Four days before he died, Louis Ahearn’s mother says her 23-year-old son told her he was feeling suicidal.
He had gotten hooked on “a bad drug,” he explained — heroin. His mom asked him where he was getting it.
“Brad,” he replied.
The account was provided by Ahearn’s mother, Gina Mattei, in a letter to a federal judge presiding over the case of a man implicated in her son’s death.
Ahearn was found Feb. 17 in his Hawthorne Avenue apartment in Derby after overdosing on what federal prosecutors described as heroin that was “either mixed with fentanyl or pure fentanyl,” an even more potent opioid.
“Brad” is Bradley Commerford, a Derby man charged with selling Ahearn the drugs that killed him. He took a plea deal in the case in May.
Federal prosecutors and Commerford’s lawyer have since offered sharply contrasting depictions of Commerford in documents filed in court.
A federal judge is scheduled to hand down a sentence in the case Friday.
Prosecutors say Commerford, 20, is a predator who pushed drugs on users as young as 16 without pause, even after he was arrested last year — or after a spate of overdoses — including Ahearn’s.
Commerford’s lawyer and family say he sold heroin to others because he was hopelessly addicted himself, self-medicating as a way of coping with an awful childhood that included witnessing the death of a 13-year-old friend a decade ago — after the boy did heroin Commerford’s sister had supplied.
The investigation was prompted by two non-fatal overdoses in Shelton on Feb. 16 and the fatal overdose on Hawthorne Avenue in Derby the next day.
The Feds said Commerford was identified “as the heroin source of supply in all three overdose cases.”
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Commerford is asking U.S. District Judge Alvin W. Thompson to give him a year and a day behind bars.
Prosecutors want about six years, the most time allowable under a plea deal to which Commerford agreed.
In a sentencing memo filed last month, Commerford’s lawyer, Assistant Federal Defender James Maguire, said his client grew up dealing with “chronic instability and stress,” such as the fact that both of his parents were unstable alcoholics.
Then, when Commerford was 10, he and a 13-year-old friend were staying at his older sister’s house in Shelton when his sister gave the 13-year-old boy heroin.
The boy died, and Commerford’s sister was sent to prison for 17 years.
Since Commerford’s arrest in February, a Yale University psychiatrist has diagnosed him with post-traumatic stress disorder in connection with the incident, the sentencing memo says, as well as addictions to opioids and marijuana.
Commerford sold heroin because he was an addict, Maguire wrote.
“A 20-year-old, he bought heroin with people approximately his age,” the sentencing memo says. “He used heroin with people approximately his own age. He also provided heroin to people of approximately his age, including an eighteen year old and his sixteen-year-old girlfriend.”
Assistant U.S. Attorney Robert Spector conceded Commerford needs treatment for “some deeply troubling issues.”
“On the other hand, there are some deeply troubling aspects of Commerford’s offense conduct,” Spector wrote in a memo to Judge Thompson. “He regularly distributed heroin to teenagers. He sold heroin on the immediate heels of being convicted in state court of several serious felony offenses.”
And he sold heroin to Ahearn — after getting him hooked on it as a way of dealing with pain from a dental procedure.
“Louis was not a heroin user; he had never tried it or expressed any interest in it,” Spector wrote. “His mistake was that he was too trusting” of Commerford, who had recently befriended him.
The feds also point out that Commerford was arrested in in the case while allegedly on his way to buy more heroin from his own supplier in Waterbury.
“Had he not been arrested, he would have continued to distribute the same deadly heroin,” Spector wrote.
Victim’s Mother: He’s A Predator
Ahearn’s mother, Gina Mattei, wrote an emotional, four-page letter to the judge attached to Spector’s sentencing memo, including several pictures of her son.
She recalled Louis telling her Commerford had gotten him hooked on heroin.
“I didn’t call the police. I should have,” she said. “I should have taken him to the hospital. I didn’t. I will live with the guilt for the rest of my life.”
She said Commerford is “a dangerous predator” and “callous drug pusher” who hasn’t shown remorse.
“If he was remorseful, he would have cooperated with detectives to eliminate the drug dealers he worked for,” she wrote.
She asked the judge to make an example of him.
“I have inherited my son’s unlived years,” Mattei wrote. “I can maybe have some peace knowing that others can live because evil such as Commerford is not tolerated anymore. I am now on a journey to honor my son and perhaps fight against a broken system that killed us both.”
The documents are below.
COMMERFORD Bradley Sentencing Memo
COMMERFORD Bradley Govt Sentencing Memo by The Valley Indy on Scribd
