Laura Hadden

Laura Hadden, the mother of Brandon Perullo, tried to make the Shenandoah Valley recognize heroin addiction before the crisis could be reduced to a sensational crime story. She answered stigma with explanation: addiction, she told local parents, could overwhelm a person’s ability to choose and drive people to seek opioids simply to avoid becoming violently ill. Her warnings were met with indifference, and her son’s later relapse and death gave her advocacy an intimate, devastating urgency.

Identity and Background

Hadden was a mother whose son’s addiction brought her into public advocacy. The book places her in Woodstock, a town of historical markers and expensive antiques, where Brandon’s 2010 attempt to rob a bank became regional news. He was among a growing group of local heroin users. In the grip of withdrawal, he entered the bank twice, then handed a threatening note to a teller. His jittery behavior had already made him conspicuous; police arrested him unarmed as he left with $1,860.

The arrest made Brandon visible, but not in the way Hadden thought the community needed. She asked the local newspaper to cover the growing heroin problem, explaining to an editor that her son was not the only person buying pills and heroin from couriers and commuter dealers traveling from Baltimore. The paper, she said, was more interested in the bank robbery. Her protest exposed a gap between a dramatic individual incident and the less visible regional supply that families were beginning to confront.

Explaining Addiction to the Community

Just before Brandon went to prison, the local sheriff and school-prevention workers held the area’s first community-wide meeting about opioid addiction. Hadden used the occasion to challenge the idea that addiction was simply a matter of bad character or weak will. She explained that, in her understanding, addiction hijacked a person’s power of choice: a flood of synthetic opioids shut down the body’s natural opioids, tolerance increased, and the brain came to crave larger quantities to stave off severe illness.

To make that compulsion imaginable to parents, Hadden offered a food analogy. She asked them to picture going three days without eating, then being left alone with a plate of delicious food that they were forbidden to touch. The comparison translated a bodily drive into an ordinary experience, attempting to bridge the distance between families who feared heroin and people already caught in dependence.

She also described what that drive meant for the community: young people were traveling to Baltimore, bringing heroin back, and selling it locally; people whom others would not suspect were using it. Her account connected the personal consequences of dependence to a moving supply network. But the audience did not respond with questions or discussion. Only about ten people attended, Hadden recalled, and she judged the response a joke. Her explanation was detailed; the meeting offered little sign that listeners were ready to absorb it.

Advocacy After Brandon’s Imprisonment

Brandon offered to tell teenagers about his experience as a warning against heroin. At his February 2011 sentencing, when he was twenty-seven, he told the judge, “No mistake is too big that I can’t bounce back from.” The judge sentenced him to three and a half years in prison. For Hadden, his sentence did not end the circumstances shaping his life outside prison: after his release, a felony record made finding work around Woodstock almost impossible.

Soon after leaving prison, Brandon moved to New York to live near his father and his close-knit extended Italian family. At first he was doing well, working for his father and teaching bodybuilding on the side. Seven months after his release, however, he relapsed. His family urged him to seek treatment, but he died two weeks later of an overdose involving cocaine and heroin.

Hadden believed that her son may have died by suicide, driven by his overwhelming fear of becoming dopesick. She did not present that interpretation as certainty: years later, she was still wondering whether he had simply been unable to continue. Two days before his death, Brandon had written on Facebook, “I hope people remember all the good I’ve done.” The post and her lingering question leave his death framed not as a solved motive but as a loss whose meaning his mother continued to struggle with.

Stigma, Silence, and Narrative Significance

Hadden’s advocacy places her son’s story against the social conditions that make addiction difficult to acknowledge. When the book’s reporting began in the suburbs of Roanoke in 2012, many families were too ashamed to speak on the record. Hadden’s own account of being brushed off by the newspaper and facing near-silence at the community meeting shows two different forms of that failure: a public preference for the arrest story over the drug problem, and an audience unwilling to ask questions when a mother tried to explain what was happening.

Her experience also belongs to a wider landscape in which relatives worked to keep people alive amid gaps between health care and the criminal-justice system. In 2012, social-media groups had not yet connected parents across Virginia to exchange treatment advice, coping strategies, or practical support. The book’s other accounts show how stigma could follow people into treatment as well: some participants in recovery meetings regarded buprenorphine as incompatible with being clean, despite formal acceptance of medication-assisted treatment. Hadden’s work addresses an earlier part of the same divide: whether families and communities can recognize addiction as a condition requiring understanding and care rather than treat it as a private disgrace or a crime worth covering only when it becomes spectacular.

The contrast between her explanations and the reception they received gives her role its force. She spoke about dependence as a physical and social process, named the route bringing heroin into local communities, and asked parents to imagine the pressure behind behavior they might condemn. The room’s silence did not disprove her warning; it marked how difficult it was for that warning to be heard. Brandon’s relapse and death made the consequences personal, while Hadden’s continued uncertainty about his final act preserved the limits of what any explanation could resolve.