Flakka`s Toll: The Human Face of a New Street Scourge

Aug. 09--When a Deerfield Beach man collapsed on his back patio in a paranoid sweat after proclaiming he wanted to try ecstasy and popping a white pill, he was exhibiting typical signs of flakka intoxication.

Michael Angove, 43, began sweating profusely, to the point he changed from long pants to shorts. He grew "very fidgety" and "extremely paranoid," his girlfriend told police. Convinced that someone was on the back patio, the father of five went outside, crouched down and fell backward into unconsciousness, a police report said.

Angove's Dec. 13 death was ruled an accidental overdose. He tested positive for Xanax, cocaine, the pain medication tramadol, alcohol and flakka.

Despite that complex cocktail of drugs, it was the volatile and unpredictable synthetic stimulant flakka, or alpha-PVP, that pathologists singled out as a primary contributor to Angove's death.

Flakka has hit like a scourge in the last year and spread across Broward County, giving rise to bizarre incidents, hospitalizations, arrests and growing concern. It has also motivated the medical examiner to highlight flakka's presence in fatalities.

"We don't know enough about the drug yet," Broward's Chief Medical Examiner Craig Mallak said. "We break it out here because it's a dangerous drug in our community. A lot of people may not die of those other drugs, but you add this to the mix and they're dead. When we see the alpha-PVP, we know they're really taking a much bigger chance."

Angove's was among the first deaths tallied as flakka-related when the medical examiner announced this spring that flakka had killed 16 in the county from September to mid-April.

"The number of cases is growing quite rapidly," Mallak said. "It's changing day to day, the list just keeps growing."

The Sun Sentinel examined the death reports on those 16 fatalaties. Two were suicides, one a homicide, the rest accidental overdoses. Eleven were men, five were women. The oldest was 58. The youngest, 21.

Many were recreational- and/or prescription-drug users who had battled addiction. Depression, health issues, failed relationships and loss of loved ones were among their common experiences.

All but one had drugs besides flakka in their systems when they died, records show.

An illegal substance that sells on the streets for as little as $5 a hit, flakka delivers an instant high that can last from three hours to three days, experts say. Body temperature spikes, leading to a fiery sensation. Delirium escalates into nightmarish delusions, paranoid psychosis and superhuman combativeness. Side effects sometimes include lingering depression and despair along with suicidal thoughts.

It gets lethal when flakka propels suicidal thoughts into suicidal actions or when the experience cascades into a wholesale shutdown of the body's critical functions and elevated body temperatures lead to internal bleeding and multi-organ failure.

May not have known

Angove may not have known he took flakka.

Drug dealers have taken to using cheap flakka to cut more expensive drugs, said Jim Hall, a Nova Southeastern University epidemiologist who studies substance use and drug outbreaks.

So some victims who set out to use cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine or ecstasy also may end up ingesting flakka without knowing it, he said.

"Oh my God, did we battle it"

Like most flakka victims, Erica Dey Grant's death was an accidental overdose caused by a combination of numerous drugs. Toxicology tests showed she had alcohol, marijuana, cocaine, Dilaudid, Xanax, two kinds of anti-depressants and flakka in her system.

Grant, 29, overdosed March 8 after a night of smoking crack cocaine and shooting up Dilaudid and Xanax. Her corpse was driven to the emergency room at Broward Health North on March 8 by her halfway-house roommate, a police report said.

"Oh my God, did we battle it. God forgive me, I would still rather be battling it, but it's almost a calmness now," Grant's mother, Joan Grant, 58, of Coral Springs, said. "Things just got more and more complicated, we spent five years, all our money, all our time, all our energy, trying to get her well ... there is nothing we did not try."

Her daughter's drug use began with legitimate, but perhaps uncalled for, prescriptions for Xanax and other pain medications and mushroomed from there, Joan Grant said.

"This kid lived his life"

A Key West drifter, who tried but could not divorce himself from drugs until he irrationally laid down across the railway tracks at Southwest 14th Street and Southwest 2nd Avenue in Fort Lauderdale, seemingly epitomizes reckless behavior triggered by a flakka high.

Jason West Clark, 43, was intoxicated and laying on the tracks when he was run over March 1 by an oncoming locomotive. His head was severely injured, his feet completely severed.

Theta Fischer, 67, of Daytona Beach, hadn't heard from her son in several months. He tended to fall on and off the wagon, alcohol and anxiety medications his preferred intoxicants of choice, she said.

"This kid lived his life, I mean he lived it, he did what he wanted to but what he couldn't do was stop drugs," she said.

Aside from flakka, toxicology tests showed West had alcohol and librium, a prescribed anti-anxiety drug, in his system.

Flakka, however, doesn't mesh with her son's drug preferences, Fischer said. "He was very picky about his drugs. I don't know exactly what kind of [illicit] drugs he did, but I know he wasn't taking [flakka] if he knew what it was."

A mother dies

Flakka's death toll crested with six fatalities in December alone. A 29-year-old mother with a history of drug use who overdosed in a Pompano Beach motel room was among them.

