Don’t come downstairs, the police told her. You don’t want to see him this way.
Serena Fallon did as the officers said and stayed upstairs while her son lay dead on the basement floor of her Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, home.
Connor, 25, had returned the night before from Florida, where he had recently attended a drug rehab program. After showering and getting ready for bed, he slumped over into his suitcase.
Serena and her husband, Doug, found him in the morning and called 911. The police, suspecting a fentanyl overdose, urged her to stay away from Connor while they worked.
At one point, a detective walked through the house, she said, but left without leaving his card. Connor lay on the floor for six hours before the medical examiner was ready to take his body away. The whole time, she paced upstairs, calling and texting her family, but mostly unsure of what to do.
“I think of myself harshly that day,” she wrote in a letter to a judge years later. “I wonder why I did not fight the police and E.M.S. to let me put a pillow under my son’s head and cover him with a blanket? Why didn’t I sit with him all those hours? My final act as a mother and I was in shock, and I was a useless mother.”
The sun had begun to set on April 12, 2022, as Connor was wheeled out of the basement in a body bag with a tag affixed to his toe.
“My son and the baby in our family,” Serena wrote, “was being taken out like labeled garbage in a bag.”
It cannot end like this, she later thought. She believed this wasn’t just a case of the tragic consequences of addiction. This was a crime, she was certain, and she was determined to have someone punished for it.
Serena Fallon is the mother of one of the more than 73,000 Americans who died of an overdose from fentanyl or some other form of synthetic opioids in 2022, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It was the deadliest year of the fentanyl epidemic so far.
It can be difficult for the police and prosecutors to find evidence tying a drug dealer to a specific overdose. But Serena was driven to hold someone accountable for her son’s death.
I met Serena and Doug Hoch, Connor’s stepfather, in late 2023. Over the course of a year, I interviewed them at their home, attended court hearings and reviewed the many court documents, including numerous letters they and others wrote to a federal judge pleading for justice for Connor.
During that time, Serena kept her emotions in check and stayed laser-focused on her goal. But the pain was never far below the surface.
“There is a saying,” she wrote to the judge. “A mother is only as happy as her saddest child.”
“I now understand what that means.”
‘An Alphabet Soup of Disorders’
As a boy growing up in Queens and Brooklyn, Connor Barr was kind and curious. He once rescued a stray dog tied up at a skate park and an emaciated cat on the street. He kept a prayer table in his bedroom. Raised Catholic, Connor once told his parents when he was young that he was interested in becoming a priest.
After reaching puberty, though, he became brooding and violent. His legs would sometimes shake with anxiety and anger. He preferred gray, rainy weather over sunshine.
Doctors diagnosed Connor with an “alphabet soup of disorders,” as Serena put it: intermittent explosive, oppositional defiant, attention deficit. By 16, Connor had been hospitalized three times for psychiatric issues. He went to therapists in New York and a therapeutic boarding school in Oregon.
One thing remained constant: Connor refused to take the medicine he was prescribed. At some point he came to believe psychiatric medicine could hurt him, and he never let go of the idea, Serena said.
She tried everything to get Connor to take his pills, hiding them in ice cream or smoothies.
“We even tried putting it in his mouth and watching him swallow the medication with water,” she told the judge at one hearing.
But he preferred to self-medicate, first in middle school with marijuana and then with many different drugs, including opioids.
Hoping again and again to give Connor a fresh start, Serena and Doug moved the family to Connecticut and later to Charlotte, N.C. But he struggled in those communities, too.
When he turned 20, Connor was admitted to his first rehab program in Florida. He was discharged after a month for breaking a door. “Connor knew that was how you got to go home,” Doug told me.
Serena, who for many years investigated Medicaid fraud for the State of New York, and Doug, who recently retired from a job in finance, had the means to help Connor. They invested tens of thousands of dollars in the hope that he could get better, sending him to at least 10 inpatient rehab programs and 13 sober living houses in Florida, Colorado, Pennsylvania and Mississippi.
When he wasn’t cycling through treatment, Connor lived in the furnished basement of his parents’ house in Bay Ridge.
Once, Serena kicked Connor out when his behavior became too disruptive.
“You are getting all this advice from people saying, ‘You have to show tough love, you have to put them out,’” Serena said.
“Connor just hung out on the front steps and rang the doorbell all day long. I realized this is a psychiatric problem. You can’t tough love your way out of a psychiatric problem.”
A Tense Homecoming
After Connor died, Serena was eager for the police to start an investigation. But almost a week passed and she hadn’t heard from anyone.
On Easter Sunday, five days after Connor’s death, Serena sought help from Justin Brannan, a Democrat representing Bay Ridge on the City Council. He got back to her right away, assuring her that the case would receive the attention it deserved.
Detective James Harkins of the Narcotics Borough Brooklyn South arrived at the family’s home a few days later. Serena and Doug recounted for the detective what happened the night Connor died.
