Belle Chasse, Louisiana — She died on her parents’ 20th wedding anniversary, one week before she would have graduated with honors from high school.
Her father found Hailey Deickman, an 18-year-old whom her family affectionately called “Hailey Bug,” convulsing and throwing up bile and blood in her childhood bedroom.
While her classmates were receiving their diplomas, Deickman’s eyes, lungs, kidney, liver and heart were being donated to five transplant recipients all over the United States.
On May 14, 2021, Deickman bought what she thought was a street drug called “Perc30” at the apartment of a dealer. The transaction was captured on a nearby security camera. The street drug’s name comes from Percocet, a numbing pain reliever in the oxycodone family, the dosage (30 mg) and the amount it costs ($30).
The single pill she bought, however, contained no Percocet, according to a police investigator who reviewed the coroner’s report.
Deickman died of acute fentanyl toxicity.
“No parent should go through this,” said Allison Deickman, Hailey’s mother. “Sometimes, I drive past her high school and I just start crying.”
Too many parents, relatives and friends across America are living the same nightmare. A Tennessean investigation into fentanyl’s effects in the South reveals an alarming reality.
Overdose deaths have risen more than 70% during the past five years in Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Tennessee, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data analyzed by The Tennessean.
Those five states combined reported nearly 4,100 overdose deaths in 2016. By 2020 — the most recent year on record — the same states reported nearly 7,000 overdose deaths.
Fentanyl is the driving force behind the increase. While not every state tracks overdose deaths by drug, in Tennessee, the synthetic opiate went from being a cause in 1 out of 6 overdose deaths in 2015 to 4 out of 6 in 2020.
People who buy heroin, cocaine, OxyContin and even marijuana on the street are increasingly finding those drugs cut with fentanyl, which provides a more intense high and comes with a more lethal risk.
In Plaquemines Parish where Deickman died, Lt. Holly Hardin of the Criminal Investigations Bureau said she deals with accidental overdoses from fentanyl “every other day.” The parish population is about 24,000.
“They can’t trust what they’re getting,” said Jesse Deickman, Hailey’s father.
From the accounts of her family, friends and police, Hailey Deickman was not a drug addict but rather a typical teenage recreational user who dabbled in marijuana and took an occasional pill. She had accepted a full-ride scholarship to the University of New Orleans.
The last night of her life, police said, Deickman and a friend went to the apartment of Franklin Senfles, 22, who is accused of selling them the lethal pill. Senfles is currently in jail, and charged with second degree murder and attempted murder. The friend also overdosed, but recovered.
The girls returned to the Deickman house, where they crushed and snorted the pill on the kitchen counter. Shortly after they consumed the drugs, one of them (it is not known which) lost control of her bowels and defecated all over the bathroom’s toilet seat and floor. It was the defecation in the bathroom that alarmed Jesse Deickman and prompted him to check his daughter’s bedroom.
What the Deickman family didn’t know at the time was that Senfles also overdosed that same night. He was treated and released from the same hospital where Deickman died.
Hardin said Senfles told police he knew the pill he sold Deickman was fentanyl, not Perc30. Hardin said Senfles sold more fentanyl after he was released from the hospital before he was arrested.
In Tennessee, Romello Marchman’s father found him dead on the couch inside his East Nashville apartment on Memorial Day weekend 2020.
His parents had no idea what happened until months later when a toxicology report revealed his cause of death was acute fentanyl toxicity — he ingested cocaine laced with fentanyl. He was 22.
Born in Nashville, Marchman became an electrical apprentice.
Marchman’s mother, Tonja Jacobs, said she believed he used drugs to self-medicate because of stress caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and his job. She said her son thought he was getting cocaine from trusted friends.
To this day, she doesn’t know who is responsible for her son’s death.
“I’ve come to peace Imight never get justice for Romello… but I do think the person may get caught with drug dealing in the future,” said his mother, who moved to Colorado in 2016.
In January 2021, his mother filed a complaint about the Metro Nashville Police investigation with the city’s Community Oversight Board.
According to the board’s report, Jacobs asked if an officer would go through her son’s phone to find out who supplied her son drugs. The officer told Jacobs in May 2020 that “it’s not considered a murder case.”
The board determined the officer violated three department policies and recommended a three-day suspension. So far police Chief John Drake has not made a decision about whether to implement the discipline.
“Nobody is immune to it. The drug dealers and fentanyl do not discriminate,” Jacobs said. “Kids are affected everywhere, and one pill can potentially kill you.
“Kids have no problem finding drugs. They can get it on Snapchat.… They get a pill, go to their room and their parents find them dead.”
Jacobs’ comments echoed those made by some parents whose children have overdosed.
“When people hear ‘overdose’ their brains pop off,” Jacobs said. “They think drug addicts, but this affects… young people, nonaddicts who just want to get out of their stress bubble for a couple hours and think they can take a pill and feel better for a little while. But that pill could be the last thing they take because it could be poisoned. From Xanax to Adderall to OxyContin, even if you take half the pill you don’t know what part has the fentanyl in it.”
In Arkansas, one family decided to help.
Matt Adams’ family thought he had died of a heart attack on Sept. 12, 2017.
They found out later the 30-year-old from Fayetteville died of an opioid overdose. He battled a heroin addiction since he was 19, and his last relapse caught them by surprise.
“We always thought it may happen,” said Brittany Kelly, Adams’ sister. “But that call was so heart wrenching, hearing he was in ICU suffering from cardiac arrest. He was healthy. That’s when it hit me. It wasn’t a heart attack. I was completely sick. I can’t even explain it.”
Heather Starbuck, who had been Adams’ fiancee, created a nonprofit in his name: The Matt Adams Foundation for Opioid Recovery, which distributes naloxone opioid overdose reversal kits and fentanyl testing strips for drug users.
Starbuck said one antidote for opioid overdose — the injectable emergency treatment Narcan — often isn’t available in smaller cities around her state.
“In Little Rock, (Narcan is) accessible — but it’s several hours away. It should be easy and confidential. It’s not an expensive drug, and it gives them the chance to recover because they can’t recover if they overdose.”
Starbuck said she wants to share the story behind every opioid overdose statistic.
In 2018, she spent six months hiking the Appalachian Trail with Adams’ dog to raise money and awareness for the opioid crisis, with funds going toward grants for those on the road to recovery so they could attend rehab and transitional programs.
Along the 2,200 mile trek, she stopped at those types of facilities to tell his story.
“He fell through my fingers,” Starbuck said. “I didn’t understand it, but I knew Appalachia is ground zero for this epidemic. You have the perfect storm of the rise of Oxy and issue of opiates…. So you get people addicted, and pill mills are born.
“I talked to people in these towns, even to law enforcement there, to see how they were dealing with it.”
She stopped in about 10 towns in southern Appalachia including Erwin, Tenn., where she said she spoke with the police chief.
Read the full article here.