A thin rope delineates the contaminated
and overgrown fields from the school parking lot.
“Might have been Demetri,”
Pickett says. “He was supposed to
be our son’s roommate in college.”
It was around the time that
Demetri Demeropoulos was getting very sick, in 2010, that talk
around Briarcliff about the fields
started to circulate. A year later,
in June of 2011, the Mazzillis’ own
son was diagnosed with thyroid
cancer after a doctor felt a growth
in his throat during a routine appointment for a physical.
“The doctor said to Nicholas,
‘It’s very treatable. There was an-
HUFFINGTON
08.12.12
other young man from the community that we just treated successfully,’” Mazzilli recalls.
Nicholas asked the doctor if
that young man’s name was Alex
Demeropoulos, Demetri’s younger
brother. The doctor said it was.
“The doctor put his head in
his hands,” Pickett remembers,
and began crying. Pickett says
he then asked her son: “Where’d
you go to high school?”
A top surgeon removed Nicholas’s thyroid two weeks after that
doctor’s appointment and then he
went through sequences of radioactive iodine treatments. The Mazzillis are among three families that
have notified the school district
SUDDEN
DEATH