FREMONT, Mich. (WOOD) — When a Fremont family that went missing in 2022 was found safe at a Wisconsin hotel 600 miles from home, it was case closed.
Until now.
Nearly two and a half years after the Cirigliano family disappeared following a bizarre call to 911, they’re revealing what they believe caused a father’s sudden psychotic break and a family’s panicked departure.
“Please find attached documents pertaining to my mental health during the period surrounding the ‘Missing Fremont Family’ case,” wrote Tony Cirigliano in an email to NewsNation affiliate WOOD.
The husband, father and information technology specialist was determined to set the internet record straight.
“I hope these materials will contribute to the historical record of the story and help address any unresolved questions regarding my mental health,” Tony added.
Shortly after contacting WOOD, Tony and his wife, Suzette, were sitting in the living room of their Fremont home, recounting their nightmare.
“Can’t some other Anthony Cirigliano do something?” he chuckled, referring to the online archive memorializing his misadventure. “It gets discouraging.”
In sharing their story, Tony and Suzette hope to shine a light on mental health and the risk of poisoning by a confection known as “mad honey.”
“A friend of mine said, ‘Suzi, people need to know about this. They really need to hear about this,’” Suzette shared. “It basically nearly destroyed our lives.”
Attached to Tony’s initial email to WOOD were 83 pages documenting the treatment he ultimately received through Newaygo County Mental Health.
The records declared Tony’s diagnosis as “substance-induced psychosis.”
“(Tony) had what appeared to be a psychotic break, in which his behaviors caught the attention of national media,” wrote a licensed master social worker with NCMH in Tony’s discharge summary. “It appears that his psychosis was triggered by the over-consumption of ‘mad honey,’ which contained brain-altering neurotoxins.”
Mad honey poisoning: What is it?
Mad honey is produced when bees collect nectar from rhododendrons that contain poisonous compounds called grayanotoxins, according to the Food and Drug Administration.
It’s also known as bitter honey or deli bal, and it’s harvested predominantly in Turkey and Nepal and sold at a premium for its intoxicating effect.
It’s also used as a sexual stimulant and an antidote for gastrointestinal disorders and hypertension.
But if users ingest too much, they can suffer mad honey poisoning with symptoms ranging from slow heart rate and low blood pressure to vomiting, dizziness and, in high doses, hallucinations.
“This is the infamous jar,” Tony said, after retrieving from his pantry a plastic bag containing an empty honey jar. “When I ordered it off my mobile phone, I couldn’t really read the letters. It looked like something I had purchased before.”
It wasn’t.
But Tony said he didn’t notice his mistake right away and began adding the honey — a teaspoon or two at a time — into the yogurt he ate once or twice a day.
“That’s when the problems began,” Tony told WOOD. “I started having a lot of unusual thoughts. Vivid dreams. Strange behaviors.”
The report from Newaygo County Mental Health noted that Tony had ingested the “mad honey” by mistake and, since throwing it away, had not had any additional episodes of psychosis.
“He was able to be safely tapered off of antipsychotic medication with (sic) psychiatrist,” the social worker continued. “He is no longer meeting criteria for a severe, persistent mental illness. He is stable and … is not in need of further psychiatric services at this time.”
The honey Tony purchased online was sold and labeled as regular raw honey, but Tony believes it was contaminated with mad honey.
The New Jersey distributor of the honey Tony bought told WOOD there’s no way the Russian-imported honey contained substantial concentrations of grayanotoxins.
An FDA spokesperson told WOOD it would “not speculate on whether the product may have caused the health outcomes claimed.”
“As we shared previously, the agency does not have information that there have been any recalls or consumer complaints to the FDA about (the brand the consumer purchased),” wrote the spokesperson in an email to WOOD.
But the Ciriglianos are convinced it was mad honey that caused Tony’s psychosis.
The potentially toxic honey has a slightly bitter taste and can cause a burning sensation in the throat.
Suzette said she experienced both when she tasted the honey.
Tony did not, but he believes his yogurt likely masked any bitterness or burning.
They tried to find a lab to test the product but were told it would cost thousands of dollars and might not detect a contaminant even if one were present. Ultimately, Tony and Suzette kept the jar but dumped the honey.
But the trauma the family suffered is not so easily shed.
Tony’s torment was documented in his call to Newaygo County 911 in the early morning hours of Oct. 16, 2022.
“Yes, hello. This is Anthony John Cirigliano,” Tony announced, his tone flat but resolute. “Everyone is okay, but I need some police protection immediately.”
“Okay, for what?” replied the dispatcher.
