Johnson County
Died: July 28, 2020
‘It was trauma on top of trauma on top of trauma’
Though not a huge fan of school, Adrian Caggianelli was “an extremely smart kid” and an excellent left-handed pitcher at Olathe East High School, even receiving a scholarship to play baseball in college, his mother said.
No matter how he was feeling, he was always there for those he cared about and went out of his way to make them feel loved, friends and family said.
But during his senior year in high school, Bobbi Caggianelli said, her son “fell in with some people that had a negative influence on him.” He also started struggling with some mental health challenges, including depression and sleep issues.
Because Adrian’s body clock was “out of whack,” she said — he couldn’t fall asleep until 4 a.m. then couldn’t wake up in the morning — his doctor had put him on Xanax. But the doctor didn’t want to keep him on it for long, his mother said, because it was habit-forming.
“They were having a lot of difficulty finding the right mixture of medication and therapy,” she said. “We tried a lot of different places and a lot of different resources. And unfortunately, he ended up, as a lot of kids do, self-medicating.”
Eventually, Caggianelli said, Adrian sought out Xanax on the black market.
“And that’s when he got the pill that was spiked.”
Adrian was no slacker, his mother said. He flipped burgers at Freddy’s for three years and delivered food for DoorDash when he wasn’t playing baseball. He had more than a 4.0 GPA when he graduated from Olathe East in 2019. He went to Dakota State University in Madison, South Dakota, on a baseball scholarship, but “it just wasn’t a good fit,” Caggianelli said. He came home after the first semester and enrolled at Johnson County Community College.
The first week of July in 2020, Adrian moved into an apartment in Overland Park with three friends, Caggianelli said. On July 28, the roommates decided to go out for the evening. Adrian told them he would just hang out at the apartment and play video games.
When the roommates returned, they found Adrian unresponsive. Afraid to call an ambulance because of the cost, they carried him out of the apartment, loaded him in his car and took him to the hospital, Caggianelli said.
“Then I get a call from Overland Park Regional,” she said. “They said, ‘Your son Adrian has had an accident.’ And I’m thinking car accident. So instead of having us get there first, this woman tells me over the phone that he died.”
She and her husband rushed to the hospital, just minutes away.
“They let us in to see him, but we weren’t allowed to touch him,” Caggianelli said. “He’s still intubated, the tube is still sticking out of his mouth. It was trauma on top of trauma on top of trauma.”
The cause of death, she said, was accidental fentanyl intoxication: “He took one pill.”
Caggianelli said she’s “90% sure” that Adrian got the pill from a friend — a person other than his roommates.
“I feel like people have this picture of a drug dealer as somebody in a back alley, you know, in a trench coat,” she said. But often, she said, it’s their friends.
Caggianelli said she can’t stress enough that parents need to talk to their kids about the dangers of fentanyl.
“You can’t police your kids 24/7,” she said. “And trying to is just going to make them sneakier. So just try to have open and honest conversations. Don’t preach at them. Don’t monologue at them. Make it a meaningful conversation with back-and-forth, and it will be much better received.”
She and her son were close, Caggianelli said. “Once a month, I tried to do mom-kid time, just me with the one kid,” she said. “And he loved Topgolf. So that was our place to go and get some mother-son time.”
Nine months after Adrian died, his family relocated to Florida.
“We had always planned to move to Florida around retirement time,” Caggianelli said. “But after that happened, there were constant triggers. And it was just too hard to stay.”
#OpioidCrisisFriday, #OpioidEpidemic, #OpioidCrisis, #Awareness, #DrugOverdose, #Drugs, #Fentanyl, #OpioidCrisis, #Tragedy, #Missouri, #JohnsonCounty, #AdrianCaggianelli, #VintageDava
Connect with Me At:
https://www.facebook.com/VintageDava/
https://www.instagram.com/vintagedava/
https://www.threads.net/@vintagedava
Vintage Dava 