As Connor was returning home from Florida, Serena got a phone alert from her bank. He had stopped at an A.T.M. at a 7-Eleven somewhere in Brooklyn and withdrawn $100.
She felt almost certain that he had taken the money out to buy drugs.
When Connor’s taxi pulled up to the house, Serena started to confront him about the money, but decided to stand down until morning. She was tired and just relieved to have him home. Doug set the house alarm, and they all turned in for the night.
They told Detective Harkins they had records that could be helpful to him like a receipt from the A.T.M. Connor used and a list of numbers from Connor’s phone, including one he texted regularly that night.
Experience had taught Detective Harkins, who now works on a violent gang task force, that it was hard to build one of these fatal overdose cases. Then again, it was unusual for him to have this type of evidence.
“They gave us a lot to work with,” he told me.
‘The Hierarchy of Dying’
In the weeks after Connor died, Serena went dark.
She resigned from her job with no explanation and made Doug turn in her badge so she wouldn’t have to face her co-workers. When they texted, called and left messages, she didn’t respond.
This was concerning behavior from someone like Serena. Her colleagues had always been close to her. She confided in them about Connor’s struggles and helped them with theirs. Serena was also a union leader in her office, handling grievances and advocating for the staff.
Suddenly it was as if there was no room in her life for anything but loss.
When I asked her about cutting off her friends, she said, “I couldn’t be helpful to them anymore.”
To cope with her grief, she attended a support group for parents who had lost children. At one meeting, she sat next to a man whose 12-year-old daughter had died of cancer. She felt out of place.
“There is a hierarchy of dying, and I am very aware that drug overdoses are at the bottom,” she said.
A once committed Catholic, she found that her faith no longer comforted her. Instead, she visited a psychic medium to see whether Connor would “come through.” He didn’t.
“I know it’s insane,” she wrote to the judge. “I just want to know there is a better place and he is there.”
Doug didn’t know how to help Serena. He bought her a book about grief. Her mother and sister urged her to return to work and engage with the world again.
One night, when Doug was asleep, Serena searched for the words “fentanyl” and “families” on Facebook and discovered other parents who had lost children to overdoses. Some had found their child dead in their bedroom. Others didn’t know for months that their child had died because their child was homeless.
Serena described these online groups as a wilderness of pain where devastated parents searched aimlessly, unable to make sense of the deaths.
For her, there was no solace in these Facebook groups. But they gave her a sense of the scale of the fentanyl problem and the anger festering among tens of thousands of families across the country who felt overlooked.
“You would read over and over again, ‘We were told who sold my kid the drugs, but the detective didn’t do anything.’”
The Drug Dealer
About five months after Connor died, the police made an arrest. Caleb Apolinaris, who was 25 at the time, was charged with selling fentanyl to Connor.
Mr. Apolinaris, by all accounts, was a low-level dealer from Brooklyn, who struggled with heroin addiction himself. He went by the name Kappa, the police said. Connor had texted him from the train on his way home from Florida.
“Be up for me bro, please,” Connor had said.
“I got you 100%,” Mr. Apolinaris responded.
Prosecutors said the text exchange showed that Connor thought he was buying $80 worth of heroin. It turned out to contain fentanyl, the police said.
A video from the taxi that Connor took from Penn Station station to Brooklyn recorded him pulling up to an apartment building in Bay Ridge and making an exchange with Mr. Apolinaris outside. Back inside the taxi, the video shows Connor raising a small envelope to his nose, snorting a substance and then throwing an empty bag out the window.
The evidence Serena and Doug gave to the police had proven invaluable. After tracking down the location of the A.T.M. that Connor used, Detective Harkins was able to pull video footage from the 7-Eleven showing Connor’s taxi. The detective then located the taxi and reviewed its video footage from that night.
The arrest gave Serena hope. She assumed that Mr. Apolinaris would be compelled to give up his source and that the police would work their way up the fentanyl food chain to arrest the major dealers poisoning New York.
“I thought he could lead to bigger fish,” she told me.
‘There Was a Death’
Serena and Doug attended every hearing, even the ones that lasted only a few minutes.
Serena studied Mr. Apolinaris in his tan jail uniform. He sat next to his lawyer and smiled and gestured to his parents, who were also in the courtroom.
It infuriated her that he seemed relatively at ease.
At one hearing, Mr. Apolinaris’s father and mother pleaded with the judge to let their son out on bail so he could undergo drug treatment. His parents said they had tried to get him into rehab before, but didn’t succeed.
“The enemy in this courtroom is not him,” his father, Moses Apolinaris, told the judge. “The enemy is drug use. The enemy is drug addiction.”
When it was Serena’s time to speak, her grief boiled over.
Addiction, she said, did not absolve Mr. Apolinaris of responsibility.
“There was a death,” she said, as she turned to look at his father.