“It is of vital national interest,” Tony continued with an almost eerie calm. “It is related to September 11th, and people want to erase me from the face of the earth. I’m not crazy. I’m a Christian. I just need some help, and then the U.S. government will take it from here. I know this sounds crazy. You don’t have instructions for this.”
Fremont police said they responded to the Cirigliano home, spent 45 minutes speaking with Tony and determined there was no imminent danger.
Man says during possible mad honey poisoning: ‘I asked God if I was the devil’
Tony thought otherwise.
“Besides people trying to kill me because I knew something about 9/11,” recalled Tony, “I thought the world was going to end very shortly by a meteor strike. That was one (of) many concerns. I can laugh about it now, but it was so crazy.”
Tony, 51 years old in 2022, was experiencing a psychotic break for the first time in his life.
“I thought maybe that somehow, I was the devil, and I asked God if I was the devil to just burn me to a crisp right now,” Tony explained. “Yelling at the sky. I just remember looking up, just yelling, ‘What do you want from me? What is it?’ It was just me crying out, literally in pain.”
Tony was diagnosed with an anxiety disorder 25 years ago, but he’s never encountered anything close to paranoid delusions.
“When your mind fails you, it’s kind of an odd thing,” Tony explained. “So, it wasn’t like I was hearing voices. It seemed like my voice that I’m used to. You know, the internal talking that you’re familiar with, but it was just saying crazy stuff.”
At the time, Tony was unemployed, having lost his job unexpectedly a couple of years earlier.
He was doing freelance coding for financial trading systems while he looked for full-time work.
“I was reading the book of Revelation, which is, you know, pretty heavy stuff,” recalled Tony, “and just misinterpreting things. … Everything seemed to have like a reason or a connection to things in the past, things in the future, things I thought were related to me and to my wife. … I’m just glad I was able to keep it together and not hurt anybody. I didn’t have any thoughts of hurting anyone.”
Suzette said she never felt threatened by Tony, knew he was not in his right mind and was trying to figure out the best way to get him help.
Sons Brandon and Noah, 19 and 15 at the time, were not frightened either.
“I knew Daddy would never hurt us,” Brandon, now 21, told WOOD.
Noah, now 17, said his dad was putting the family first when they fled north.
“He was always looking out for us the whole time,” Noah explained. “He left because at the time he thought his children and family were in life-threatening danger. It was all out of love.”
Cirigliano father before disappearance: ‘We need to leave now’
Twenty-seven hours after Tony placed that call to 911, he acted.
It was approximately 3:30 a.m. on Oct. 17, 2022, and Tony and Suzette were lying in bed, struggling to sleep.
“He turned. His eyes popped open, he looked right at me and he said, ‘We need to leave, and we need to leave now,’” recalled Suzette, who inexplicably sensed a similar dread.
“Being a Christian, you’re open to the Holy Spirit,” Suzette explained. “So, I’m thinking, ‘Are we actually in danger?’ I know (Tony) had some, you know, crazy prophecies … (but) maybe God was protecting us, and we needed to leave.”
Looking back on Suzette’s willingness to flee, Tony blames contagion in part.
“I think all my paranoia was kind of rubbing off,” he explained. “We’d been married so many years at that point, like 29. It’s going to affect you.”
The Ciriglianos said they planned to bring Suzette’s mom with them. She has dementia and lives with the family.
But when she refused to go, Tony and Suzette reasoned she’d be okay at home because Tony’s mom was scheduled to stop by in just a few hours.
“Before we left, we prayed that God sent (Tony’s mom) over sooner rather than later and that my mom would be safe and everything would be okay,” Suzette said.
But when Tony’s mom arrived, she found the doors locked.
Then, on Monday evening, neighbors spotted Suzette’s mom wandering outside. She was physically OK but disoriented.
That’s when the alarm was sounded: Tony, Suzette, Brandon and Noah were missing. The widely publicized search that followed quickly captivated armchair detectives and grabbed media attention nationwide.
“All I had in my mind was just to get away and head north,” Tony recalled of his mindset at the time.
He’d insisted the family leave cell phones behind to prevent tracking, so they had no GPS.
The first sighting of the family came at a gas station in the Upper Peninsula, 300 miles from home.
Headlines blared that surveillance video showed Brandon “secretly using” the phone at the gas station. He told WOOD he was just trying to call one of his grandmas because he missed her.
“It didn’t go through,” Brandon explained. “I didn’t know you had to press 1 before you put the phone number in.”
