Even in jail, Dimitri took care of others before himself
ON JUNE 10, 2010, Dimitri Grammatikopoulos pulled out a notebook inside his prison cell and started writing a letter to his older sister.
In blue ink and spare prose, Dimitri described how he often offered cigarettes to the most desperate of his fellow inmates at the Sing Sing Correctional Facility.
“There’s one who looks really sick and it kills me to look at him,” Dimitri wrote. “I gave him a cigarette and it was like the first time any of the convicts had seen him smile. It was great. I give him one every day now.”
From a very young age, Dimitri saw himself as a savior of lost souls and the protector of his family.
Growing up the son of a single mom in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, in the early 1990s, the dark-haired boy with two older sisters took it upon himself to be the man of the house.
He’d walk around their tiny apartment on Third Ave. with a hammer looking for things to fix. At the age of 8, he repaired a broken bathroom door and rushed to show his mother his handiwork. “He always felt he had to watch out for me and his two sisters,” said his mother, Melissa Lee, 58, an elementary school teacher. “He was very protective. He was a very manly child, and it was a big burden for him.” But Dimitri was already displaying signs of mental illness. The same year her son fixed the door, Lee got a call from his third grade teacher saying he had threatened to kill himself. Dimitri entered therapy, and his doctors suspected that he was bipolar. But he never experienced manic phases, only periodic bouts of depression that worsened in his teens. One such bout escalated to a frightening climax when Dimitri, then 17, smashed a bathroom mirror and told his mom he had punched his reflection. “Mommy, you can say goodbye to your son,” he told her. “I want to die today.” Dimitri wound up at Lutheran Medical Center’s psychiatric ward, where he spent two weeks. The episode marked the beginning of a drugfueled downward spiral that played out for the next 13 years. It started with Xanax.
“Ma, I found a pill and it makes me feel really nice,” Dimitri told his mother not long after the bathroom incident.
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.
His love of animals — he rescued baby possums, a pregnant pit bull, a wayward fruit bat, among many others — led him to dream of a career as a K-9 cop.
But he dropped out of Fort Hamilton High School before his junior year.
Dimitri was working as a neighborhood handyman and spending nearly all of his earnings on pills.
He overdosed for the first time at the age of 16.
“He knew he was a drug addict, and I knew he knew it,” Lee said.
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?”
Dimitri celebrated his 18th birthday by checking himself out of a rehab facility. Now an adult, there was nothing his mother could do to keep him in treatment.
He enjoyed monthslong stretches of sobriety, but his life took a dark turn two years later when he was busted for a stabbing in 2005. Dimitri maintained that he didn’t do it, but he ultimately took a plea deal and was sentenced to four years behind bars.
Staten Island’s Arthur Kill Correctional Facility was good to Dimitri. He got his GED, performed in plays and somehow managed to rescue animals. He found two baby turtles in the yard and persuaded a correction officer to hold on to them until his mother could pick them up.
“Don’t let them go yet because they’re too slow,” Dimitri told his mom. “They can’t take care of themselves.”
Behind bars, he remained the cheery boy who saw beauty everywhere he looked.
“Today I woke up to a beautiful sheet of snow on the ground right outside my window,” he wrote his mom in one letter from prison.
Three years later — after his release — Dimitri’s girlfriend gave birth to a baby boy named Nicholas.
But a relapse set in motion the revolving door of rehabs, more relapses and brief stints behind bars for probation violations.
Along the way, Dimitri picked up a heroin habit. His mother said he tried it for the first time at an inpatient drug treatment facility in the Bronx — and returned home a shadow of himself.
“I met a son that I didn’t know,” she said.
Roughly a year later, Dimitri’s mom went upstairs to his bedroom and found the door locked. She called his cell phone and heard it ring, but no other sounds came from the room. “I knew he was dead,” she said.
Her daughter’s boyfriend used a ladder to climb into the window. Dimitri’s last cigarette was sitting in a white ashtray on his bedside table. A jug of Poland Spring water was resting on his radiator.
And there was the cold-tothe-touch Dimitri, seated on his bed, his cheek resting on his wooden dresser, a needle still in his hand. Beside him was a tiny bag of white powder.
After laying him on the floor and kissing his eyelids, his mother scrolled through his cell phone.
His final message, to the pal who helped him score the fatal bag of fentanyl, went unsent.
“Dawg, thank you so much,” it read. “You’re my best friend.”