After fatal overdoses in Coram, an 'epicenter of need' in the spotlight

Days after a cluster of suspected drug overdoses in Coram killed three men and left one woman in critical condition, a crowd of close to 100 gathered for a memorial in the parking lot of a 7-Eleven on Middle Country Road.

Muhammad Sajjad, the store owner, said he talked at the memorial about the victims, people who through late-night visits to his store over the years had become fixtures in his life. They included an older man he knew as William, sometimes called Birdman because of his skill in mimicking bird calls; Luis, a tiny man who surprised him by learning a few phrases in Sajjad's native Urdu; Cindy, who always wore sunglasses, even in the dead of night; and another man whose name he did not know. On slow nights he gave them snacks and told them about his childhood in Pakistan, Sajjad said in an interview last week. 

Sajjad said he believed the four were homeless, sometimes living with their families on Long Island or in abandoned buildings in the neighborhood. Once, some years back, he said he got attacked in the store, and Birdman came to help.

“He never bothered anybody, he never misbehaved, sometimes he was even helpful,” Sajjad said.

Suffolk police have said that four people were victims of what they called a "bad batch" of crack cocaine laced with fentanyl. The four, whom police have not publicly identified, were all found on July 11 — a 39-year-old man in a tent on Judith Drive at 2 p.m.; a woman and a 24-year-old man in the rear yard of a house on Fife Drive at 7:12 p.m.; and a 58-year-old man behind a business on Middle Country Road at 7:15 p.m.

Police have said the four are believed to have been crack cocaine users who did not have a tolerance for synthetic opioids like fentanyl.

Federal Drug Enforcement Administration officials have said dealers deliberately mix fentanyl with other illicit drugs to "drive addiction," but Tina Wolf, executive director of Community Action for Social Justice, a nonprofit that does harm reduction work in the area including outreach to drug users, said the cause could also have been unintentional cross-contamination.

Two people were arrested in connection with the overdoses, police said. Police have not publicly identified them, citing an open investigation, and have not said whether any charges were filed against them.

Wolf said that beside the overdoses cited by police, her group received reports of seven overdoses on July 11 and 12 that could be connected to the bad batch. In those cases, she said, Narcan — an over-the-counter opioid overdose reversal medication distributed by her group — was used, but 911 was not called.

Fentanyl concerns

For the year ending in October, 84,076 Americans died from a drug overdose, according to the DEA's 2025 National Drug Threat Assessment.

Fentanyl — "a primary driver" of those deaths — is "increasingly being mixed with other illicit drugs. ... Many users and dealers simply do not know the exact makeup of what they are consuming or selling. Drug cocktails have become the new normal," according to the report, with one in four lab-tested cocaine submissions revealing fentanyl content.

Drug mixing occurs throughout the supply stream, though most mixing "probably occurs at the street distribution level," the report said.

On July 10, officials in Baltimore announced a "mass overdose event" in that city; at least 27 people were hospitalized, according to news reports. (Suffolk police have said they have "no reason to believe" the Coram overdoses are connected to the ones in Maryland.)

On Long Island, there were six overdose deaths across eight days in August 2021 in Southold and Shelter Island. Most of those deaths were also attributed to a bad batch of fentanyl-laced cocaine. In 2022, the DEA warned law enforcement agencies across the country of a "spike in fentanyl-related mass-overdose events."

In Suffolk, where the rate of overdose deaths is among the highest in New York, there were 317 overdose deaths in 2024, including 131 in Brookhaven, the town where Coram is located, according to county spokesman Michael Martino. So far this year, the county has recorded 78 overdose deaths, 29 in Brookhaven.

Ground Zero in the Coram area, say police and civic leaders, is the stretch of Middle Country Road (Route 25) that includes Sajjad’s 7-Eleven, extending roughly from Route 112 in Coram to Yaphank Middle Island Road in Middle Island. Gail Lynch-Bailey, president of the Middle Island Civic Association, said crack cocaine use and prostitution have been problems in the area since the 1990s.  