Seven days and 600 miles later, a hotel clerk in Stevens Point, Wisconsin, recognized the family, and responding police determined they were safe and unhurt.
Suzette and the boys were relieved.
“We needed to get home,” Suzette said. “And Tony needed help.”
A hospital stay, antipsychotic drugs
That help included a three-week hospitalization at a psychiatric facility in Kent County.
Tony was put on antipsychotic drugs and court-ordered to do six months of outpatient counseling through Newaygo County Mental Health. He did an additional six months voluntarily so he could be monitored as he tapered off antipsychotic medication.
Newaygo County Mental Health did not qualify its diagnosis of substance-induced psychosis, even writing “ruled out” next to a bipolar diagnosis provided by the psychiatric hospital where Tony spent three weeks.
“Mental health diagnoses are complex,” said Dr. Bibhas Singla, a psychiatrist at Pine Rest Christian Mental Health Services.
Singla said he knows nothing about mad honey, but paranoid delusions are a symptom of mania.
“A lot of bipolar can first present with mania, and then mania has paranoid delusions as one of the symptoms as well,” Singla said.
He noted, too, that research shows bipolar disorder most often surfaces between ages 15 to 25 or 45 to 55.
Suzette recalled that Tony did show symptoms of mania, but she believes it was connected to his honey consumption.
“I did see it, but it was after the honey,” Suzette said. “I had never seen that before. He was just getting these highs, you know, like he could do anything. He’d get real animated and talk a lot.”
But Tony is confident in NCMH’s diagnosis of substance-induced disorder.
“Forest View saw me when I was still in pretty bad shape for about three weeks,” Tony said. “Newaygo County Mental Health worked with me for the court-ordered six months and I volunteered to work with them an additional six months.”
Mad honey delusions rare but possible, doctor says
Suleyman Turedi is an emergency medicine doctor in Turkey and treats patients with mad honey poisoning.
“We have seen and managed very different patient groups,” wrote Turedi in an email exchange with WOOD. “From mild poisonings (usually presenting with complaints of dizziness, weakness and varying degrees of slow heart rate and low blood pressure) to severe poisonings (severe heart blocks, cardiac arrests, severe low blood pressure and very serious patients requiring atropine and pacemaker implantation up to coma).”
Turedi said while he sees varying levels of mental status changes, from agitation to confusion and coma, delusions are not a common symptom.
“But it is possible that mad honey can potentially cause delusions,” wrote Turedi. “But these delusions should be temporary … and should disappear after the effects of grayanotoxin have worn off.”
Sameer Shah of Best Mad Honey, a distributor based in Nepal, told WOOD that he’d never encountered delusions caused by mad honey.
“That being said,” wrote Shah, “if ingested in high doses, Grayanotoxin may cause side effects such as headache, nausea, and dizziness. We appreciate your efforts in covering this topic and raising awareness about responsible consumption.”
Shah noted, too, that he’s heard of cases where sellers tried to pass regular honey off as mad honey — but never the opposite.
“We have never come across cases where mad honey was mislabeled as regular honey, given the significant price difference,” Shah wrote.
WOOD heard the same thing from a business that sells mad honey from Turkey’s Black Sea region.
“We have never heard of such cases,” wrote Ahmet from Deli Bal Turkish Mad Honey, when asked if he knew of any consumers who thought they bought regular honey only to find out it contained “mad honey.”
“We are selling Deli Bal (for) 8 years but never heard any kind of problems from the customers,” wrote Ahmet. “Deli Bal (mad honey) was used as a folk medicine, a spoonful of it on a daily basis lowers blood pressure and is also used as a sexual stimulant. The nectar contains grayanotoxin, a naturally occurring toxin. The amount that makes it into honey depends from season to season and the flowers the bees have been feasting on. People believe ‘hallucination involved,’ but it can cause dizziness, low blood pressure, slight fever, nausea, and difficult in walking.”
Cirigliano family: ‘We’re doing good’
The Ciriglianos said they will never know for certain what caused Tony’s psychosis, but their experience has given them insight into a world they did not previously know.
“I would say the biggest thing was we have such an appreciation, a heartfelt concern, for people who have gone through (mental illness),” said Suzette. “I have the utmost respect for families that deal with this all the time.”
They hope their story will encourage others to talk openly and empathetically about mental health.
They learned something else, too: Their community cares.
“We were just so touched by so many people who were praying for us, by the outpour of people concerned about the family,” Suzette said.
The Ciriglianos are doing well now, including Suzette’s mom, and Tony is back to working full-time in IT.
“Yeah, we’re doing good,” Suzette declared with a smile.
