On a dark, cloudy night in late September 2023, around 12 days after one-year-old Nicholas Feliz Dominici tragically and accidentally overdosed on fentanyl at El Divino Niño daycare center, a cover for an underground fentanyl operation, Michael, 45, and Ashley, 31, huddled together under the infamous nearby Kingsbridge underpass in Kingsbridge Heights. Sometimes they squabbled, not in an aggressive way but like an overly familiar elderly couple.

 

Both seemed at ease chatting to Norwood News. Ashley, from Rockland County, occasionally drifted in and out of the underpass, located at the Grand Concourse and East Kingsbridge Road, as did one or two other people. At times, she appeared a little anxious as she rummaged through the couple’s belongings which sat on the damp, dirty sidewalk beneath a Minnie Mouse soft toy, which was jammed behind a waist-high bar overhead.

 

Asked how he wound up on the streets, Michael, who grew up on Decatur Avenue, said, “I’ve always had an apartment. I’ve been getting high probably 20 years. I would just do heroin, which is bad enough, but then the girl that I ended up being with for like six years, she did a lot of cocaine and then I would have to buy enough cocaine because if I didn’t, then she would go and do shit to get money, you know?”

 

He paused to ask if we minded if he shot up while talking to us, then proceeded to inject himself with what he said was one of six hits a day. Asked what drug he was using, he said, “fentanyl.” Asked if he was sure, he said, “Yeah, I got [testing] strips. I test it. You gotta test it.”

 

Sounding equally coherent before and after the hit, Michael said he only did drugs because he was lonely. “I don’t have anybody really,” he said. “Everyone that I give my trust and my love to, they always end up giving me the short end of the stick. The first person that did that was my son’s mother. I have a son who’s 18 now and I haven’t seen him since he was 5.”

 

Asked what his son’s name is, he said, “Matthew,” adding that Matthew’s mother is from Columbia. “I married her ‘cause she had no papers and I loved her, and then she got pregnant right away but on the last day of the fifth year, she asked me for a divorce,” he said. “When you’re married for five years, five years married is enough to get [residency].”

 

Michael said when his wife divorced him, she left with their son for Columbia. “I haven’t seen him in 13 years and then I started using a bunch of drugs,” he said, adding that later Ashley became his girlfriend but now they’re just “best friends.”

Asked if they ever go to a shelter, Michael said, “We can do anything. I just need help sometimes to get pushed there.” We asked if anybody offered him help. “No, not really,” he said. ‘They come around and say they have some help. They really don’t.” He said he believes outreach workers need to make a certain quota. “All the people that I’ve tried to work with… smoke and mirrors,” he said. Out of earshot of Ashley he added, “Then I got this girl who doesn’t care about anything except for crack and then when I leave her, I feel bad because she has nothing.”

 

He alleged city workers just wanted him to “sign a paper” to receive syringes or medication and would ask him to wait for somebody else to come and then “nobody else would come” or he and Ashley would be sent somewhere “horrible.” He gave an example of ACI in Manhattan and said it was too overcrowded.

 

Michael said that by 2023, he had been living in the underpass on and off for two to three years, though he said he doesn’t sleep there every night. “I lost my apartment,” he said. “It’s hard. I don’t know. I just don’t want to make anyone feel bad.” Asked if things had gone downhill during the pandemic, he reflected and said, “Actually, yeah, the pandemic.”

 

He went on to say that he had been on Rikers Island at one point. [We understood this was before the pandemic.] “I just gotta get my shit together,” he said. “I gotta get on, stand up, and get my shit together. I can’t drag. I gotta do it for myself.”

 

We asked Michael and Ashley if they had seen any of their friends overdose. “No, but I’ve seen a couple of people,” Michael said, while Ashley said she had actually saved some people, including Michael it seems, sometimes with a Narcan kit and other times by asking someone on the street to call an ambulance. Now, Ashley said, “No matter what, I always have Narcan.”

As reported, a Narcan kit containing Naloxone is a potentially lifesaving measure designed to help reverse the effects of an opioid overdose in minutes. Norwood News asked Michael and Ashley if they worried if the drugs they were taking were laced with other more potent drugs. “Ah! We don’t wanna say that stuff!” Michael said. “Words are so powerful, so I try to speak positive, right?”

