Narcan Rescue Stations In Greenport Businesses After 6 Fentanyl ODs

GREENPORT, NY — A cloak of mourning hung heavy over Greenport in 2021 after a batch of fentanyl-laced cocaine led to eight overdoses and six deaths over eight days on the North Fork and Shelter Island in 2021.

That loss continues to reverberate and now, Stony Brook Eastern Long Island Hospital, the Greenport Village Improvment District, Greenport Harbor Brewing Co. and Community Action for Social Justice have come together to unveil new Narcan rescue stations.

The rescue stations will be situated in North Fork establishments, including bars, breweries and restaurants, to prevent potential opioid overdoses. The first two have been installed at Greenport Harbor Brewing Co. in Peconic and Greenport, organizers of the project saiid.

The program was conceived after the loss of six lives in the summer of 2021.

“It’s painful to remember the summer of 2021,” Richard Vandenburgh, owner of Greenport Harbor Brewing Co. and President of the BID, wrote in a letter to local business owners. “Over one horrible week, the lives of Nicole Eckardt, Fausto Rafael Herrera Campos, Swainson Brown, Matthew Lapiana, Seth Tramontana, and Navid Ahmadzadeh were cut short. As the head of the Greenport Village Business Improvement District, and a member of this amazing, compassionate community, I am reaching out to ask you to help me prevent more tragedies like the one we faced in 2021."

The Narcan rescue stations come equipped with multiple doses of naloxone, the life-saving drug that prevents death from opioid overdose, as well as detailed administering instructions.

Additionally, free training will be provided to any business. As the program has been underwritten by SBELIH, the BID, Greenport Harbor Brewing Co. and CASJ, the Narcan rescue stations come at no cost to participating establishments.

“The tragedy that occurred in 2021 could have been prevented,” said Paul J. Connor, chief administrative officer at SBELIH. “These Narcan rescue stations will honor the legacies of those we’ve lost by ensuring nobody else meets the same tragic fate.”

Several other Greenport businesses, including Claudio’s, Ellen’s On Front, the GDC Roller Skate Rink, and Front Street Station have already committed to installing Narcan rescue stations.

Businesses can sign up for Narcan rescue stations here.

"Seth's death saved lives — mine included"

Samantha Payne-Markel, who lost her boyfriend Seth Tramontana on that dark summer night, has started a non-profit organization, The Gold Boots Foundation — named after his signature gold boots, so beloved he wore them until he needed tape to hold them together — to celebrate his rich life and loving spirit.

Remembering that last day, Payne-Markel said she had asked Seth to accompany her to her women's softball league that night. "He said, 'I love you, but those games are so boring,'" she said..

Seth opted to go out instead, she said. She texted him when she got home and heard nothing. Then in the morning, when she would normally wake up to a text, still, there was silence. By noon, she sent him a text and hadn't heard back.

"There was a group chat with people . . Someone said Seth was dead. I was so mad. I said, 'That's completely impossible. It's not true.' It seemed impossible."

Later, while she was still at work, Payne-Markel spoke with Seth's best friend, who told her he was in the hospital.

"I told my boss, 'I have to go, Seth is in the hospital.' The whole time, I was thinking that it couldn't be true, that it wasn't real," she said.

When she got to the hospital, she headed to the nurses' station, where she was told to sit down and wait for a doctor.

"I still had hope," she said.

But then, Payne-Markel got a text from someone she knew and trusted, telling her the unthinkable. "They said he'd had Narcan in the ambulance and was alive for 30 minutes at the hospital, before he went into cardiac arrest — and died."

The doctors confirmed the news that changed her life forever. "I just fell to my knees and started screaming," Payne-Markel said.

Her mother came, as did Seth's father — Payne-Markel and Seth's father sat by the water outside the hospital, sharing their grief.

Fentanyl, Payne-Markel changed everything, creating a deadly scenario people weren't even aware existed.