Jamie Serrano, 29, of Lauderdale Lakes, had used cocaine the night before and wasn't feeling well when she went to sleep, the father of her 16-month-old child told police. Six hours later on Dec. 6, Serrano was found laying face down, cold to the touch.

The deadly mix of drugs in Serrano's system included flakka, Xanax, cocaine, a muscle relaxant, a painkiller and kratom, a plant-based, mood-altering substance sometimes used to alleviate opiate withdrawals.

"I wish I had done more, but it's too late"

Two days before Christmas, a hotel housekeeper found the body of Jon Hummel Jr., 43, hanging by an electrical cord in a closet at a La Quinta Inn in Deerfield Beach.

"Little Jon" never cared for alcohol or marijuana, but it was in South Florida that the Pennsylvania native discovered designer drugs such as "Special K," Molly and eventually flakka, his mother, Karen Hummel, 66, said.

"He said he was taking Molly and he couldn't get away from it," Karen Hummel said. "I didn't even know what Molly was. I don't know what got him into this new drug [flakka]. Why these people take this, I do not know. There's just so many why's in my head."

Flakka, which has has been reported to trigger and intensify thoughts of despair, was the lone drug in the Tamarac man's system at death, toxicology tests showed.

In the month before Hummel's suicide, the weekly "crazy calls" to his mother began. He told her he was being watched, followed and chased -- fears that can be typical of flakka-induced paranoia: "Somebody's chasing me, it's the cops, they're here, the helicopters are overhead."

After Hummel's death, his mother would find out her son, a divorced father of two adult daughters and a talented auto body painter, had been involuntary hospitalized for mental health evaluations as many as seven times in recent years.

"I wish I had done more, but it's too late," Karen Hummel, of Blairsville, Penn., said. "It is really sad, it really is."

"Heard him gasping for air"

As he intentionally drove his 1998 Volvo down a boat ramp and into the Middle River, Larry Bisnett spoke by cellphone with his close friend and colleague.

"We ended up praying on the phone as the car filled and he was gasping," Michael Aulbach said. "'I love you,' was the last thing he said. I heard him gasping for air and that was it. It's still hard to believe."

Bisnett, 57, a resident turned house manager and handyman at Project Soar, a Fort Lauderdale halfway house, took his life Dec. 4 at George English Park across from The Galleria mall.

His life had swerved out of control after his wife's death from cancer about a decade ago, Aulbach, a coordinator at Project Soar, said. "Little by little he ended up homeless and broke."

Although Bisnett's death was ruled a suicide, the presence of alpha-PVP in his system make it a flakka-related fatality, according to the medical examiner. He also had alcohol, cocaine and two kinds of anti-depressants in his system.

Bisnett's known weaknesses were women, alcohol and crack cocaine, Aulbach said. He's convinced that Bisnett ingested flakka unknowingly.

Taken intentionally or not, flakka has been reported to amplify depression.

"He didn't sound drunk, he didn't sound high, just very certain. His mind was made up," Aulbach said of Bisnett's final moments. "He was tired of living in a halfway house, driving a junk car, his daughter was estranged, and he didn't want to do it anymore."

"When he died, she fell apart"

Also in December, Charlene Laino, 58, a former medical journalist at MSNBC, was found on the floor of her Hollywood apartment. Her neighbors told police she was known to couple alcohol with pain pills to the point of passing out.

With flakka increasingly finding its way into the hands of those who abused pain pills like oxycodone during South Florida's pill-mill crisis, Laino's history of drug abuse follows the trajectory of many of the areas addicts who progress from one drug trend to the next.

The Columbia University graduate's life went into a tailspin after the death of her photojournalist husband about seven years ago, Carmine Laino, 94, of Fort Lee, N.J, said.

Laino spent thousands, her father said, on nearly half a dozen stints in drug rehab programs.

"Before her husband died, she was a doll," Carmine Laino said. "When he died, she fell apart."

She never woke up

On Valentine's Day, 21-year-old Caridad Pineiro never woke up. She had four baggies filled with white powder stashed between her breasts.

Pineiro had partied into the early morning hours on Xanax, Molly and marijuana after she got off work at a Miami bar. She crashed on a friend's sofa bed in Pembroke Pines. When it was time for Pineiro to return to work at 4 p.m., she was "stiff and cold to the touch," a police report said.

"Cari" was living in Hialeah, her family ties in tatters, hanging with the "wrong crew," working just to stay afloat and "dabbling in those drugs," John Scott, a friend from Boca Raton, said.

Naive, always searching for friendship and "easily swayed," Pineiro would "be down with whatever you would be down with just to be your friend," Scott said.

He spoke with Pineiro by telephone before she worked her final shift.

"She was sad, she was down," Scott, 46, said. "She was trying to get right, but when you're living in a neighborhood where the enticements are right at your front door, it's tough."

Pineiro died with heroin, cocaine, morphine, alcohol and flakka in her system.

Death toll rises

Broward County's flakka death toll crested again in May with six fatalities, matching the monthly high set in December, according to the medical examiner's office. The rising countywide tally now stands at 29 flakka-related deaths since September.

tealanez@sunsentinel.com, 954-356-4542 or Twitter @talanez

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