Dominic Dupont, the nephew of late actor Michael K. Williams, is opening up about the tragic loss of his uncle, who died in September 2021 from an accidental drug overdose.
While appearing on Wednesday’s episode of Facebook Watch’s “Red Table Talk,” which discussed the life-threatening dangers of fentanyl, Dupont reflected on Williams’ death, including the horrific moment when he discovered his uncle’s body.
Williams, best known for his roles as Omar Little in “The Wire” and Chalky White in “Boardwalk Empire,” was found dead in his Brooklyn apartment on September 6. He was 54. According to TMZ, his cause of death was a fatal drug overdose, with fentanyl, p-fluorofentanyl, heroin and cocaine found in his system.
Speaking to Jada Pinkett Smith, Willow Smith and Adrienne Banfield-Norris, Dupont recalled the day on which he found Williams’ body.
“I think a lot of what happened, what I saw on September 6, I’m still processing,” he said, adding that his uncle was an “amazing human being.”
Dupont said he had “reached out” to Williams the night before and “was concerned that [he] had not heard from him.” Dupont said he and his wife decided to go check up on the actor at his apartment.
“I went upstairs, opened up his door and it was quiet,” Dupont recalled. “Michael always played music. That wasn’t the case. I stuck my head in, I said, ‘Uncle Mike, are you in here?’ And I observed him deceased.”
“[I] immediately called 911,” he continued. “[The EMTs] said, ‘Listen, do you want to start some compressions?’ And I said, ‘I’m telling you. He’s deceased. He’s gone. He’s cold.'”
Banfield-Norris AKA Gammy then asked Dupont if Williams, who battled drug addiction in the past, had “shown any signs” of relapsing before the accidental overdose.
“Mike was doing well,” Dupont said. “He was working on a book. It did not appear to me that Mike was sliding back into addiction.”
Dupont — who had served nearly 21 years in prison — said in the “four and a half years” he’d been home Williams “didn’t appear to be overwhelmed or dealing with any major issues.”
“Michael also worked really hard not to have the things he was going through weigh on other people,” he added. “And he was an actor, right, and you can fool people, you can convince people that you’re okay.”
However, Dupont pointed out that he’s “positive” that his uncle “would not have knowingly taken fentanyl,” stressing, “I know that like I know my first name.”
When asked why it was “important” for him to come to the Red Table, he said, “Fentanyl finding its way into our communities is the reason why I know Michael would want me here.”
“A huge part of what my life entails now is honoring his legacy,” Dupont said, adding that he and Williams grew up in a “really rough” neighborhood. “Michael believed we don’t sit back and just look at things fall apart and just become complacent, and if we do, we’re complicit.”
“We have to work hard to make people aware of what’s happening so that other people don’t have to feel the type of pain that I felt,” he continued, before Pinkett Smith noted how Dupont is living with Williams’ 94-year-old mother, calling her “an amazing human being.”
“Her grit. Her strength. I see what Michael got it from,” Dupont said.
Dupont also shared a memory from his childhood from “right before” Williams went to rehab for the first time. See what Dupont said his uncle said to him in the full episode, above.
Meanwhile, also during Wednesday’s episode of “RTT,” comedian Kate Quigley recalled the horrifying story from last September in which she and three friends accidentally overdosed after using cocaine they didn’t know had been laced with fentanyl. Quigley was the only survivor.
Quigley, 40, detailed the evening of the horrific incident, which took the lives of her friends Fuquan “Fu” Johnson, Enrico “Rico” Colangeli and Natalie Williamson, whom Quigley said she had just met “that night.”
“I did a show. I saw Fu there. I saw Rico at the club too,” she began. “We went back to my place, the four of us, and we were doing some coke there.”
“After a comedy show, honestly, occasionally, that’s kind of a normal night,” she added. “It’s not like it was a crazy night of partying.”
Quigley admitted that she “always liked to do it for fun,” but was “always a baby about it,” saying, she “just did a teeny bit of a line”, “which is why I lived.”
The comic said she went to the bathroom and when she went to leave, she couldn’t button her pants. “I was already that disoriented,” Quigley said, adding that she realized “something’s not right about this.”
“I felt nauseous. I sat down and that’s the last thing I remember,” she continued. “And I passed out in this chair … sideways and when I passed out my legs stayed in this chair [and] my head hit the floor.”
Quigley said this was around 6 o’clock in the morning … and she didn’t wake up until late that night. “It was dark and it was like 11 at night or something,” she shared.
“I was just so confused,” she continued. “I couldn’t feel my legs, but I thought [everyone else was] asleep. I went to stand and that’s when I really realized.”
She added, “And I started to get scared, and I started to say ‘Hey Rico, Rico,’ I just thought he fell asleep, he even still had the guitar — he was holding a guitar in his hands. It never crossed my mind he was dead because he didn’t look dead.”
Quigley said she “couldn’t see Fu and Natalie” at the time because of her positioning. And didn’t realize Colangeli was dead.
“I called my uncle, I still thought Rico was okay until I threw a shoe at the door next to him and he didn’t wake up,” she said. “I started to panic and then two minutes later my uncle walked in and immediately he walked over and he touched him and he was cold and he called 911.”
“The rest was, I mean, see this is the part that’s hard to talk about for me,” she added. “It was horrific.”
Although she survived, Quigley was hospitalized for serious injuries. “I had total kidney failure [and] three ruptured discs in my back,” she said, adding that “they’re not very nice to you in the hospital when they think you’re a junkie.”
Reflecting on the tragedy, Quigley said, “I felt guilty like I didn’t do more, but then I know I couldn’t. I’ve just been having a hard time with not feeling like I have to defend myself.”
When asked what she ultimately “learned” from the tragic accident, she shared, “Just everything I thought mattered doesn’t.”
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