Thursday, October 1, 2026
Mitchell Prussman found something strange when he woke up one January morning. The light was still on in his 19-year-old daughter's room, shinning through the cracks in her locked door.
"She had shot up with heroin and killed herself, and she was fully dressed, like she did it on purpose," Prussman told an auditorium full of parents at a drug awareness forum at Long Beach High School on March 10. "And she was on the floor and the detectives came. It was horrible. We had to live through that."
Prussman's daughter had been home only a week after spending four months at the Dynamite Youth Center, a drug rehabilitation facility in the Catskills. "We tested her, and unfortunately she had heroin in her blood," he said, referring to the evening before she died.
Her death was one of three in Long Beach caused by heroin in recent months, and the forum was one in a series of events hosted by the school district, the police department, Long Beach Medical Center and the Coalition to Prevent Underage Drinking. On Tuesday, neurologist Dr. Stephen Dewey gave a talk on the effects of alcohol and drugs on the adolescent brain at the annual coalition-sponsored National Town Hall Meeting on Underage Drinking at the library, detailing his research at North Shore-LIJ.
The sizable gatherings at both events suggest that drug use — and particularly heroin use, which is on the rise nationwide — has parents concerned. While some in the community, such as schools Superintendent Dr. Robert Greenberg, say the recent deaths are not indicative of an epidemic in the city, arguing that it is not on the scale as the swine flu, some parents pointed out that at least no one in Long Beach died of the virus.
Prussman's daughter died a month after a 23-year-old woman was found dead in her home, and a man overdosed and died more recently, although the Long Beach Police Department was unable to provide more details about him at press time.
