Mother’s Day in the midst of the opioid epidemic | Local News

She looked back on Dec. 31, 2017, when many a family prepared to celebrate the close of the year and the arrival of a hopeful new one.

There was to be no celebration at the Weiss household, only shock and grief over the death of David Greene, victim of what the family learned was a fentanyl overdose.

Ironically, a front-page headline that day in the Observer-Reporter‘s annual top-10 local stories of the year list was, “Opioids still taking a huge toll.”

While the statistics were on track to decline, for Kathy Weiss, the headline still rings true.

“As a mother, you feel so bad because you know there’s nothing you can do,” she said in an interview. “It’s, like, out of your control. When your child hurts, you hurt.

“It’s so hard for people to understand unless you’ve been in that position.

“You have to really live it to understand it.”

Drug use first appeared at about the midpoint in David Greene’s 30-year lifespan.

Weiss became aware her son was smoking marijuana when he was 14 years old.

“At first, as a parent you don’t want to believe it,” she recalled. “I started checking his pockets, his drawers.

“Of course I found some – not large amounts – just little bits of weed and we had a discussion about it.”

Then there was young David’s first of several brushes with the law, a theft from a garage that landed him before a master in Washington County Juvenile Court when he was in high school.

At some point, he began crushing and snorting Xanax pills, an anti-anxiety prescription medication and tranquilizer.

David studied carpentry at Western Area Career and Technology Center, but dropped out of the McGuffey High School Class of 2005, later obtaining a GED.

After he turned 21, Weiss noticed her son’s odd behavior at a family gathering.

“I don’t exactly know when he started on heroin,” she recounted. “There was a birthday party I had at the house. He was old enough to drink beer, and he was nodding off, tired, and he was real groggy.

“I thought, ‘That just can’t be from beer. I wonder what’s doing that?’”

It was then that Weiss started noticing “these little packs of white paper. I had never seen them before.”

The little packets were stamp bags commonly used to package doses of heroin or other opioids, and they were lying on a dresser in her son’s bedroom.

She described her son’s final nine years: “He was a chronic heroin user,” in and out of rehab.

“He knew he had a problem. He struggled with it. He did want to get better, don’t get me wrong.

“David was on Suboxone,” used in opioid replacement therapy without producing a high. “I’d take him all the way to Bridgeville to get Suboxone,” said Weiss, who lives in Blaine Township.

“He was on Suboxone, he was on methadone,” a synthetic opioid used to treat opiate addiction.

“He moved back home because he couldn’t afford the methadone every week and he couldn’t afford to pay his rent.”

Administered at a clinic, Greene would take a dose of methadone every day, including weekends, at a cost of $100 a week.

Then a traffic accident in West Virginia accelerated his downward spiral.

“He was in a bad car accident. I think that was when the heroin use got worse,” she said.

Weiss pegged the car crash at 2012. Her son was ejected from a vehicle in which he was a passenger. Greene was blinded in one eye and had titanium rods inserted in his back. He spent a total of three weeks in Ruby Memorial Hospital, Morgantown, and HealthSouth Rehabilitation Hospital.

“He was in a lot of pain after that,” she said. “I’m pretty positive he used when he got home.”

Despite his addiction, Weiss said her son worked in the family landscaping business, and she estimated he went through six drug rehab programs, the last one of which was faith- and abstinence-based.

“Right before my son went to rehab before he died, he said to me, ‘Mom, I shouldn’t have to put something in my body to feel like I’m normal.’ It was the first time I ever heard him say that. He said, ‘I can’t ask a girl out on a date. I feel I can’t do these things unless I have something in my body.’

“When he came home, he was completely off of everything. I just didn’t have a good feeling,” his mother said.

That was the final Friday of 2017, and Greene was anxious the next day, feeling the need to attend a 12-step meeting for support even as steady snow accumulated.

“I took him to three different churches here in town,” Weiss said. “All of them were closed. He had no meds. He was getting all sick. What was I to do?”

