AUGUSTA, Maine — Sen. Brad Farrin says he still wakes up some mornings, thinking it was all a bad dream. But it is still all too real.
In July 2022, his 26-year-old daughter, Haley Farrin, died from an overdose of fentanyl, the dangerous opioid drug that has killed thousands of Mainers in recent years.
"Haley traveled with me and we discovered a love for the Keys," Brad recalled during an interview. "We traveled to D.C. while I was teaching at the Pentagon for a number of years. And until Lynn and I met, Haley was like my best friend and we did a lot together."
Brad and Haley's mother, Tammy, divorced when their daughter was two, he explained, but they have remained in close contact while co-parenting their daughter.
"Haley was super loving and smart," Tammy said. "She was the one we called when we had questions about most anything."
But the parents and their two respective spouses were left with all the questions following Haley's death.
They all explained that Haley had been unhappy following a breakup, and began a new relationship.
"A manipulator," is how Tammy described the man.
"And he introduced her to something that I know she knew was wrong," Lynn said. That something was drugs, including fentanyl.
The parents say they didn’t know she had become a drug user, but they had noticed changes in Haley, which caused concern. Brad and Tammy said they tried an intervention, to get her to cut off the relationship with the boyfriend, but that didn’t work.
Then, on July 27, 2022, Tammy said she and her husband Sam went to Haley's house and discovered her car in the driveway, meaning Haley had not gone to work. They found two strangers, a man and a woman, on the couch. The man, they said, stated Haley had passed out in her room.
Tammy said she ran in and found Haley on the floor, some areas of her skin had turned blue. With no Narcan, they called 911 and began CPR.
"Tammy was doing CPR on Haley," Sam said. "I was compressing her chest; Tammy [was] doing mouth to mouth."
But it was too late.
Brad and Lynn arrived a short time later after they were called.
"What Tammy did, performing CPR on her child, I can’t imagine," Brad said.
In the wake of their daughter’s death, all said they have asked the same questions.
"It's always the what if," Lynn said. "What could we have done different? If we had done something different would it have changed the outcome?"
All say the grief has not gone away, that it's always with them.
"It's almost as if you wake up on a whole different planet. Nothing's the same," Tammy explained. She said she and Sam have moved full-time to Florida because it's just too painful for her to be in Maine.
Brad and Lynn have tried to channel their grief by looking for steps to prevent others from taking those drugs. They began by checking on drug education efforts in area schools, after learning that fentanyl was being produced in a form that looked like candy.
"I contacted at least 10 superintendents," Lynn recalled. "And I have to give a shout-out to John Moody in Skowhegan who actually took the time to talk to me and be proactive. They had already gone before the school board to have Narcan in the school."
She said Maine Central Institute in Pittsfield also explained the drug education steps they were taking.
"Sadly, the majority of superintendents never even responded to me. I've gone to a school board for one district but still didn’t get movement. The answers I was getting were that it was up to the [school] nurses to what the schools would receive in training."
That result prompted Brad to introduce a bill in the Legislature, modeled after a law in Texas, "which would mandate 10 hours of class time instruction on dangerous drug awareness."
"Then I watched the sausage-making process here in Augusta, and it went to committee and I heard from the teachers union, the superintendents, [complaining] unfunded mandate, and we can't tell local control what to do. And when it was all said and done, they passed the bill but took all the teeth out of it," he said.
He explained that mandates in the original bill were changed to make the drug education voluntary.
"The governor asked me if I wanted to do a bill signing ceremony on it, and I said no because it didn’t accomplish anything."
Brad said he sponsored two other bills, one for tougher sentences for possession of fentanyl, and another to consolidate treatment methods for best practices. Both ran into opposition, and both bills failed to pass.
Tammy and Sam, in Florida, kept track of what was happening to those they say got Haley into using the deadly drug.
Andrew Blais, the man who all said was on the couch when Tammy and Sam went to the house, was eventually indicted last October on six felony counts. He is currently in jail awaiting trial, which District Attorney Meaghan Maloney says is expected to take place in June. Those charges include unlawful trafficking of drugs which resulted in death, which Maloney said can bring a sentence of up to 30 years.
Lynn and Brad Farrin say they plan to continue their efforts to push for more and better drug education in the schools, to try to prevent other family tragedies.
"A lot of parents have to stop thinking this won’t happen to my child," Lynn said. "It's not discriminatory and it affects lawyers' children, doctors' children."
"We are losing a whole generation to this," Brad said. "There is nothing that compares to losing a child, and you don’t know that until it happens... There is no way to describe it, it's every day."
