NEW YORK – The tragic story of Greek-American Dimitri Grammatikopoulos is growing all too familiar today with the rising opioid epidemic. The Brooklyn resident struggled for years with mental illness, drug abuse, and addiction that eventually cost him his life. The Daily News reported the story as part of its series on the opioid crisis noting that Grammatikopoulos even as a child “saw himself as a savior of lost souls and the protector of his family.”
He grew up in Bay Ridge, raised along with his two sisters, by a single mother who recounted how her son tried to be the man of the house, as reported in the Daily News article.
His mother, Melissa Lee, 58, an elementary school teacher said, “He always felt he had to watch out for me and his two sisters. He was very protective. He was a very manly child, and it was a big burden for him.”
She noted how her young son would carry a hammer to fix things in their apartment including a broken door and would proudly show his work to her.
A call from his third grade teacher that young Dimitri threatened to kill himself, led to therapy for the boy. According to the Daily News report, his doctors “suspected that he was bipolar, but he never experienced manic phases, only periodic bouts of depression that worsened in his teens.”
At age 16, he “smashed a bathroom mirror and told his mom he had punched his reflection,” the Daily News reported, saying, “Mommy, you can say goodbye to your son. I want to die today.”
He spent two weeks at Lutheran Medical Center’s psychiatric ward after which he was prescribed Xanax. “Ma, I found a pill and it makes me feel really nice,” Dimitri told his mother as the Daily News reported.
“Lee, who was studying to become a nurse, warned Dimitri that Xanax it was a serious drug that was easily abused. But Dimitri gradually fell deeper into drug abuse,” the Daily News noted.
Dreams of becoming a K-9 cop, out of his love for animals and helping people were sidelined by his drug addiction. After dropping out of Fort Hamilton High School even before his junior year, he worked as a handyman, spending all his pay on pills, and overdosing for the first time at 16.
“He knew he was a drug addict, and I knew he knew it,” Lee said, as reported in the Daily News.
Repeated overdoses and his mother’s calls to the ambulance every time led her son to say just as he regained consciousness, “Why are you putting me in the hospital? I can’t get drugs. Why are you doing this to me?”
Dimitri overdosed repeatedly. His mother called for an ambulance each time, provoking her son to lash out after regaining consciousness.
“Why are you putting me in the hospital?” he once asked her, only seconds after coming to. “I can’t get drugs. Why are you doing this to me?”
On his 18th birthday, Dimitri checked himself out of rehab since he was an adult and his mother could no longer keep him in a treatment facility.
There were stretches of sobriety over a period of two years, but then Dimitri was arrested for a 2005 stabbing, maintaining his innocence, though he plead guilty and received a four-year sentence.
While incarcerated at Staten Island’s Arthur Kill Correctional Facility Dimitri was able to get his GED, perform in plays, and even managed to rescue animals. Finding two baby turtles in the yard, he persuaded a corrections officer to keep them until his mother could take them.
“Don’t let them go yet because they’re too slow,” Dimitri told his mom, as the Daily News reported. “They can’t take care of themselves.”
While in prison, he seemed to have regained the youthful optimism of his boyhood, seeing beauty in nature.
“Today I woke up to a beautiful sheet of snow on the ground right outside my window,” he wrote in a prison letter to his mother, as the Daily News reported.
After his release, three years after the letter to his mother, Dimitri’s girlfriend gave birth to his son, Nicholas.
Unfortunately, the cycle of relapses, rehabs, and brief stays in jail for probation violations followed, leading to Dimitri’s heroin addiction.
His mother told the Daily News that he tried heroin for the first time at an inpatient drug treatment facility in the Bronx, returning home “a shadow of himself.”
“I met a son that I didn’t know,” she said.
About a year later, Dimitri’s mother went to his locked bedroom door, calling his cell phone, hearing it ring, repeatedly, with only silence as a response.
“I knew he was dead,” she told the Daily News.
Dimitri’s sister’s boyfriend climbed into the room through a window and found Dimitri dead, a needle in his hand, and a small bag of white powder next to him. His mother discovered the final message on his cell phone had never been sent to the “friend” who had helped him score the deadly fentanyl that cost him his life. The message read, as the Daily News reported, “Dawg, thank you so much. You’re my best friend.”
Dimitri Grammatikopoulos was about two months away from his 30th birthday.
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