YOUNGSTOWN — Eric Ungaro said he felt “totally smashed” the day his younger brother Sean died at the hands of a drug overdose 13 years ago.

“I called my brother every single day, a hundred times; ‘where are you going? What are you doing?’ in the midst of my own life,” said Ungaro, a Poland Township trustee and president of the Mahoning County Mental Health and Recovery Board. “So when people talk about how it’s affecting you, you know what it did? It affected my wife, my daughters, without me really knowing it.”

Ungaro, the night’s guest speaker, was just one of 100 individuals in attendance for the Overdose Awareness Day at Wean Park on Tuesday evening. The event was sponsored by Grief Recovery After a Substance Passing (GRASP) and OhioCAN, a nonprofit with the mission of embracing, educating and empowering individuals who have been impacted by substance use.

The night featured a candlelight vigil, a remembrance table and lanterns released into the sky as attendees sought to remember loved ones who had died from an overdose.

Ungaro recalled his brother’s fight with addiction, noting that Sean “wanted so bad” to be a dad and beat it and do other things.

He said it ultimately ended badly, adding there were no “good Samaritan laws that would enable his brother to call the cops and have them pick him up.”

“There was no Narcan 12 years ago, the only people who had it were ambulances. I became a trustee in Poland and that was one of the things I talked about,” Ungaro said. “Police unions were against this — this is back to 2012. At the time they were like, ‘I don’t want to get involved with this; I don’t want to save the same dude 50 times.'”

Ungaro said he was thankful the township’s officers were willing to start carrying Narcan, as he believed Poland’s decision was the trigger to making it readily available.

Ungaro said there’s “not a day that goes by” that he doesn’t think about what he could have done for his brother.

“I hope, if you got anything out of this other than the fact that I’m still getting my head kicked in, it’s just that I spoke from the heart. I would do anything, any accolades outside of my wife, my daughters and my granddaughter, my mom, my sisters,” Ungaro said. “I would give up anything to have him back — even if he was sweating and 300 pounds or whatever.”

Anna Howells, the event’s organizer and leader of her own GRASP grief group, said they’ve been putting the event on for the past eight to 10 years.

“The stigma and shame of just having an addiction, let alone passing away from an overdose — a lot of people blame them, they did it to themselves,” Howells said. “It’s a disease, and people need to educate themselves, so we’re here trying to say, ‘these were very wonderful people, just like everyone else’ and they had this disease. We’re here in their memory, never to be forgotten.”

Howells said her son, Dennis, died in 2013 from fentanyl poisoning, leading her to create her own GRASP chapter a year later.

“When people die from an overdose, it’s not like someone who dies from cancer; everybody is like, ‘they should have stopped,'” Howells said. “There’s no education in their brain that says this is a disease, and it’s a terrible disease, the suffering they did is.”

Howells said she tells people at the grief group that Dennis’s death was the “worst thing in the world”, but it was easier than living his life with addiction. She said others agree with her.