Gavyn Drago, Mattituck Junior-Senior High School student and runner, dies at 17

Gavyn Drago, a 17-year-old Mattituck High School senior who loved running, his friends and life on the North Fork, died Friday at his home in Mattituck.

He died after an epileptic seizure, said his parents, Bryan and Marissa Drago, owners of the Jamesport restaurant Main Road Biscuit Co. Gavyn was diagnosed with epilepsy when he was 6. It grew more severe as he aged, they said.

In a phone interview, they described a boy who was looking forward, with eagerness and nerves, to his senior year of high school and leaving home for college next year; who pushed his body to its limits in half-marathons and 5k runs; who grew up around restaurants and good food, learned to cook pasta carbonara in Rome but ate pizza with his friends in his backyard in an end-of-summer hang a couple weeks ago.

Gavyn Avery Drago was born June 5, 2009, in St. Vincent’s Hospital in Manhattan. He lived in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, until he was a toddler, when his family moved to the North Fork.

Gavyn was about 7, his mother said, when he began spending time in the space that would become the family’s restaurant.

"We utilized grandma and grandpa, but we didn’t have a nanny," she said. During renovations, he helped sweep; after the restaurant opened, sometimes he sat in the kitchen, drawing with markers or playing with Legos as the staff bustled around him. "Sometimes he’d come up front with me, fill the water carafes, ask people if they needed water." The grade-school restaurateur circulated among his customers and asked: "Is everything tasting good?"

Carolyn Iannone, owner of Love Lane Kitchen, in Mattituck, recalled the youngest regular she ever had: "He was 6. He had a regular spot to sit and a regular order, and he had really amazing taste. This little kid is there eating a bowl of mussels."

The kid also loved salmon, avocado, feta and olives and broccoli and peppers from Wowak Farms. As his palette matured he found escargot agreed with him, as did the lobster pasta from the Crow’s Nest in Montauk. One Christmas Eve during the pandemic when the family splurged on stone crabs sent up from Joe’s Stone Crab in Miami Beach he learned he loved those too.

Gavyn kept visiting the Kitchen, even after his parents’ restaurant opened, partly because he was good friends with the kids on the runner and busser crews there.

"They’d come to sit, and have lunch," Iannone said. "It was this group of kids, they were really tight and really funny. They took care of each other, cheered each other on, celebrated one another’s successes. They’d come after practices or before a meet." 

Became a runner

Gavyn was not a born athlete; that might be why he started running, his father said.

"He just loved that with running you could put in the work and you would see the results," Bryan Drago said.  "You go out and put a pair of shoes on, and keep running a little farther."

He did his conditioning on New Suffolk Road, his dad said: "Start at the school, go down New Suffolk, run to the second bridge. He just loved it."

Gavyn developed a taste for half-marathons and ran in New York City’s. His father recalled one of the first: "We were paranoid — he’s 14, running with all these grown-up people. We were running to try and find him."

They found him at last, dirty, tired and thrilled.

After one race, his mother recalled, "He put his arm around me. He needed me to help him walk. He was so happy, so proud of himself."

Gavyn became a bar mitzvah at North Fork Reform Synagogue. He’d studied for years with Renée Navarrete, the Hebrew teacher. He wanted to know, she said, why the Hebrew letters took the shapes they do, “‘Why do we read from right to left, why do some letters only come at the ends of words?’ Other kids would just say, ‘Ok.’ But he has a very inquisitive spirit. He wants to understand it."

Some young people’s participation in synagogue peaks when they recite their Torah portion; Gavyn came back to "help and be a part" of Hebrew School skits on holidays, and to help run the synagogue’s summer beach services. "He was helping people, not only his peers, but younger and older. That made him be a part of the community." 

Restaurant work

When Gavyn grew into a teen, he bussed tables at Main Road, rolled silverware and napkins and hauled tables outside. This summer he interned at Suffolk County Legis. Greg Doroski’s (D-Mattituck) office. "The kids are a little older than he was, typically," Doroski said. "He was the youngest intern that we’ve had."

Doroski said Gavyn had worked on a speech about the reburial at Calverton National Cemetery of Pfc. Garfield M. Langhorn, a 20-year-old from Riverhead killed in the Vietnam War. He also reviewed legal invoices in a push by Suffolk’s Democratic legislators to review spending on Republican-led lawsuits that sought to strike down a New York law moving local elections to even-numbered years. 

Gavyn, Doroski said, "was looking to get all the experience he could in this field. That’s how you learn."

Every so often, the Dragos said, they talked about moving — maybe back to Williamsburg, or out to California. Gavyn’s vote was always no.

"He was so secure here," his father said. "He loved it. He’d say, once a month, something about the sky, or how beautiful it was to go to the beach."

Gavyn loved looking at the North Fork sky, his parents said. His mother recalled coming home Sunday nights, exhausted after working at the restaurant: "Sometimes Gavyn and I would stay on the driveway a minute or two, arms crossed over each other’s necks, looking up at the sky. He’d say, ‘Mom, the sky is so beautiful here.'"

His father recalled nights on a borrowed boat on Little Peconic Bay: "The two of us would end up on the water, watching the sunset." 

A couple weeks ago, as summer closed and senior year loomed, his mother said, Gavyn’s friends, boys he’d known since grade school, gathered in the Dragos’ backyard.

"He loved his backyard," she said. "It was his favorite place in the world: he had so many birthday parties, so many moments with friends."

The boys swam, played basketball and spikeball, then ate pizza.

"It’s peaceful," she said. "There’s a garden and from the pool you can see the garden, the weeping cherry. You sit out by the pool and there’s wide-open sky." 

Gavyn is survived by grandparents James and Jaqueline Drago, of Ridge; aunts and uncles Rebecca and Evan Epstein, of New York City; David Goldberg, of Long Beach; James and Bonny Drago, of Thousand Oaks, California; Jessica Drago Romanelli and Paul Romanelli, of Melville; and Karen and Jay Quartararo, of Cutchogue. He was predeceased by great-grandparents Jean and Jack Quartararo, of Ridge; and grandparents Arthur and Michele Goldberg, of Huntington.

A service was held on Monday at North Fork Reform Synagogue in Cutchogue, followed by burial at Cutchogue Cemetery.

By Nicholas Spangler

nicholas.spangler@newsday.comspanglernewsday

Nicholas Spangler is a general assignment reporter and has worked at Newsday since 2010.