Mothers, a counselor and recovery coaches speak for four dead sons at Winchester vigil

Winchester Margaret Walsh had one child. She does not believe he could have been saved.

“Robbie was never meant to be a day over 19,” she told the crowd on the Winchester Town Common on Sept. 30 . “He was never meant to go to college. This is just the way it is.”

He was Robert Francis Walsh IV, two born in Ireland and two born here, she said. Every man in the line an alcoholic, without exception. His mother was, too.

She met her husband in recovery, she said, and Robbie never saw either of them drink. There was no trauma in his early life. Some say trauma, some say genetics, and Walsh says genetics.

“Boy, he had it on both ends,” she said. “He didn’t know what hit him.”

He loved people so much as a boy, his mother said, that he would talk to a wall. He kept the house full of other children and would rather play in the street than sit inside with a video game.

Then he started drinking, and that ended. He isolated. He withdrew into himself. He became sad.

He overdosed three times before the fentanyl killed him in 2019, at 19. He was never a daily user, she said, only because the state kept locking him up for treatment. As a teenager he spent three nights, at separate times, in the Winchester Police Department.

“That’s his legacy,” she said.

She calls the sickness underneath a hole in the soul.

“That hurts so bad,” she said, “just being alive.”

‘I only know good kids’

Sal Caraviello, a counselor, followed her to the microphone.

“I only know good kids,” he said. “In my 40 years, they have been the light of my life.”

He described a child with a wound they cannot name, often with no one to help, reaching for whatever gives a moment of relief.

“Sometimes that tool is good and sometimes that tool is harmful,” he said. “It’s hard for the child to differentiate at that point in their lives.”

As the child becomes an adult, he said, a third thing arrives: the shame.

“And now they have three battles: the emotional wound, the worn out harmful tool, and the tremendous sense of anger and shame,” he said. “That’s a lot on any person.”

Walsh described the shame from the other side. When Robbie was 14, 15 and 16, she said, Winchester had no resources for him.

“Winchester had a bunch of parents saying, ‘Not my kid.’” She intercepted a text on her son’s phone from one of the other mothers. It said, “Stay away from my son.”

“I could have been that same person protecting my precious self,” she said.

Robbie’s sign, staked in the grass at the far left of the row, reads “Forever 19.”

Four signs

The Winchester Coalition for a Safer Community held its second Recovery & Remembrance Candlelight Vigil at 6 p.m. near Waterfield and Church streets. The Coalition formed in 1999.

Purple flags around a tree stand for people who died, white flags for the families and friends around them, yellow for those who took their own lives.

Last year Dot Butler, the town’s community health program manager, borrowed most of the display from another community. This year, four Winchester families wrote their own signs for Clayton Soper, who died at 19; Michael J. Lannan, who died at 34; Joe Mafera, who died at 28; and Robbie Walsh.

Two of the mothers, writing separately, each called her son “my beautiful boy.”

One party

Genny Soper’s son, Clay, had finished his freshman year at the University of Denver and was home for the summer 11 years ago. He had no history of addiction, she said. He was social, liked people, liked a good time.

On a casual Friday night, he went to a party where he and his friends mixed Xanax with alcohol.

“When Clay went to sleep, he never woke up,” Soper said. “Quite honestly, he and his friends had absolutely no idea, nor did I, that mixing those two things could be fatal.”

Three days after he died, his friends came to the house. They told the family it never should have happened to Clay, and that they wanted to get his story out.

The family formed the Clay Soper Memorial Fund and made a documentary. It has spent 10 years going into high schools, colleges and communities across the country.

A couple of years ago, the family added a second Winchester boy to the film. Drew Pelusi’s anxiety worsened during the pandemic, Soper said, and he bought Xanax online. It was laced with fentanyl. He was revived that night. About eight months later, he died.

“Those who would go to the party and maybe make a bad decision,” Soper said, “and maybe those who wouldn’t even go to a party, but would have no barrier to misusing prescription drugs.”

She stopped partway through.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “Couldn’t hold it together.”

Joe

Michelle Mafera’s son, Joe, loved baseball and spent hours on the field growing up. He was mischievous, she said, and he noticed people. She took him into Boston when he was small and he could not get past the people sleeping on the sidewalks.

“He wanted people to be OK,” she said. “And that compassion stayed with Joe.”

His sign says he made many attempts at recovery. He died in 2024.

“They are not just statistics,” Mafera said. “They were someone’s son, daughter, friend, neighbor, someone’s teammate. They were someone’s whole world.

“Joe cannot come home, and I would give anything for one more conversation, one more hug, one more laugh,” she added. “Somewhere tonight, someone is struggling, and we need to reach for them.”

Where the money went

Barrie Brian will mark 35 years sober on Oct. 5. She grew up in Winchester, raised her children here and still lives here. She said one of them has the disease.

“He’s on his journey,” she said, “and I’m right by him the whole way.”

She is one of the town’s two recovery coaches, paid with Winchester’s share of the national opioid settlement.

Sixty percent of that money went to the state and 40% to cities and towns, she said, and municipalities will keep receiving payments through 2037. The 40% measures the municipal share of the settlement; the total settlement figure needed to translate it into dollars for Winchester was not provided.

The town’s program has paid for 14 people to enter sober living or partial hospitalization programs, with stays of one to four months, Brian said. Twelve families have received support and guidance.

A family support group began Sept. 16 and meets the third Wednesday of each month at an Episcopal church on High Street in Medford, open to all the Mystic Valley Public Health Coalition towns.

She put it in Medford on purpose.

“If I started with an institution in Winchester,” she said, “nobody would come.”

Winchester is quiet, she said. “It’s quiet, very quiet.”

She told residents to ask the town how the settlement money is spent. Grandparents raising a grandchild qualify, she said. So do families paying for a funeral, or for therapy or counseling after a death.

“Asking for help is a huge step, and not knowing where or who to go to makes it even harder,” Brian said. “There should be no shame. This is a disease.”

Steven Kent, who co-owns Insight Recovery Treatment Center near the town transfer station, said he spent more than 10 years in addiction.

“I was unable to tell anyone what was going on,” he said.

His nonprofit holds a family meeting on Monday nights, open to anyone.

What the town counted

Butler said the local losses she knows of are not many, and that some were never reported back to her. Not every flag is a Winchester resident.

The town’s 2024 needs assessment on opioid use drew 378 responses. Forty-one said a family member had died of opioid use disorder or an overdose. Twenty-one said a family member was living with it.

The survey’s authors cautioned that respondents chose to take part, and the figures are not a count of Winchester deaths.

A smaller sign along the walkway put the number of Winchester residents in recovery at about 2,300, working from a national estimate.

Michael Lannan’s sign says he became hooked at 24 on medicine prescribed for pain, and that in recovery he helped others. He left a son, Luke. His family wrote the last line: “Always loved, never forgotten.”

Walsh said God gave her grace, and she defined it for anyone who did not know the word as an unmerited gift.

“I have the unmerited gift of knowing I loved that kid, and I did everything I could in my power to save him,” she said, “but he was on his own journey.”

Earlier this month, before any of the families spoke, a young woman walked over to Butler’s flags and told her it had been alcohol.

“She’s been in recovery for nine years,” Butler said, “and you just got to congratulate her.”

Will Dowd is a Massachusetts journalist who covers municipal government and community life for Winchester News. He is also the founder and editor of The Marblehead Independent, a reader-funded digital newsroom.