Dan Flood’s long goodbye
His family’s love was strong, but it could not overcome years of opioid addiction
ALBANY — It took three weeks for Dan Flood’s family to learn of his death from a fentanyl overdose. It was not an unexpected outcome. Flood, who had grown up in Guilderland and wound up homeless in downtown Albany, was found unresponsive on Jan. 3 — his parents never learned the exact location — and transported to Albany Medical Center Hospital, where he was pronounced dead. Because he had no identification, the 32-yearold’s body went unclaimed.
He was transferred to the morgue at Ellis Hospital in Schenectady and remained there as a John Doe for three weeks. A relative who was helping his parents try to track Flood down identified him from a tattoo on his leg: a gallon paint can with rainbow colors.
“We hoped against hope that Dan’s story would have a different ending,” said his father, Kevin Flood, who last saw his son in Albany five weeks before his death. “We tried everything — we had a lot of support, good services — and nothing seemed to work. We could
not save our son.”
Kevin and Diane Flood invested more than $500,000 of their retirement savings in more than a dozen treatment programs in five states across 18 years of desperation and heartache.
Nothing, it seemed, could free their son from the powerful grip of opioid addiction.
“I was heartbroken when I learned that Dan died,” said John Quigley, an advanced substance abuse counselor with Albany County’s Mobile Outreach Treatment Overdose Response unit. The veteran counselor worked closely with Flood for several years.
“Dan was smart and engaging, funny and kind,” Quigley said. “He had everything going for him. His parents and the county got him access to every possible resource. It is a shame what this disease does to people.”
Flood was a familiar face for years in downtown Albany. You could see him regularly along the Interstate 787 entrance off Madison Avenue holding a handwritten cardboard sign that said, “Homeless. Out of Work. Anything Helps. God Bless.”
“I don’t remember what day it is most of the time,” he told me in 2014, when he was 24.
He slept wrapped in a blanket or cast-off cardboard to fend off the cold
beneath the I-787 ramp near the U-haul building, or in the bowels of the Empire State Plaza. He found a community of sorts among a half-dozen homeless men who panhandled on South Pearl Street and camped in a clump of bushes and scrub trees behind the former Mcdonald’s at the corner of Madison Avenue and Pearl Street. He got kicked out of homeless shelters for breaking rules or failing sobriety tests.
His best friend from Guilderland died of a heroin overdose at 17. A half-dozen of the street people he hung out with in downtown Albany died of heroin and fentanyl overdoses.
His father often wondered how his son cheated death for so long. He developed the survival skills of a feral animal and endured multiple overdoses and hospitalizations, untreated health issues and serious injuries after beatings by street punks who prey on homeless people.
After a random drug test at one of many failed outpatient programs, a counselor told his father that his son’s fentanyl level was so high that it should have killed him.
‘Living hell’
In 2020, there were 100 fatal drug overdoses in Albany County and 65 involved fentanyl. In 2022, there were 135 fatal drug overdoses in Albany County — triple the number in 2015, according to county officials.
More than 107,375 people in the United States died of drug overdoses in 2021, the most recent year federal data is available, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Of those, 71,941 (67 percent) involved fentanyl or other powerful and deadly synthetic opioids.
As the numbers continue to climb, the human wreckage is incalculable. Xylazine, an animal tranquilizer known as tranq, has begun showing up in street heroin laced with fentanyl, resulting in more overdoses and in some cases gruesome side effects requiring amputations.
The Floods said their son also suffered from undiagnosed or misdiagnosed schizophrenia for years. Quigley said that is not uncommon in the people he serves. About 70 percent of his substance abuse clients have some form of mental illness.
Dan Flood’s death was personal for me. I wrote a lengthy 2014 feature on the Flood family’s anguish as part of the “Scourge of Heroin” investigative series, which examined the opioid epidemic’s human toll on the Capital Region. I later partnered with WMHTTV on a related multimedia documentary series, “Chasing the Dragon.”
My connection to Dan’s story went deeper. He had been a toddler at Pooh’s Corner, a day care center in Niskayuna that my son, Sam, also attended. I remember Dan as a sweet-natured, towheaded tyke with a sunny nature and a lot of energy. Sam and Dan were the same age. They played together on the playground and took afternoon naps on cots in the same room. I got to know his parents. I played golf a couple times with his father. I saw father and son at the Guilderland YMCA. Our sons drifted apart, and so did their families.
“A living hell” is how the Floods described their son’s descent into opioid addiction. He was an above-average student at
Guilderland High School, played guitar, earned a black belt in tae kwon do and competed in rec league basketball.
At 14, he became a heavy pot smoker and was kicked off the high school track team for marijuana use. He skipped school, failed classes and dropped out before he could be expelled. He hung out with a clique of teen drug users and shifted to heavier drugs, which led to injecting heroin. He got money to buy drugs by stealing valuables from his family’s house, including heirloom silverware and a grandmother’s cherished jewelry. His parents changed the locks, padlocked their bedroom door and felt like prisoners in their own home.
He was convicted of drug possession multiple times and spent time in jail. He walked out of voluntary treatment programs or discovered wretched ways to get high at secure facilities — inhaling oven cleaner or drinking hand sanitizer.
