Boardman couple paint tragic portrait of son's addiction

By JORDYN GRZELEWSKI

jgrzelewski@vindy.com

BOARDMAN

Sitting beside each other at Lorie’s Gertrude Avenue home, Donald and Lorie LoGiudice replay the night of April 1 again and again in their minds, agonizing over the what-ifs.

“I keep wondering, did he want to come stay that night? Should I have said, ‘Donny, come stay here for tonight?’” Lorie said.

“If I had gone in when he came in, and sat down and talked to him, I might have changed everything,” Donald said.

They keep trying to piece together the last hours of their 28-year-old son’s life before his death early April 2.

“I don’t understand even why he even did this, or why he even tried to do it that night, because I just picked him up” from rehab, Donald said. “He was so happy and cheerful, the best I’ve seen him in years.”

The day after Donald picked his son up from a treatment center in Akron, he found him sitting slumped over on his bed, dead from a heroin overdose.

“I don’t want anybody to ever see [that],” Donald said. “It looked like he saw a monster.”

Donny, whose parents remember him as a creative, inquisitive soul with scores of friends, struggled with

addiction for years before his death.

The worst of it started in 2012, his parents say, after a car accident left him with serious injuries. He’d been clean for awhile after some drug use when he was younger, but the pain medication he was prescribed after the accident set off his addiction again.

In the last few years, Donny fluctuated between using drugs and getting clean.

When he was clean, he was a frequent presence in downtown Youngstown, where many people got to know him.

“Our talking with him was always, ‘Why are you doing this? Get off drugs! What are you doing with your life? You’re wasting away!’” Donald said. “Well little did I know, he wasn’t wasting away. He was helping other people.”

Many of his friends, however, didn’t know about his addiction.

“When he was using, he wanted nobody around him. None of his friends or anything,” Lorie said. “He would stay away from downtown. That’s why nobody down there knew — they were shocked.”

That kind of behavior, she said, should serve as a warning to other families.

“You have to watch for that, when they’re isolating themselves. And when they start going back to these friends that you know they were with when they were using before,” she said. “Then you’ve got to really step up.”

During those times, the family struggled.

“Because we were always arguing,” Donald said. “I said, ‘Why are you doing this? It’s killing us.’

“Because it was hurting me. It really hurt me. And I knew what his potential was.”

Donny even begged his dad to go out and buy heroin for him, right before he went to Akron for treatment.

“I wouldn’t do it,” Donald said.

Over the years, Lorie found Donny multiple times after an overdose.

“I always found him slumped on the floor in his room,” she said. “The first time I found him was the worst. He was turning blue.”

Police reports filed April 28, 2013, and March 22, 2014, detail instances when police responded for overdoses. An earlier police report details an arrest for domestic violence, and possession of drug instruments and drug paraphernalia.

Now, Donald and Lorie are on a mission to defeat the heroin epidemic that’s ravaged the community.

“I’m going to try and see if I can get some people together that have had the same experience, and see if we can become a force to take down this heroin,” Donald said. “As individuals we can’t do anything. But if we get a few voices together, we’ll become a roar.”

The first step, for them, was stating the cause of his death in Donny’s obituary.

“Donald W. “Donny” LoGiudice, 28, became a victim of laced heroin, that caused his untimely passing on Thursday, April 2, 2015,” it reads.

“I think [other families] have got to make it known. They have to let people know that they are dealing with a monster, a devil,” Donald said.

“You’ll find out, they’ve just got a monster on their back that they can’t handle.”

A Maine couple made national headlines last week after posting a similar obituary about their daughter.

“Molly Alice Parks, age 24, who most recently resided in Manchester, NH, passed away in Manchester on April 16, 2015, as the result of a heroin overdose,” it reads.

It continues, “If you have any loved ones who are fighting addiction, Molly’s family asks that you do everything possible to be supportive, and guide them to rehabilitation before it is too late.”