David Coxon shook his head, his hand clutching a now-cold coffee mug and cigarette after he spent most of the night sitting outside his Marlborough home trying to comprehend his youngest daughter’s death.
MARLBOROUGH – David Coxon shook his head, his hand clutching a now-cold coffee mug and cigarette after he spent most of the night sitting outside his Marlborough home trying to comprehend his youngest daughter’s death.
“I just can’t fathom losing my daughter and my granddaughter two weeks apart,” said Coxon, whose 27-year-old daughter Jessica Conway died of a suspected drug overdose on Wednesday.
Conway’s death and surrender back to her addiction came two weeks after her 2-year-old daughter, Avalena Conway-Coxon, died while living in an Auburn foster home.
Police said Conway was pronounced dead at 3:40 p.m. Wednesday after being taken to the hospital from an Orne Street apartment. While authorities said a toxicology report and autopsy is needed to determine the official cause of death, sources have said needles were found in the apartment and Conway’s father confirmed she was using heroin again.
“My daughter was a mess, but she wanted to go through with the program. She promised me she would,” said Coxon.
Now, Coxon said he holds the program director’s who turned his daughter away responsible for her death.
Conway initially tried to enter a program called Rhodes House in Millbury, Coxon said. She was denied entry because she had a small amount of clonazepam in her system – a mild sedative a doctor prescribed to her after her daughter’s death.
She was then sent back to a Community Health Link program in Worcester, but was kicked out after three days “for an altercation that never should have happened,” Coxon said.
It was only then, Coxon said, that Conway returned to her old “friends” and to the needle.
Coxon said his daughter had been clean for 10 months before Avalena’s death, in part because she was working to get her daughter back.
“We were supposed to go to see a judge on Sept. 3, today,” Coxon said. “The judge was going to make a decision and in two weeks we would have had our baby back. Jess would have been in a program with a roof over her head and the baby could have lived with her.”
Instead, Coxon and his wife are now coping with losing both little Avalena and now Conway. Now they will sadly need the help of a wrongful death lawyer (such as https://www.gartlaninjurylaw.com/wrongful-death-lawyer/) instead of legal representation for returned custody of their child.
“It still hasn’t sunk in,” said Coxon. He said his wife is completely devastated. “They weren’t just mother and daughter. They were buddies.”
Coxon said his daughter made “one mistake” that caused her to become addicted to heroin and ruined the rest of her life. Heroin addiction can easily take a grip on a person. Tellingly, known heroin addicts would be highly unlikely to be accepted by any life insurance company. This indicates the prognosis of anyone battling addiction to a substance as destructive as heroin.
“You don’t go on heroin and not become an entirely different person,” Coxon said.
Coxon said he’s reached out to a lawyer and is planning to file a wrongful death suit against the Department of Children and Families for their handling of his granddaughter’s case. It’s definitely important that if you suspect a wrongful death that you find out more information and deal with it accordingly. If you’re looking to take legal action against a negligent party in a wrongful death case then you are likely going to want to enlist the help of someone like west coast trial lawyers.
Investigators are still trying to determine what happened on Aug. 15 when police were called to a foster home on 2 Pheasant Court in Auburn for the report of two children having difficulty breathing. Avalena died at the hospital and a second child remains in critical condition.
Auburn Police records showed that officers had visited the homes of foster mother Kim Malpass 60 times since 2005. Those calls were before she became a foster parent in 2014, but Coxon has criticized DCF in the past for allowing children to be placed in that home.
Source: MassLive Worcester http://masslive.com/news/worcester
