My son, 19, went to bed after holiday & never woke up – painkiller for headache was fentanyl… my warning to parents

SANDRA can still remember what she said to her son Ryan on the last night of his life.

He had just come home from a trip to Mexico – bubbling with energy and carrying his favourite snack, fried chicken wings.

“He was so happy”, Sandra recalled. “He had just started working with his dad… he was doing so well.”

She watched Ryan, 19, climb the stairs to bed in their Texas home as he told her he had a headache and needed an early night. “Kay, love ya!” she called after him.

That night, Ryan took what he believed to be a painkiller called Percocet, purchased from a pharmacy in Mexico.

The next morning, Sandra discovered his body.

DRUG LORD

Crazy life of Chinese ‘King of Fentanyl’ who sparked manhunt after escaping jail

‘THIS IS OUR PANDEMIC’

Killer drug fentanyl now found in EYE DROPS after overdose deaths

“There was no Percocet, no pain medication”, she told The Sun. “It was all just complete fentanyl.”

Two years earlier, and hundreds of miles apart, another mum, Niki Beddoe, had made the same horrifying discovery.

Her son Jake, 25, had just moved back home to Connecticut during the Covid pandemic and had been working from home as a travel consultant.

“It was actually the best of times”, Niki told The Sun. “We were having family dinners, and watching movies, cocktails, just having a lot of fun all six of us together under one roof and then tragedy struck.”

Most read in The Sun

GUNSHOT DEATH

Tributes to ‘lovable character’ shot dead as man & woman bailed over ‘murder’

MID-AIR CRASH

Air force jet crashes during air show in Greece in front of stunned crowd

AIRPORT FIRE

Fire shuts down runway at Heathrow Airport as ‘tinderbox’ grass ignites

She said Jake, the resident “jokester” and “life of the family”, had been anxious over his job and struggling to fall asleep – and so took a sleeping pill to help him drift off.

What Jake didn’t know was that his anti-anxiety Xanax medication – bought off someone local he’d known for years – had been laced with a fatal dose of fentanyl.

Niki knew her son had bought Xanax – but she never made the connection to his death in the early hours of May 27, 2020 until nearly two months later, when the toxicology report came back.

She told The Sun: “We were completely shocked. When the toxicology report came back and it said fentanyl, I was like ‘what!?’”.

Back in his hometown of Turnbull, Connecticut Jake had got back in touch with a man who would go on to sell him the fake medication.

“It’s somebody that Jake definitely trusted, he’d known him for seven years”, Niki explained.

The revelation that Jake had died from counterfeit medication plunged the family into turmoil.

Niki had initially believed it may have been a freak heart attack because Jake had had a leaky valve in his heart as a child.

In a heartbreaking confession, she said: “Honestly I wish that that’s what it was, that it was nature that just took him.”

Sandra, the mum of 19-year-old Jake, immediately knew that her son had purchased something in Mexico that killed him.

The former teacher and their family lived in Mission, Texas – right on the border with the narco-nation.

She said: “He and his friend walked right over the border and purchased what he thought were Percocet pills at a pharmacy in Mexico. It was a bottle of ten.”

Buying medication in Mexico is a lot cheaper than in the US, Sandra explained.

“I guess he trusted the pharmacy. He didn’t know that these pills were completely,” she added.

On Monday morning, April 4 2022, Ryan didn’t show up to his dad’s business, where he worked as a salesman for manufactured homes.

Sandra said: “His dad called me, asking ‘have you heard from Ryan? He hasn’t showed up to work’ and I was teaching at the time and just at that moment I had this horrible feeling.

“I asked if I could leave work to check on him. And so I drove home and I just knew something was wrong.

“I ran upstairs to his room, and he didn’t open the door. So I just opened it myself, it wasn’t locked,and then I found him laying in his bed.

“And I’m like: ‘Ryan, wake up’. And then as I got closer I knew he was gone. He was just laying on his side, peacefully, like he had just gone to sleep.

“And I don’t know how I ended up calling 911, but I did, and after that it’s just a blur. I do remember calling my husband at the time and telling him ‘Ryan’s gone’ and he’s like ‘where did he go?’ And I was like ‘he’s gone, he’s gone’.