“Then it died down," she said. "It resurfaced in the teens to 20s. In COVID it died down a bit. Now we’re back to the unfortunate norm.”

The stretch includes a number of vacant storefronts and, Sajjad said, a vacant building where Birdman’s body was found.

“If somehow the drugs could be taken out, this is a beautiful neighborhood,” said Sajjad. He said he goes to work armed, and parks a video surveillance tower in his store’s front parking lot.

“There have been, over the years, overdoses,” said Inspector Paul Mamay, commanding officer of Suffolk’s Sixth Precinct, which patrols the area. “There was more crime, there was more crime out in the open — drug dealing, assaults in public areas — so we dedicated resources to that."

Several years ago, the command assigned four officers to patrol the area, focusing on several shopping centers and a bus stop where people gathered. Police also cleared out camps in wooded areas, Mamay said.

"The area is significantly better than it was a few years ago…We are a constant presence along [Route] 112 and [Route] 25," he said.

Area crime dropped 36% from 2023 to 2024, and has dropped another 4% so far this year, Mamay said.

Enforcement debate

Kareem Nugdalla, a nurse practitioner and president of the Coram Civic Association, grew up in the hamlet. In a recent interview, he said he felt frustrated watching the police briefing on the overdose deaths, in which police highlighted outreach efforts to warn users about the contaminated drugs.

“You keep giving out Narcan kits, you keep talking about a bad batch of drugs — but what about the people selling the drugs?” he said.

Police have said that in addition to the two arrests, 20 grams of powdered fentanyl and a gun were found when executing warrants at two Coram properties after the overdose deaths.

Nugdalla said his group’s members wanted to see “law and order,” including more police along the Route 25 corridor — a relatively small portion of a hamlet that he said otherwise includes “some of the safest neighborhoods in the entirety of Long Island, with a lot of bang for the buck, and decent people living in them.” 

Crime — or at least the corridor’s reputation for it — means many of the hamlet’s own residents “don’t feel comfortable going there to shop,” he said. “These are people who chose to remain homeless, choose to abuse drugs.”

He still seethes over incidents like the 2018 discovery of coin-operated dispensers on the Route 25 corridor selling pens inside ceramic glass pipes that could be used to smoke crack.

But Wolf, whose group started working in Coram after the 2021 overdoses, warned that an emphasis on enforcement could be counterproductive. “People are afraid to get services because of the police presence,” she said. Before the police began focusing on the area, including closing the camps, she said her outreach workers encountered as many as 50 people in those wooded areas; now they meet far fewer. But that doesn’t mean those people have found homes and stopped using, only that they’re harder to find, she said.

“Enforcement efforts don’t necessarily treat addiction or dependence,” she said. “It doesn’t keep people from using, and even people who get arrested come out of jail and use again. They’re at a higher risk when they come out, with fewer supports in life, and their tolerance is lower.”

Finding a solution

After years of what Nugdalla said has been inadequate attention from town and county officials, he said members of his association were considering running primary campaigns against elected officials or incorporating their own village.

Brookhaven Councilman Michael A. Loguercio Jr. said stepped-up town enforcement of issues such as property maintenance and illegal dumping has cut some criminal activity simply by taking away places to do “bad things” out of view.

County Legis. Dominick Thorne (R-Patchogue) said a multipronged approach could work, harnessing economic development, law enforcement and harm reduction, including Narcan for users. “When you’re in that kind of crisis, that’s not the time to judge …that's the time to save their life and deal with everything else later,” he said.

Bishop E. Edward Robinson, who leads the nearby Breakthrough Chapel, said all his church’s staff have been trained to use Narcan. The church’s food pantry even gives it out. He saw the corridor as an “epicenter” of need: for jobs, homes, treatment for mental health problems and drug addiction.

Robinson said the picture appeared to be getting worse, partly because of federal government budget cuts resulting in lower funding for organizations serving people in crisis.

“The people who need it” are “back in the streets with no type of assistance,” he said. Even so, the corridor has “great potential” that can be realized if residents demand more resources and protection from state, federal and local officials, Robinson said.

“There is definitely hope, but that hope is going to take work," he said.