HEROIN HELL HITS HOME
OD claims mom, 29, as S.I. reels from scourge
This is the second in a series of stories on the city’s opioid epidemic. The Daily News interviewed addiction experts, recovering addicts, police and prosecutors to provide an in-depth look at the drug scourge that police say killed 1,370 people in the city last year. The News watched as addicts injected heroin into their bodies. Reporters sat down with families grieving over relatives whose lives were cut short by opioid abuse.
And the highest levels of the NYPD weighed in, saying cops are taking a different approach — acknowledging police can’t arrest their way out of the problem.
The second stop is Staten Island.
One month after Catherine Piraino cradled her dying daughter one last time, she recalled wrapping her arms around baby Jackie for the first time.
“When that child is born, something magical happens,” the Staten Island mom reflected in her home. “And that magic happens because you begin to love that child more than you’ll love anybody else and anything else in the world.
“And you will do anything — anything — to protect that child and keep that child safe.”
On April 5, standing in the ICU of a Staten Island hospital, Piraino finally accepted the truth: Jackie could no longer be kept safe from herself.
Five days after her last shot of heroin, Jackie’s family asked doctors to turn off the machines keeping her alive. The pretty young mother of two was dead at the age of 29, her too-short life gone the way of her hopes and dreams.
Piraino is among many similarly mourning mothers in the city’s least populated borough. In the first three months of 2017, pills and smack had already claimed another 16 Staten Island lives — one every six days.
In 2016, Staten Island officially recorded 90 fatal overdoses. Many believe the number is even higher.
Once, Piraino’s daughter Jacklyn Mastromauro, born Sept. 24, 1987, would have seemed an unlikely candidate to die of an overdose.
The product of a private Catholic school, she studied psychology at the College of Staten Island and worked at a school for autistic children.
She enjoyed the Manhattan club scene, like many twentysomething Staten Islanders. But Jackie showed no obvious signs of the drug addiction that devoured the last six years of her life.
“She was diligent in her work and her school,” her mother recalled in an interview with the Daily News. “She loved her children, and paid so much attention to them.
“And as the drugs slowly took on and over her life . . . she quit school with only two classes left until she graduated. Her physical appearance started going downhill.”
There was a time, before the drugs, when Jackie was meticulous about her appearance.
“Her nails were done, her toes were done. She had makeup on, she was dressed to the T’s when she left the house,” Piraino said. “She had a bit of the devil in her, in terms of her sense of humor.”
The changes started in her early 20s, when Jackie first abused painkillers — snorting oxycodone and Percocet. Her mom suspects she discovered the drugs while clubbing in Manhattan, although she may have discovered the pills after a doctor prescribed painkillers following a car crash injury.
Legal drugs leading to the hard-
er stuff is nothing new on Staten Island.
An estimated four of five opioid users in the borough started with prescription medications before switching to cheaper, easier-to-buy heroin, officials said.
Jackie left her family’s Rosebank home after her boyfriend — later the father of her two children — stole thousands of dollars worth of Piraino’s jewelry.
Nobody thought for a minute that Jackie, like her beau, was already in the throes of addiction. And her friends helped cover up the drug problems after the birth of son Joshua, arriving in shifts to take care of the infant.
“I guess you could say I was kind of enabling her,” said one of the surrogate moms, 23-year-old Stephanie Gonzalez. “I was trying to look out for Josh at the end of the day.”
On Labor Day weekend in 2013, Gonzalez and a friend stopped by Jackie’s apartment and looked at Mastromauro through the window. She had a needle in her hand.
“The lights were on,” Gonzalez said. “Then I saw Josh walking. And I saw her walking. And she sat on the couch, and she was holding a needle, and she was tapping the air out of it, I guess.
“As she goes to put it in her arm, I literally knocked on the window. And she looked up, and she looked at me, and she ran to the bathroom.”
The truth, now undeniable, hit Jackie’s family like a bomb.
For the next two days, Piraino scrambled in vain to find a detox center that could admit her daughter on a holiday weekend.
“When you face this, you don’t know what the hell you’re doing,” she said. “As a parent, you don’t know where to go . . . . You don’t know where to get help.”
Jackie made her first of three trips to detox that Tuesday, winding up in a 30-day rehab facility. The initial optimism of her release soon faded. She relapsed six months later.
When she stole her father Vito’s Rolex for drug money, he had her arrested. But tough love failed as well.
Jackie dragged her family into an endless cycle of drug court appearances, faked urine tests and failed attempts at getting clean. She came down with hepatitis C, and struggled with mental and physical problems.