The next months were dark, but she was buoyed by the love and support of her mother and "core 4" best friends.

Payne-Markel said she was lucky to have such strong support and also, grief therapy, including time spent at Spirit's Promise, a horse rescue aimed at healing.

Remembering her love, Payne-Markel said,: "Seth Tramontana was thoughtful, open-hearted and a kind soul. If you needed $5 and he only had $4, you would be walking away 4 dollars richer. He was universally loved by anybody that met him. A free spirit whose love for music was instilled in him by his father at a very early age and stayed with him until the day he left this world. He was a unique person — known for his individuality, gentle heart and signature style.

"I’m not saying he was a saint — he was the life of the party –but he was battling his own demons and would often self-medicate with drugs and alcohol. I mention this because the stigma of drug users has been that they are dangerous and out of control but the reality is that the grasp that cocaine along with other barbiturates has on our community is far reaching and can affect everyone from your neighbors to your friends and family. If you think you don’t know anyone that is currently using and this problem does not affect you, my guess is that you are wrong. No matter what happened, the love that I felt from Seth and the love I had for him never diminished no matter the battles we went through.

"Seth’s death saved lives, mine included. It was a wake-up call for me, someone who had always given themselves a timeline for when I would stop, a timeline that was for me, ever extending. When we lost so many innocent souls that night of August 13 you would think that it would have stopped users in their tracks, but time goes by and the drug dealers remain with a customer base that is always changing. And it’s not necessarily people who are using every single night. These are hardworking, local people who are fighting their own demons or in all honestly sometimes just want to party. Fentanyl laced drugs are everywhere, the threat is not going anywhere and with the summer coming, it’s only going to get worse.

"After Seth died, I was in shock for weeks followed by months of intense grief. Instead of having Seth be remembered simply as a person who overdosed, his close friends and I wanted to make sure people didn’t forget who he was and how he lived his life with kindness and generosity, so the Gold Boots Foundation was founded in his honor. Our aim is to raise money for scholarships and help prevent more incidents like this tragedy from happening in the future. We raised $20,000 during our first fundraiser, a testament to the love this community had for our best friend."

She added: "Seth didn’t need to die that night. If there had been a Narcan kit available, things might have been different. These Narcan Rescue Stations are so important to our community and the Gold Boots Foundation is thrilled that the North Fork will use this resource."

A survivor's story

William Mokus, a patient at Quannacut Outpatient Services who was revived with Narcan at SBELIH and has been in recovery and abstinent from opiates for 7 months, also shared his story with Patch.

Mokus said fentanyl has only made a dire situation worse, on the North Fork and across the country. "A friend of mine just died last Monday. In the last year and a half, I've probably known at least a dozen people who have passed away. It’s crazy," he said. "I stopped counting how many people were dying when I was 26 I just turned 30 a couple days ago."

Mokus himself never overdosed until the day he went to get clean, he said. He's been using almost 18 years old, since he was 12, he said.

"I started very early; I thought of it as a normal thing," he said.

He always hung out with older people, he added; at 12 or 13, his circle was friends who were 18 or 20.

His first drug was cocaine, then drinking, then marijuana, he said. Despite the drug use, he stayed active and was very athletic, Mokus said. "I thought I was invincible."

No matter what drugs he used, he always told himself he'd never use heroin, he said.

One day, when he was using cocaine and alcohol on a regular basis a cocaine dealer came over and "dumped out brown powder I didn’t know you could sniff heroin. I thought it was all about needles," he said. "He told me, 'You can sniff this, it's way safer. So I did it."

Mokus said he'd never gotten into pills. "My drug was cocaine and alcohol — but when I was introduced to heroin it was like a whole new drug. It made me be able to work 12 hour days. It made me energetic."

When he was 20, he'd gotten in trouble for drinking so he'd had to quit drinking.

With only breathalyzer tests administered to him, Mokul said: "I thought I could get away with doing heroin.I didn't know the consequences."

