitation hospital for 10 days.
When he arrived home, Cunningham didn’t see any improvement, so he went to Plymouth for court-mandated addiction treatment, overseen by the state Department of Correction.
” ‘Ma, get me out of here,’ ” he said over the phone.
Buscanera spent 30 days there, and appeared to make progress.
He said he’d feel even better and wouldn’t use drugs again if his mother bought him a motorcycle, a Kawasaki 650. In September 2017, she bought him the motorcycle, and everything seemed like it was heading in the right direction.
Those negative behavior changes returned two months later in November. He went to a detox facility at an old country inn, but didn’t follow it up with after-care.
When Cunningham continued to see the behaviors in January 2018 — on the back porch he was in a full nod on Jan. 21 — she lost it.
” ‘I can’t do this,’ ” she told her son.
Maybe he needed to hit rock bottom, she thought.
Maybe she needed to throw him out.
That exacerbated everything.
“I’ll tell you, tough love doesn’t work when the underlying cause is anxiety or a mental illness,” she said.
Around 10 a.m. on that fateful August day, she looked down at her buzzing phone. Her ex-husband was calling.
Joey’s gone, he told her.
Where did Joey go, she wondered.
Police, firefighters and the coroner were at the trailer, her ex-husband said.
She started feeling sick and pulled into the MetroPCS parking lot near Lowell’s Rourke Bridge. A friend picked her up to drive to Plaistow.
When she arrived, her son was face down in the trailer, wearing only boxer shorts and shoes. He got hot when he was high, stripping off the rest of his clothes; he had shoes on because he apparently tried to get to his car, where there were five packs of Narcan.
He never made it outside.
The police investigation showed that Lowell 25-year-old Eric Martinac allegedly sold the fentanyl to Buscanera on Aug. 25 at Hadley Park.
The death occurred in New Hampshire, so the Plaistow Police Department charged Martinac with sale of a controlled drug resulting in death. Martinac turned himself in to police on Jan. 18, and pleaded not guilty in Rockingham County Courthouse in Brentwood.
The maximum penalty is life in prison.
On March 12, sides will meet in a conference. Martinac is being held until then.
A day after Buscanera died in August, Martinac like many others took to social media.
“Today we lost a brotha a good person who we all seen become Lil Joey to the man he became,” Martinac wrote on Facebook. “I remember getting into a fight with him when we were kids we were friends after and ever since then we always been bois, he had the best tre flips and was one genuine dude RIP homie.”
Instead of jail for the rest of his life, Cunningham said she hopes Martinac turns his life around, and helps others battling addiction as a way to honor her son. Incarceration isn’t the solution, she reiterated, adding that her loving son wouldn’t want anyone to go to jail.
She also wants Martinac to realize the profound degree of loss here.
What if he walked into her facility?
“I’d probably hit him with a pillow and say, ‘How could you?’ ” Cunningham said. ” ‘Now, what are we going to do to get you better?’
“That’d be a tough assignment because I’m not Jesus,” she added.
She visits St. Patrick’s Cemetery every day, stopping at her son’s headstone that reads “Heart of Gold,” the hit single by Neil Young.
He loved that song, his mother says.
It starts:
“I want to live, I want to give
“I’ve been a miner for a heart of gold
“It’s these expressions I never give
“That keep me searching for a heart of gold, and I’m getting old.”
Follow Rick Sobey on Twitter @rsobeyLSun.
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