“That memory will forever be ingrained in my brain.”

When the toxicology results came back a month later, they showed that Ryan had 11mgs of fentanyl in his bloodstream.

“Two milligrams is lethal”, Sandra said. “He didn’t stand a chance”.

US Drug Enforcement agency DEA estimates that fentanyl is around 50 times more potent than heroin. Just two to three milligrams can kill an adult man.

Since March 2021, police in Texas have seized 793 million lethal doses of fentanyl across the state. That is enough fentanyl to kill every man, woman and child in the US, Mexico and Canada.

It is the deadliest drug the US has ever seen – and is now the leading killer of Americans ages 18 to 49, according to the Texas Department of Health.

Fentanyl has been cut into street drugs like weed and cocaine, but increasingly cartels are smuggling the deadly poison into painkillers, antibiotics, ADHD pills and erectile dysfunction medications.

Sandra said she had even heard of cases of fentanyl being smuggled over the border in chilli peppers and heads of lettuce.

The mum warned: “They’ll put it in anything just to get it across. For them, it’s all just about money.

“It doesn’t matter if they kill someone if they get someone addicted, that’s the goal. So they can purchase more and more. It’s a win-win for them.”

Mum Niki had never heard of opioids being pressed into medications and sleeping pills – the type of drugs that circulate through college campuses.

The day she found out that her son Jake had died from a counterfeit Xanax, her family took to Facebook to spread the word.

She said: “We definitely had a mission to spread awareness to save other families from going through this.

“Pills are being sold on college campuses and I think that’s where Jake picked up that idea.”

Niki said her travel consultant son was also an artist and illustrator, adding: “He had a double major in philosophy and studio art. He was a talent and a bright light.

“As a kid growing up he loved to read books. He wasn’t much of an athlete, he just preferred to read and to play games with friends.”

Wiping away her tears, she said: “It never gets easy. But we’ve learned to live with it. And we’ve learned that along with pain there can be joy. One day at a time.”

When Ryan died of fentanyl poisoning, Sandra sank into a nightmare realm all summer, each day blending into the next, while her husband at the time pushed his grief aside and threw himself into work.

But it was Ryan’s sister that Sandra most feared for. Sandra added: “She had just started medical school and it totally devastated her. She couldn’t focus. She couldn’t take on any tasks.”

Both mother and daughter are coping better now, with Sandra saying “not that we’re healed by any means, but we’re better”.

“Ryan wouldn’t want us to be grieving and not living our lives – that’s not who he was. He was so full of life.”

She told The Sun that Ryan had been the jokester and the comedian of the family – although he also had a sensitive side.

He also loved the outdoors and his passion was fishing – he would bring home whatever he caught.

“Gosh I miss that” recalled Sandra, adding: “he would bring home whatever he caught and he’d try different recipes.” Grilled red fish was Sandra’s favourite – something Ryan cooked often.

Now, Sandra says she and her family are trying to do the living for him, “keeping his memory alive, hopefully saving lives.”

Sandra is now board director for Texas Against Fentanyl where she speaks in schools about the dangers of fentanyl and helps organise events for grieving parents.

From speaking to fellow heartbroken mums, Sandra says she “always tries to look at the positive.”

“For example, my son, I had him for 19 years. There are some families that lose them when they are babies,” she said.

Drug dealers target youngsters over apps like Snapchat – social media platforms predominantly used by kids – to peddle illicit pills. Children as young as 13 have been killed by pills pressed with the deadly poison.

Sandra said: “I would want parents to speak to their children, even if they think ‘oh, they’re not going to listen’. They’re listening when you tell them a story like Ryan’s, or so many others.

“Talk to your kids and make them aware that fentanyl is being put in various drugs now, street drugs, everything imaginable, even in vapes.

“Also, I would have them purchase Narcan. It’s a naloxone that reverses the effects of a poisoning. I always carry my naloxone with me. You never know where you’re at, you could save a life.”

Niki’s plea to parents echoes that of Sandra’s – to have that conversation with your kids.

She said: “We live in Trunbull, a small town… we’re your typical suburban family, very loving, very close, happy, joking around all the time. Jake was the big jokester.