Shouting now, she added, “Even though the Apolinaris family doesn’t recognize that their son killed our son.”
“He didn’t,” Moses Apolinaris shot back.
“He absolutely did,” Serena said.
One of the U.S. marshals guarding the defendant whispered into his radio, calling for more officers in the courtroom.
The judge pleaded for calm: “Excuse me. I think we need to be less personal.”
In the end, the judge denied bail, and soon after, Mr. Apolinaris decided to plead guilty to selling fentanyl to Connor.
The prosecutor stopped short of charging him with the more serious crime of distribution of fentanyl resulting in death, which carries a minimum 20-year sentence. The sentencing would be in November 2024.
After the plea deal was made, Serena emailed her former colleagues and told them why she had vanished.
“I am sorry I fell apart,” she wrote.
She urged them to write letters to the judge asking for a tough sentence for Mr. Apolinaris.
She also posted a petition online asking for a harsh penalty. More than 1,700 people from across the country signed in support, and many of them shared their own stories of loss.
“We have to put these people in prison,” wrote one mother.
“No more losing our babies,” wrote another.
Deciding on Punishment
Many of Serena’s former colleagues took the day off to be with her in the packed Brooklyn courtroom on the day of the sentencing. Mr. Apolinaris’s family sat on one side of the courtroom, Serena and Doug’s family on the other.
As part of the plea deal, Mr. Apolinaris’s lawyer and the prosecutors agreed to recommend a range of possible prison terms from 11 to 14 years. His court-appointed lawyer, Michael Schneider, pleaded for a shorter sentence.
He pointed out that the dealer who sold the fentanyl that killed Michael K. Williams, the celebrated actor in the television series “The Wire,” had many prior convictions, but received only a 10-year sentence.
Mr. Apolinaris, by contrast, had a less extensive criminal history. The year before Connor’s death, Mr. Apolinaris had been arrested for leaving his young daughter unsupervised after his lawyer said he took Suboxone and passed out in a public bathroom.
Mr. Schneider said in a letter to the judge that he understood the “family’s cries for justice — for a maximum sentence.”
“But vengeance,” Mr. Schneider wrote, “is not justice.”
Mr. Apolinaris told the judge that over his lifetime, he had been stabbed, shot at and attacked with a machete. He said that in jail he had become free of opioids for the first time in a decade and that he was sorry for the pain he caused Connor’s family.
“Judge, I am not asking you to set me free,” Mr. Apolinaris said. “But I’m asking you to believe in the person I can and will become.”
In the end, Mr. Apolinaris did not disclose his supplier, which Serena and one of her colleagues, who spoke at the sentencing, said should have been a requirement of any plea deal.
Moses Apolinaris said his son would have put himself and his family in danger if he had divulged his source of the drugs he sold.
“To have done so would have been in fact a death warrant,” the father wrote to the judge.
Chief Judge Margo K. Brodie of the Brooklyn federal court said her duty was to impose a sentence that was “sufficient, but not greater than necessary.”
A former federal prosecutor who had been nominated to the bench by President Barack Obama, Judge Brodie decided on a 14-year sentence, at the high end of the range in the plea deal.
Mr. Apolinaris slouched in his chair and nodded repeatedly as if something had just dawned on him. “Love you,” he said loudly to his family, as the marshals escorted him out.
Serena and Doug were stunned. They had hoped and expected that Mr. Apolinaris would face a sentence closer to 20 years. They said the intricacies of the plea agreement were never fully explained to them and the deal was too lenient. “He got off easy,’’ Serena told me.
The Apolinaris family was also shocked that their son was sentenced to 14 years, which to them seemed harsh because he had no intention of harming Connor. “I know their loss is real,” Mr. Apolinaris’s father wrote to the chief judge after the sentencing. “But our loss is just as real.”
In a statement, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office said it “recognizes the deep pain suffered” by Connor’s family and “so many others who have lost loved ones.”
“Our mission is always to do justice, based on the law and the evidence.”
***
During the sentencing hearing, Serena said it was important that she talk about Connor “because he cannot speak for himself.”
“He loved history,” she said. “He was fascinated by other countries and collected flags and money from around the world.”
“He hated math.”
“He loved a neat and clean bedroom.”
Serena said that after staying away from Connor’s body for hours on the day he died, she finally went downstairs to see him. He was lying on the cold tile floor.
“I hugged and kissed him one final time in our home,” she said.
The courtroom was silent as she spoke.
Judge Brodie addressed Serena, praising her support for Connor through his many rehab stints and hospitalizations and finally her quest for “justice from this tragic overdose.”
“He fought hard to live and to find his way through his many challenges,” Judge Brodie said of Connor.
And it was clear, the chief judge said, “that he never fought alone.”
Read by Michael Corkery
Kirsten Noyes contributed research.
Audio produced by Patricia Sulbarán.
Michael Corkery is the finance editor of The Times.
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