Mom whose 2 sons died from overdoses says it's critical parents talk to their kids about drugs and addiction

Christine Padaric has lived through a pain no parent would ever expect.

On April 12, 2013, her 17-year-old son Austin died of an overdose. He was at the house of a local drug dealer playing video games when someone encouraged him to snort morphine tablets. He started to show signs of an overdose, but no one called paramedics and he died.

Quin Kurtz, who pleaded guilty to manslaughter in 2015, was sentenced to two years less a day in jail and three years of probation.

Less than 10 years after Austin's death, Padaric's other son Kurt died from an overdose on Jan. 3, 2022. He was 29.

"Kurt carried so much guilt for Austin's passing. Like, he really felt that being the older brother that he somehow introduced Austin to drugs, to smoking weed," Padaric said in an interview with CBC Kitchener-Waterloo to mark International Overdose Awareness Day on Thursday. 

"There was a three-year age difference between the two, but they were together all the time. They did everything together and their friends, they were intermingled. Kurt, I don't think, knew how to survive without Austin."

The circumstances of Kurt's death were different, Padaric said. Kurt had social anxiety as a teen and she and her husband, Klaus, noticed Kurt withdrawing. He experimented with drugs, but he also sought help, including counselling and going to rehab.

In the last years of his life, he was a peer worker at the consumption and treatment site in downtown Kitchener.

"He loved working with people. He had such empathy for others and he turned into the naloxone guy," she said about the opioid rescue drug.

"He had dozens of kits in his apartment. He would get phone calls in the middle of the night from people saying that someone was overdosing and he would take a cab there."

Still, Padaric said, they were worried about Kurt.

"You try to find all the help you can get for your kids, you do everything you can, but you never feel it's enough," she said, noting she and her husband were constantly worried about Kurt relapsing and using drugs again.

Mother and son would have a 10 a.m. check-in from work every day and she'd go home at lunch if she hadn't heard from Kurt. When they went away, friends stopped in to see Kurt regularly.

"He hated himself as an addict, as a substance user, it really, really, really ate away at him and his self-esteem," she said.