FATHER & SON OVERDOSE TOGETHER
Dead in B’klyn b’day party horror
A FATHER AND SON at a Brooklyn birthday bash went out for a late-night smoke — and then both died from apparent heroin overdoses, police said Sunday.
Carlos Andrade’s girlfriend found the 22-year-old man struggling for breath, his face turning purple, just inside the doorway of an apartment building on 27th St. near Fourth Ave. in Greenwood where his father lived, the woman’s uncle told the Daily News.
Andrade’s father, 44-year-old Joseph Andrade, was found unconscious next to his son, outside the red-brick building about 3 a.m. on Sunday, police and sources said.
Emergency responders arrived and immediately administered Narcan, a medication that can reverse an opioid overdose, and rushed them both to NYU Langone Hospital-Brooklyn, where they died shortly after 4 a.m., authorities said.
Several hours later, investigators had taped off the apartment building and were examining a tiny red baggie that was on the ground outside the place where the opioid crisis apparently claimed its latest victims.
Jasmin Santos, the 23-yearold mother of Carlos Andrade’s 11-month-old and 4-year-old sons, emerged from the building with puffy eyes and a child in her arms.
She got into a white Nissan SUV and rode off.
Her uncle, Yovanny Santos, 41, said cops told the family they had found cocaine in the pockets of the older man.
But he said they told him that it was likely a deadly mix of heroin that killed the father and son.
“It’s something awful, these drugs being sold on the street that kill people. It makes it so they can’t breathe. This is what killed them,” Santos said. “These people selling drugs on the street, they don’t care about killing people for it. They don’t care. They just want to make money.”
The News has closely chronicled the opioid epidemic in New York City, where authorities say 1,300 people died of overdoses last year. That figure is more than twice the number of murder and car crash victims combined. Opioid overdoses accounted for about 80% of those deaths, and of those, 90% were caused by heroin or fentanyl.
Carlos Andrade, a construction worker, had traveled from Maryland for the party.
Relatives said he had been inside his father’s first-floor apartment when, they said, the pair headed outside for a smoke, according to police.
When they didn’t return, Jasmin Santos went looking for them and discovered the nightmarish scene, police and relatives said.
She was terrified at the sight of her children’s father gasping for air.
“She saw him all with his face swelled up purple,” Yovanny Santos said.
“I’m so surprised because I know Carlos, and I never know that he used drugs or anything like that.”
He said the 4-year-old boy had asked him where his dad had gone.
“I told him he just went out for a bit. I don’t know what to say,” he said. “This kid was crazy about his dad. He and his dad were together always. I don’t know what he’s going to do now.”
Santos said he planned to take his niece to his home on Long Island for the time being.
“You’re going to have to help out your niece,” a detective at the scene told Santos. “It’s going to be very hard.”
A next-door neighbor said she’d never witnessed any drug activity, but wasn’t shocked by the tragedy.
“I’m not surprised,” she said. “They’re out there drinking all the time. I wouldn’t be surprised if drink led them to drugs.”
The police investigation is ongoing. The city medical examiner will determine an exact cause of death. “It’s just a sad thing, that’s it, a father-and-son thing,” said a second detective investigating the double death.
“Once you do it and you get sucked in, everything else is secondary.”