 

He agreed fentanyl itself was potent but seemed to suggest its effects on his system have dwindled over time. “The first time I had it, I almost passed out. I did pass out I guess,” he said. Suddenly, Ashley asked, “Who’s watching the stuff?” Michael replied, “I don’t know but at one point, you just walked off.” Ashley later left the tunnel and Michael proceeded to complain about her alleged drug taking, saying he had spent hundreds of dollars that day on drugs.

 

Asked how he could afford it, he said, “I go to like stores and take clothes or stuff like that so I can get money to buy like a couple grams and sell it to get high, not to make more money.” Asked if he eats every day, he said, “Yeah, I eat most of the time. Today, I had chicken and rice and a bunch of snacks.”

 

In reference to his and Ashley’s 14-year age difference, he asked, “That’s not too bad, right?” before adding, “You know she left to go do something with somebody to get crack.” We asked Michael if he could sleep after taking fentanyl. He said he could. Asked if he had ever been attacked while sleeping on the street, he said, “no,” but added that he had been attacked “in the park near Webster by just crazy people.”

 

He continued, “I’ve been in a lot of fights, and I’ve protected a bunch of people so yeah, it does happen.” Rummaging through his bag, he came across a bottle of cologne. “It actually smells good,” he said, before adding, “Man, you know what it’s like to be with somebody and worrying that she’s gonna go and like……”

He added, “I really care about her but not like that anymore, you know? Yeah, I can’t. Nobody ever cheated on me in my life. Well, maybe they did but not like that, in 20 years. I can’t. I can’t. We were down at the park by Webster and all of sudden she just walked off and now I ended up seeing her over here.”

 

On Friday, Sept. 26, during a check presentation ceremony held in nearby Poe Park, Bronx Community Solutions (BCS), a project of the Center for Justice Innovation, unveiled its new HOPE-on-the-go van, a mobile outreach unit that extends access to lifesaving, overdose prevention services and harm reduction information to those who need it.

 

The Bronx Heroin Overdose Prevention and Education (HOPE) initiative, launched in 2019, is an existing initiative of BCS, which emerged following discussions with the Bronx District Attorney’s Office, the NYPD, and Bronx Community Solutions. The new van was funded by State Sen. Gustavo Rivera (S.D. 33) at a cost of $100,000.

 

Officials said the outreach van is the first of its kind in New York City and will help dedicated peer specialists reach more at-risk community members [like Michael and Ashley] and connect them with support for substance use. They said it provides a private space and peer specialists to connect with, visitors to the van can access on-the-spot Narcan and fentanyl test strips, rapid support with substance use, and opportunities to engage with court diversion and longer-term treatment.

 

Magaly Melendez, senior program manager for community programs at BCS, said the HOPE mission is clear and is not just to divert people from criminal court but to connect them to “meaningful services.” During the check presentation event, her colleague explained that while each person is on their own journey and doesn’t necessarily accept help straight away, through persistent outreach, when and if they do, there is a sense of trust already in place which helps facilitate next steps.

 

“Our goal is to meet people where they are, right in the community, so we can connect, build trust, and provide real-time help when it’s needed most,” Melendez said, explaining that merely acknowledging a person’s humanity can make the world of difference to people living with addiction. Emotionally invested in the program, she later held back tears as the group paid tribute to a former colleague named Anthony, who Melendez credited for much of the program’s success.

She said the organization’s “peer specialists” are usually people who have come out the other side of addiction, themselves, and are guided by compassion. For his part, the senator said he was inspired to fund the van since he visited Lisbon, Portugal, where the country’s drug policy is more focused on treatment than incarceration.

 

“For the past 10 years, Bronx Community Solutions has helped Bronxites trying to overcome substance use to reclaim their lives by facilitating access to important rehabilitation initiatives,” Rivera said in part. He added that he looked forward to seeing the HOPE on-the-go van make a real difference for those in the community who needed it the most. [The senator was recently arrested, as reported, in lower Manhattan while attempting to oversee the conditions under which immigrants were being held at 26 Federal Plaza.]

 

Meanwhile, Anthony Liberatoscioli, a project director at BCS, was also present at the event and said he works in the criminal justice system trying to identify potential candidates who might be suitable for an alternative to incarceration. We asked how that determination is made.