She dropped him off at a restaurant, promising to pick him up if he needed a ride home. It was the last time they spoke.

Early in the morning of Sunday, Dec. 31, her husband, Dan Weiss, went into their son’s bedroom to wake him so they could get a head start on removing the snow that had fallen overnight.

“David was laying on the floor on his side. He was starting to turn purple.”

Weiss, who is certified in cardiopulmonary resuscitation, immediately started performing CPR.

Later, she recalled hearing what she thought was a cat scratching at a litter box overnight. Greene’s dog was in his bedroom, and, in retrospect, she realized the noise she heard was more likely the dog trying to alert them.

“He probably died in the early morning sometime,” Weiss said. “Of course, I had Narcan at home, but I didn’t use the Narcan. Looking in his eyes, holding him there, I knew he was gone.”

Paramedics arrived and applied paddles to attempt to re-start Greene’s heart. They administered naloxone, the generic name for Narcan, but they ultimately pronounced him dead. State police began an investigation, during which Weiss turned over her son’s cellphones.

An autopsy was performed later that morning, and the concentration of fentanyl in Greene’s blood is listed on the report as 26 nanograms per milliliter. A nanogram is a billionth of a gram.

“In fatalities from fentanyl, blood concentrations are variable and have been reported as low as 3 nanograms per milliliter,” the report notes. The drug depresses breathing so severely that it can cause seizures, low blood pressure, coma and death.

There was no attempt to conceal Greene’s cause of death. His obituary announced he had “succumbed and lost his battle with addiction.” The family spent time at a funeral home receiving consolation from friends, and Greene was buried Jan. 5, 2018.

What spurred Weiss to talk in detail about her son’s death was a Washington County Court case from the Mon Valley stemming from a fentanyl-laced heroin fatality. An admitted drug dealer entered a guilty plea and was sentenced to five to 10 years in prison.

Weiss has not seen anyone charged with delivering the drug that caused her son’s death, and she said it made her feel “hurt and, somewhat, I felt betrayed, angry.

“You know, I was happy that (the Mon Valley victim’s) parents have got, that they did find the person that sold their son the drug.

“I was angry because I felt there could’ve been more done with my son. I was under the impression they were going to do what they could to find the person who sold this to David.

“I just have a lot of mixed feelings.”

It’s a local election year, but Weiss said she has no political motivation in expressing her dissatisfaction with the lack of a prosecution in her son’s death.

Weiss last year attended a meeting of the Washington County Opioid Overdose Coalition and introduced herself to Washington County District Attorney Gene Vittone.

The investigation of David Greene’s death is still open, Vittone said, and because of that, he couldn’t discuss much about it. He expressed empathy with the family’s tragedy and those who have experienced similar horrors.

“Drug overdose cases are particularly difficult investigations, as drug transactions usually don’t occur in the open,” Vittone said. “Police do their best to identify who the dealer is, but it is not possible in all cases.

“All too often I have had to talk with families who have lost a loved one and it is tremendously sad. We will continue to work to find dealers and prosecute them accordingly.”

First Assistant District Attorney Dennis Paluso spoke of an evenly split decision by the state Supreme Court that governs the use of cellphone communications in criminal prosecutions, saying it “handicaps us in establishing the authenticity of text messages. It’s not helpful to us at all. We will do what we can.”

Today, Weiss and her family plan to visit the cemetery where both her son and her mother are buried.

“I’ll go out to see him and I’ll take flowers,” she said. “It’s an emptiness.”

Although the story of David Greene’s shortened life is a sad one, Weiss said she wants people to know “he wasn’t a bad person. He was very much loved by people. He was always smiling, but when you’re fighting this, it’s a disease. David used to tell me, ‘It’s evil. It’s the devil. It’s the dark side.’

“He fought for a lot of years. I mean, he had so many goals and he tried, but it seemed like he just could not get there, no matter how hard he tried.”