Maryland health officials suspended the license for troubled addiction treatment provider PHA Healthcare months ago. Several families of those who died in the program say they want more.

Their mourning is haunted by lingering questions, including: What will happen to the people who ran the program?

Griselle Estrada, the mother of a former federal contractor who died while in PHA Healthcare’s housing, said authorities should close the program permanently and punish its operators, who have denied wrongdoing.

“At least a little bit was done,” she said of the state’s initial response. “Because before, nobody cared.”

PHA Healthcare, a drug addiction treatment provider in Maryland, was licensed by the state in 2020 to provide outpatient counseling services and had received millions from Medicaid for treating patients each year.

The state ordered PHA Healthcare to stop treating patients in December for operating without a valid license, three days after an investigation by The Banner and The New York Times revealed the program had placed some patients in what were effectively government-funded drug houses. But the owner has said it would continue to provide housing to people struggling with addiction.

A state health department spokesman declined to say whether PHA Healthcare was among the providers the agency has referred to investigators as part of a fraud crackdown.

Reached by email last week, PHA Healthcare’s spokeswoman Janet Conner-Knox said Banner/Times reporting on the company has not been “fair, accurate or balanced,” and declined to comment further.

The Banner/Times investigation found at least 13 deaths have been linked to PHA Healthcare since 2022. Relapses, overdoses and even deaths happen on occasion at treatment programs; patients with long-term drug addictions often have other health issues, and it is impossible to know whether any person would have survived outside the program.

But more rigorous programs routinely take precautions — such as regular drug testing, stocking houses with overdose-reversal drug Narcan and frequently checking on patients — that PHA Healthcare did inconsistently, according to the Banner/Times report.

State authorities have not alleged that PHA Healthcare is responsible for the patient deaths, and neither the company nor any of its employees have been criminally charged.

The dead include a grandparent and a 1-year-old, as well as lifelong residents of Baltimore and people newly drawn to the city by the availability of drugs and treatment.

Here are some of their stories.

Fernando Rivera-Estrada

Growing up in Puerto Rico and Virginia, Rivera was a straight-A student who loved watching scary movies with his younger sister and singing along to Boyz II Men, according to his family. In college, he joined a fraternity and began drinking, triggering a decades-long fight with alcoholism that was exacerbated by mental illness.

He had been a federal contractor with steady work and a nearly six-figure salary, but was fired for drinking on the job, his mother said. For many years, according to his family, he shuttled between treatment programs in the region, with periods of sobriety in between.

Rivera spent his last Thanksgiving with the men in his drug-treatment recovery house, explaining to his family that the others had nowhere to go. He spent days preparing a feast: marinated turkey, fried pumpkin fritters and stuffing with yuca and a blend of spices from Puerto Rico.

“That was the kind of person Fernando was,” Griselle Estrada said. “He tried to help.”

On January 13, 2023, Rivera, 43, was found unresponsive in an apartment run by PHA Healthcare, according to his family. A medical examiner ruled his cause of death as an accidental overdose from fentanyl. When his sister, Lizzy Estrada, stopped by to pick up his belongings, she said she was shocked to see syringes littered on the floor of his unit.

After Rivera was cremated, Lizzy Estrada poured some of his ashes into a miniature glass orb on a necklace. She has kept her brother with her as she’s traveled to music festivals and concerts, including their beloved Boyz II Men.

Lizzy Estrada recently gave birth to her second child, a boy who will never know his uncle.

“One of the last pictures we have with him is just him being excited to hold my daughter,” Lizzy Estrada said. “He would have been thrilled to know I’m also having a son.”

Rodney Myers

Rodney Myers called his sister shortly after moving into a PHA Healthcare-run apartment, concerned about what he saw. People were getting high around him, he told her. His belongings were disappearing.

A few weeks after arriving, on April 17, 2023, Rodney Myers, 45, was found on his bedroom floor, dead from an overdose, according to an autopsy and police report. The medical examiner detected fentanyl and cocaine in his system.

“He went there for help,” his sister Roxie Myers said. “How did he lose his life?”

She believes as a result, the employees of PHA Healthcare should be fired, but she added that the drug treatment housing should not be shut down because people like her brother need a place to stay.

Rodney Myers had a difficult childhood growing up in Baltimore. His father began using drugs with him when he was 11 years old, according to his sister. Rodney was exposed to dangerous levels of lead and dropped out of school by the sixth grade, she said. For the rest of his life, he struggled with drug addiction and illiteracy.

Roxie Myers said her brother had often been homeless, at times sleeping on her couch, but more often staying at treatment programs across the city.

Even so, Rodney Myers was close with his family. He dressed up as Santa Claus for Christmas and posed for photos with his nieces. He never forgot to wish his sister a happy birthday. Whenever she was having a bad day, he would tell her “Don’t cry, Roxie, I’ll fix it.”

“Just because he got high doesn’t mean his life doesn’t matter,” she said. “He was somebody, he was special to me. He was my hero.”

Amanda Vlakos

When paramedic Angela Vlakos responded to calls for suspected overdoses, she would pray to God it was not for her daughter.

She had seen her only child, Amanda Vlakos, spiral deeper into drug addiction, starting in her late teens. A rape at age 12 and, later, the death of a baby, had destabilized her life, her mother said. She reached for heroin to dull the pain.

The mother and daughter were estranged for as long as a year at a time. Once, after a period of silence, Angela Vlakos resuscitated a passed-out patient who had taken too many drugs following a stint in addiction treatment. The stick-thin young woman with dark hair bore a heart-stopping resemblance to her daughter.

At the sight, Angela Vlakos felt her terror turned to relief, then to pity as the girl revived.

Amanda Vlakos did not die of an overdose until many years later. On September 17, 2024, the 34-year-old was found in an apartment operated by PHA Healthcare. She had been a patient in its care for nearly two years, according to her family.

A few months before her death, Amanda Vlakos wrote an essay that she dreamed of being sober, reuniting with her kids and moving somewhere warmer, ideally to a house by the beach. Today, her remains rest in an urn in her mother’s living room.

“As a mother, I always had hope,” Angela Vlakos said. “Now it’s gone, I’m left with nothing.”

She believes the program should be forced to pay back state funds meant to help care for her daughter and others like her.

“I just want them to be held accountable,” she said. “I don’t want this to slip through the cracks.”