That first day led to a nine-year battle, he said. "When fentanyl came around , I was 25 and shooting heroin and fentanyl."

Before he began using fentanyl, Mokus said he had an $800 a day habit.

"Before my last run-around pretty much what ended up happening was I was getting so messed up, shooting 5 grams of fentanyl a day to stay well — not to get high, not to get euphoria. Just to function. I was using using ground meth, grams of crack cocaine and a lot of Xanax a day."

His habit got so bad that his family told him he had to make a choice. "They pretty much said, 'Hey, we aren’t going to watch you die in this house.' This was about a month before I went to rehab."

He added: "The day I went to rehab, I don’t think I had hours, let alone days, left."

Usually around 170 lbs., he was down to about 140 lbs., Mokus said.

"After I got kicked out of the house, my mother said, 'Don’t ever call me unless you're going to go get help.' It was really eye-opening experience."

One night, someone attacked him; he sustained a head injury. "I was getting high 17 hours at at time. It was really bad," Mokus said. "I woke up one day and all my drugs, all my money, were stolen."

It was at that moment, he called his mother.

"I said, 'Listen, I think I've got to get help a different way this time.' She didn't say much. She was so disappointed. I understood. It killed me, that silence on the way to the hospital," he said.

Outside SBELIH, seated at the gazebo by the water, Mokus found 20 pressed pills, Xanax with fentanyl, and two pints of alcohol in his backpack. "I thought I was done," he said. "I'd burnt every bridge. I thought, 'If I keep living all I’m going to do is hurt these people. I don’t know how to get sober.'"

He took all the pills and drank all the alcohol and then, walked into the hospital, where he sat down and became unconscious, he said.

"They said everything stopped. I was dead," he said.

Five doses of Narcan later —and a nurse who breathed for him when he was unable to, on his own — Mokus was alive.

Now, on the 16th, he will have been sober for 7 months.

His future has begun to take shape, with a possible GED and dreams of going into a field where he can help others.

The Narcan stations can save lives, he said. "There are so many people in this town that go to these bars, there's all this fentanyl in all the drugs — and if the Narcan is right there, the solution is right on the wall," he said.

He keeps Narcan kits in his own home. "Just in case. But it's for other people, at this point," Mokus said.

His family, Mokus said, has been supportive of his recovery. "They're here for me," he said.

Looking back on what he experienced, Mokus said: "It took somebody saving my life to realize that there are more important things out there than getting high. More important than self sabotagin. They gave me a second chance."

The Narcan stations can do the same for others, he said. "It gives people warning," he said.

He has a new lease on life now, Mokus said. "I get to wake up every day and I don’t have to worry. I don’t have to scramble, I don’t have to overanalyze anything. I can just wake up and start my day and do it the way I want to do it without something else controlling me."

And now, his goal is to help others. "I have so many friends suffering in this pandemic," he said. "I think the fentanyl pandemic is worse than the coronavirus pandemic," he said.

His spiral downward was sparked by the isolation of the pandemic, he said.

"When I was younger I thought drugs were way to live," he said. "Now, I’m only 30 and it’s not like it was when I was young. It's not cool anymore. Everyone needs to understand that."

As for Payne-Markel, she's organized another fundraiser for her foundation for April 14 at The Lin in Greenport, raising funds for a Greenport High School scholarship in Seth's memory.

She'd also like to see grief therapy options expandedo n the North Fork.

And she's fully supportive of the Narcan stations.

"I hate to say it and I hope it's not true, but this will prob save someone s life by the end of summer. If this had been available that night, Seth would not have died," she said.

She thanked all involved for being proactive with the Narcan stations and also urged drug users to use fentanyl testing strips.

Of her grief, she added: "I couldn’t picture how I would ever get out of it. Time does heal. I didn’t want to hear that the first six months, but a year passes, then it’s a year and half, and I don’t wake up crying. But I cried in the shower this morning. It's not every day anymore, though. Now I'm able to look back and think about fonder memories."