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Memorial fundraiser planned in honor of Boardman overdose victim
YOUNGSTOWN
Donny LoGiudice never got all of the help he needed to beat his heroin addiction.
His father, Donald, however, hopes to help others avoid the fate of his son, who died April 2, 2015, of a drug overdose at age 28.
To that end, the LoGiudices will donate money raised at a memorial fundraiser on Sunday at The Federal to addicts who need help paying for treatment. Some funds also will be used to establish a YSU scholarship.
The downtown restaurant will donate 20 percent of proceeds from food sales and all tips earned from 2 p.m. to close to the memorial fund.
Donny’s family believes it is important to help people get treatment, Donald told The Vindicator, because the obstacles to getting clean (such as lacking insurance and the often-steep cost of treatment) can be prohibitive.
“How many people can afford to spend $40,000 or $50,000?,” LoGiudice said. “And there is no guarantee that it’s going to work. There are cases where people have spent $50,000 for their child to go to rehab, and they still relapse.”
He knows, because it’s similar to what happened to his son. Donny died just hours after his father picked him up from a detox center.
“Unfortunately, that night he got the urge. He went out, got some bad heroin, overdosed and died,” LoGiudice said.
Donald is the one who found his son’s body, slumped over in bed, his face frozen in an expression his father described at the time as horror-stricken, “like he saw a monster.”
LoGiudice said he regrets that he didn’t know how to help his son, but since Donny’s death, has become passionately outspoken on the topic of addiction, even noting Donny’s cause of death in his obituary.
His efforts in part are ignited by the overwhelming scope of the national opioid-addiction epidemic. In 2014, 47,055 people in the United States died of a drug overdose, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“It’s more than you would lose in a war,” LoGiudice said, noting that it breaks down to 129 overdose deaths per day.
“It’s got to be stopped,” he said. “We’re losing a generation of young people. Every day we’re losing them.”