Piraino’s car became peripheral damage, its windows smashed and tires slashed by her daughter’s drug-dealer debt collectors.
The problems came inside the house, too.
“When you live with an addict, you don’t leave money out,” the mom said. “So I would wear a belt with my credit cards and my money with me at all times.”
Piraino even slept with the belt, similar to those worn by casino dealers, wrapped around her waist. When she awoke one day to find money missing, she started wearing the belt around her neck.
An anonymous tip led the city’s Administration for Children’s Services to Jackie, and the agency turned custody of Joshua over to Piraino. Jackie worked her way up to supervised, then unsupervised visits.
Then came another bombshell: Julianna — Jackie’s second child — was born in May 2015, addicted to morphine.
“Within 24 hours, she starts showing signs of withdrawal,” Piraino said.
The newborn was placed on a low dosage of opium and then carefully weaned off the drug.
“And that was really very, very hard watching that, watching an innocent child, an innocent baby, withdraw from drugs that my daughter chose to use,” Piraino said.
Jackie only got worse. She faked a drug test when she was sent to a residential treatment facility in Manhattan, and flunked out of a court-ordered treatment program. She was sentenced to a year in jail in January 2016, and did eight months on Rikers Island.
When she returned home, her mom hoped she had turned a corner. It turned out Jackie had yet to hit bottom.
The happy reunion ended in February 2017, when Piraino noticed activity on her bank account — a cash advance through Western Union.
Jackie, after getting high with the money, faced a maternal ultimatum: Get out or get straight. The daughter opted for cold turkey withdrawal at home, with Piraino at her side.
“The next five days I spent in her room, every minute of every day, wiping her as her skin was crawling, holding her head as she was vomiting,” the mom remembered. “And then she seemed to be OK after about a week.”
Jackie went to a therapist, then said she joined a gym. Piraino thought she was seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, but her daughter was descending back into the darkness.
The gym was a ruse to get out by herself. The drugs were back.
April Fools’ Day arrived as a fairly normal one in the house. Piraino made lunch for Joshua and Julianna, and Jackie went upstairs to her bedroom. Piraino ascended the steps later to check on her, and found her daughter slumped over the bed.
Jackie wasn’t breathing, and her skin was blue. On April 5, her family made the decision to take her off life support. In Jackie’s obituary, mention was made of her losing battle with drugs.
“So sorry for your loss,” wrote one mourner in the guest book. “She just could not fight off the demon that controlled her.”
As Piraino recounts the darkest parts of her daughter’s story, Joshua bounces in and out of the family dining room, almost uncannily interrupting her with loud music on a cell phone or a scene from a children’s video.
“You’re seeing firsthand the repercussions of this,” Piraino said.
Daniel Deynes, the father of the two kids, is out of the picture. The drug casualty, age 27, is locked up for robbing a 92-year-old Bronx woman and her 80-year-old neighbor last year. His earliest possible release date is July 27, 2023.
Joshua’s grief appears in unexpected ways. He refers to his mother only as “Jackie,” never as “Mom.” For two weeks after his mother’s death, he never mentioned her at all. Julianna appears well adjusted — but she’s just 2.
“They see the police and EMS
and all these people and see them take your mother away, but you don’t want to make it horrific,” Piraino said. “You can’t sit down and talk about how your mother was a drug addict. You can’t have that conversation with a 5-year-old.”
Instead, Piraino explained to Joshua that God had summoned his mom to join Him in heaven.
“I said to him that God was out of angels,” she recalled. “He had no more angels. And He called Mom because Mom needed to help Him.”
Piraino, once alone in her pain, has learned in recent weeks that her story is anything but unique. She’s heard other loving, watchful parents recount their own children’s horrors and their feelings of helplessness in the face of addiction.
In those final moments with her daughter, Piraino flashed back to the scene in the 1989 film “Steel Magnolias,” where Sally Field’s character makes a similar decision for her comatose daughter, played by Julia Roberts.
The mom climbed into the hospital bed and put her arms around Jackie one last time.
“I just said to myself, I just have to hold her as she leaves this world,” Piraino said.
“So I climbed up on the bed, and they put down the guards, and I held her in my arms, and they turned off the machines, and my family was around me, and I didn’t cry . . . . It was just like a peaceful moment.
“And then I got up and everybody left, and then I wanted a few minutes by myself with her, and I just told her how much I loved her, and I hoped that she was at peace.”