04. Balloons in Heaven

A supplementary conversation to Fentanyl: The Counterfeit Killer with four families who have been affected by the synthetic opioid.

"Why" is a common question among the parents and family members of people lost to America's illicit drug de jour, the powerful opioid fentanyl. Answers are hard to come by. Harder still is figuring out what to do about it. Carrie Walker is one of those parents but she has decided on a path forward. Her eldest son, Alexander Cullers, died of an opiate overdose in 2014 at the age of 18. He'd taken some prescription oxycodone from his girlfriend's grandmother's medicine cabinet. Losing a son would devastate any mother. But then in April 2019 Walker's other son, Andrew Cullers - by then 18 himself - died of an overdose too. In his case, fentanyl, counterfeit oxycodone.

It was Feb. 19, 2020. Katie Coughenour walked into a restroom a few steps down the hall from the front door of Aspire Behavioral Health, her counseling program, and locked the door. She did not walk out. How does an 18-year-old get her hands on counterfeit oxycodone - fentanyl pills? In Katie's case, with that handy little ubiquitous device most of us carry around like extra appendages - the cell phone.

In March of last year Dan Harte lost his 28-year-old son Dylan. Dan found Dylan unresponsive in his room and called 911. It was too late. Nine months later, in December, four days after Christmas, incredibly, Harte lost his other son, 23-year-old Camren. He found him unresponsive in his room and called 911. It was too late. Two sons, same year, same drug. With one new fentanyl overdose death every three days last year in Kern County, maybe the odds of it taking two brothers weren’t as astronomical as it might have seemed.

There’s a deadly drug on the streets of Bakersfield right now in amazing abundance. It’s fentanyl, a synthetic opioid that serves as a powerful painkiller useful in cases like advanced-stage cancer. But it has now been appropriated for the illegal drug trade. Fentanyl is what killed 33-year-old Brooke Torres of Bakersfield, whose counterfeit Xanax, purchased off the street, contained a fatal dose of the synthetic opioid. Her mother Becky Torres now looks for ways to honor her daughter. First, by encouraging the state medical board to scrutinize doctors who prescribe recklessly. Second, by organizing a support organization for parents like herself who’ve lost children to drug overdoses.

Tyler Cabral must have felt invincible. At times he seemed invincible to everyone else too. That’s the awful irony of his story - he shrugged off danger practically every day of his life but couldn’t overcome the shackles of a little pill. Fentanyl did to Tyler Cabral what speed and gravity couldn’t - it killed him.