 

“Based on a lot of different factors,” he said. “It depends on the offense that’s charged. We can intervene for broader level offenses with this group [BCS]. So, for someone who is arrested on drug possession, a simple drug possession charge, we can intervene and offer someone an education session, connection to resources, and if they are willing to engage in that on the spot, their case can ultimately be dismissed.”

 

He added, “For cases that are maybe a slightly step up the ladder in severity, they can potentially be eligible for a bit more extensive of a mandate, maybe a certain number of individual counseling sessions, a certain amount of group programming, maybe some community service, which we also facilitate, and then as you get up the ladder to individuals who are charged with felonies, it gets a little more complex. Obviously, everyone is very interested in making sure that you are held accountable for what has happened.”

Liberatoscioli continued, “At the same time, I think all the stakeholders in the system want to recognize that there are underlying factors which drive a lot of criminal behavior, and if there is a way to successfully address those underlying factors, really establish a long term fix rather than a band aid, which is incarceration, why not try it, and so on some of those more serious cases, when all parties involved do come to an agreement, someone can, in fact, participate in more extensive programming of upwards of six, nine, 12, or more months, and it’s a really extensive process. So, it happens on all those different levels.”

 

Given residents of Kingsbridge Heights have long complained about drug use and used needles in Poe Park, and the ramifications of that for children and other local residents, we asked Melendez and Rivera for their latest thoughts on the matter.

 

“The complaints from the residents are real and I take them very seriously,” the senator said. “Ultimately, we want to achieve the same thing. I believe this park should be a safe place for everybody regardless of age or anything [..] to enjoy public spaces. I think the frustration is that there are policies that have been tried for decades that haven’t worked and we still try to insist that we need to go back to them, and I believe there are different things that can work and the type of things that I’m pushing for are around harm reduction.” He cited the outreach van as one example of meeting people where they are, and is also in favor of more Overdose Prevention Centers.

 

Melendez said in part that as a mother and grandmother, she also understands residents’ concerns, saying the HOPE program is just one aspect of a multifaceted approach to the overall drug epidemic. She added that while BCS works with law enforcement, they are not actually law enforcement nonetheless.

 

During the event, a BCS official said there were 858 overdose deaths in The Bronx in 2023 and that the Bronx is the hardest hit county in New York State when it comes to such deaths.

Someone who may also offer a glimpse of hope that the program works is Segundo Lopez, the oldest and senior peer specialist with BCS. “It’s a wonderful way of life for me to give back,” Lopez said. “I also suffered from addiction, incarceration. I didn’t know where I was going. I went back to college. I never did outreach so I sat in one time, and I found my love.”

 

He added, “I finally got my passion, and I realized that when I finished talking to people who were addicted, they told me, ‘God bless you guys. Enjoy your afternoon. Thank you for your support. You help me get in recovery.’ I was so moved by that, so I dedicated my life to give back to the community.”

 

Lopez said his clients are given a crisis bag when the team meets them usually at a precinct which includes something to eat. “I remember how it is when you’re hungry, you don’t want to talk to anyone,” he said. “You just want to go home, take a shower, and especially if you don’t have a home, you want to go out and use.” Lopez added that the work was also about human connection and witnessed clients being brought to tears when they were hugged even if they felt embarrassed and would say to him, “No, don’t hug me please. I smell.” He said he would hug them anyway.

 

In terms of offering hope to anyone currently living with addiction, we asked Lopez how he turned his life around. He said he remembers being incarcerated and being paid to be on suicide watch for his colleagues. He said he was offered drugs one day in exchange for a favor. “I took it, and when I put that in my nose, for the first time in my life, I felt my spirit jump out of my body,” he said. “I had enough. I have kids. I have daughters and a son, and I was never there for graduation. I missed a lot. I wanted to be a father again.”

A new “HOPE-on-the-go” van is unveiled at Poe Park by State Sen. Gustavo Rivera (S.D. 33) and Bronx Community Solutions on Friday, Sept. 26, 2025, to provide vital overdose prevention services and information to the local community. A check presentation by the senator to Bronx Community Solutions of $100,000 to fund the van followed. Video by Norwood News via YouTube

Lopez has since reconnected with his kids and was even there at the end for one of his daughters who he said sadly died of cancer last year. “My hope came through my parole officer,” he said. “He saw something in me that I couldn’t see and because of him, I’m here 33 years later.”