Serena Fallon's son Connor died of a fentanyl overdose in her Brooklyn basement in April 2022. Police and a medical examiner came to the home, and six hours later, Connor was wheeled out in a body bag. As Serena put it, "My son and the baby in our family was being taken out like labeled garbage." And as Michael Corkery writes in a lengthy piece for the New York Times, "It cannot end like this, [Serena] later thought. ... This was a crime, she was certain, and she was determined to have someone punished for it." So began her lengthy quest for justice.
Connor, 25, struggled for years with psychiatric problems and addiction, cycling through a dozen rehab stays. On the final day of his life he returned home from rehab in Florida, withdrew cash at a 7-Eleven, and used it to buy what Serena suspects he thought was heroin. Serena managed to give police more evidence than they typically had to work with, including an ATM receipt that allowed them to access surveillance cameras, pinpoint the taxi he took to buy the drugs, and access its video footage. Five months after Connor's death, police arrested 25-year-old Caleb Apolinaris and charged him with selling fentanyl to Connor.
But Serena's hope that Apolinaris, a low-level dealer reportedly battling addiction himself, would reveal a bigger supplier went unfulfilled; he pleaded guilty but did not name names and was handed a 14-year sentence. Both families ended up feeling wronged—Serena thinks 14 years too lenient, while Apolinaris' family calls it harsh; Serena wanted those names, and Apolinaris' family claims they all would have been in danger if he had specified his supplier. (Read the full story for more.)
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