His parents tried tough love and kicked their son out of the house. When they did not hear from him for weeks, they made panicked calls to hospitals and morgues in fear that he had died on the streets.
A respite
The Floods shared their story with me nine years ago in the hope it might help other parents who had a son or daughter struggling with opioid addiction. Going public took courage, because it carried a heavy social stigma at the time — and still does. They hoped to raise public awareness that heroin indiscriminately destroys even kids in “good schools” and “good families.”
The couple testified at state legislative hearings and met with local and county officials. They advocated for parents, educators, law enforcement and social service agencies to unite to find new strategies to combat the opioid epidemic.
Kevin, a sales representative in the food industry, and Diane, a state employee who worked in health care, retired and relocated to Florida in 2016. Both are 63.
That decision “was so heavy and painful. We had to move away for our own mental health,” Kevin said.
He made frequent trips to Albany to see his son, and both parents found ways to stay connected as best they could.
The happiest stretch of Flood’s adult life came about four years ago. He wound up in Albany Drug Court, which led to a stint in the county jail and a court-ordered mandatory drug treatment program. He spent a full year in a highly secure, drug-free residential program in Dutchess County that required participation in intensive therapy.
After his release, Flood’s case worker helped him get a job as a janitor in the Empire State Plaza. He rented an apartment in Center Square and paid his own rent. He held the job for about two years and maintained his sobriety.
“He was clean and sober for the first time in a long while,” his father said. “He looked the healthiest I had seen him in years and was doing well.”
He eventually lost the janitorial job. His parents were unsure if he had quit or been fired.
Two years of sobriety and stability quickly unraveled. He relapsed and was shooting meth, injecting heroin and smoking synthetic weed.
“He became like a zombie. It was scary,” his father said, who observed his son beset by paranoid delusions.
Flood rigged up a place to sleep in the rafters above a drop ceiling in his Hamilton Street apartment because he feared intruders. He let several of his homeless, drugaddicted buddies flop there. Neighbors complained. The final straw was when his son jumped out of a second-story window, screaming about someone chasing him. He was held for four days in
We hoped against hope that Dan’s story would have a different ending. We tried everything — we had a lot of support, good services — and nothing seemed to work. We could not save our son.”
— Kevin Flood, Dan’s father
the psychiatric unit at Albany Med, but was released because he was deemed not to be a danger to himself or others. His landlord evicted him.
Homeless again, with winter approaching, his parents rented an apartment for him on Elm Street in the city’s South End. He was shooting meth and heroin, and broke into a neighboring apartment under the delusion that he had to rescue his parents, whom he believed were being held captive. They were in Florida.
Remains
Kevin Flood traveled to Albany when he learned his son had been admitted to Albany Med with severe abscesses where he had been injecting drugs under infected fingernails. He was given intravenous antibiotics at the hospital. A physician told his father the infection was so bad he might need to amputate his son’s fingers.
Kevin stayed at his son’s bedside for five days during visiting hours, early morning to late at night. On day five, after Kevin stepped out of his hospital room briefly, Flood bolted, dragging along his IV pole. His craving for drugs was overwhelming. Security guards stopped him at an exit and had to wrestle him into submission. He was secured to his hospital bed. The antibiotics ran their course, and his fingers recovered.
After Flood was discharged from the hospital, his jagged downward trajectory accelerated. But even in the throes of drug addiction, he could display an innate kindness.
“He was a loving kid,” Diane said. No matter how impaired by drugs he was, he ended every conversation with her by saying “I love you.” He called his grandparents more often than their other grandchildren did, just to say hello and let them know he loved them.
Late last fall, as Flood was languishing on the streets as cold weather set in, Kevin brought his son to a meeting with MOTOR’S John Quigley and Larry Watson, a peer advocate with the same program. They were the counselors who had worked most closely with Flood over the years, and the ones he trusted most.
Kevin and the two counselors offered Flood a last chance: a bed in a voluntary residential treatment program.
“We were leaning on Dan hard to enroll. We were so close to him saying yes and signing up,” Kevin said. At the last minute, Flood refused and stormed out of the meeting.
“He went so far down the path of addiction that he couldn’t make it back,” Quigley said.
“At that point, I knew it was going to get worse,” Kevin said. He sent his son a little money that winter. “I didn’t want him to starve to death, and I took a chance that he would buy food. But I am sure he used it on drugs.”
Flood was cremated, his ashes shipped to his parents in Florida. In June, the extended Flood family will gather in Boston for a memorial service for their son.
The following day in the same city, they’ll celebrate the wedding of Dan’s 30-year-old younger brother, Brian, who earned a master’s degree from Boston University and works for a software company. The brothers were estranged for years.
I choose to remember Dan Flood as that innocent, sweet-natured little kid on the playground at Pooh’s Corner three decades ago. We called him Danny. I can still picture the afternoon sun catching his tousled blonde hair as a teacher pushed him in wide arcs on a swing set.
He was a golden boy whose future seemed bright and limitless.
And then the ominous clouds of heroin addiction blotted out the sun. Finally, there was only darkness.