ALBANY — It took three weeks for Dan Flood’s family to learn of his death from a fentanyl overdose. It was not an unexpected outcome.
Flood, who had grown up in Guilderland and wound up homeless in downtown Albany, was found unresponsive on Jan. 3 near the corner of Delaware Avenue and Elm Street and transported to Albany Medical Center Hospital, where he was pronounced dead. Because he had no identification, the 32-year-old’s body went unclaimed.
He was transferred to the morgue at Ellis Hospital in Schenectady and remained there as a John Doe for three weeks. A relative who was helping his parents try to track Flood down identified him from a tattoo on his leg: a gallon paint can with rainbow colors.
“We hoped against hope that Dan’s story would have a different ending,” said his father, Kevin Flood, who last saw his son in Albany five weeks before his death. “We tried everything — we had a lot of support, good services — and nothing seemed to work. We could not save our son.”
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Kevin and Diane Flood invested more than $500,000 of their retirement savings in more than a dozen treatment programs in five states across 18 years of desperation and heartache.
Nothing, it seemed, could free their son from the powerful grip of opioid addiction.
“I was heartbroken when I learned that Dan died,” said John Quigley, an advanced substance abuse counselor with Albany County’s Mobile Outreach Treatment Overdose Response (MOTOR) unit. The veteran counselor worked closely with Flood for several years.
“Dan was smart and engaging,…
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