WHEELING, W.Va. (WTRF) Marla Ayres lost her 27-year-old daughter to fentanyl poisoning when she thought she was taking prescription anxiety medication.
Now Ayres has two messages: that fentanyl is everywhere, and that its victims aren’t junkies.
Angela Clemons was living in Fostoria, Ohio.
Her mom and grandmother were visiting.
They went out to dinner and made plans for the next day.
“When I dropped her off, we said the normal ‘I love yous’ and she said ‘Mom, meet me for breakfast in the morning.’ “
The next morning, Marla got the worst news of her life.
“It was a Facebook message from her roommate, saying Angie died,” recalled Marla.
Angie took Xanax for anxiety, and had run out.
Someone gave her what looked like Xanax.
“It had enough fentanyl to kill several people,” Marla noted.
Now Marla talks to seventh through 12th grade students.
She shows them two clear glass bottles, one with an eighth of an inch of white power in the bottom.
She tells them that’s how much heroin it takes to kill someone.
The other bottle appears to be empty, except for a few dots of what appears to be dust clinging to the inside. She says that’s how much fentanyl it takes to be deadly.
She says people hear ‘overdose’ and they immediately think ‘drug addict.’
“These people aren’t dying by overdose,” Ayres explained. “Overdose is when you take too much of a drug that you normally abuse. They don’t even know fentanyl is in what they’re taking. They’re actually being poisoned.”
She is learning their stories and folding them into her program, “Angies Wish.”
Including the story of a 14-year-old girl whose friend gave her something for cramps.
“When they noticed she hadn’t come back, they went to the bathroom and they found her dead in the bathroom stall,” she said.
She says the drug is disguised as legitimate medicine or even candy.
“They look like Sweet Tarts,” she said. “They look like Skittles. And the markings—one of them has a Mickey Mouse logo on it.”
She’s doing a memorial program called Forever Locked In Our Hearts.
They connect personalized padlocks to a fence and literally throw away the key, as a permanent memorial.
As for the traffickers who are pressing and distributing these drugs?
“It’s difficult because of the resources,” she said. “Prosecutors don’t have the budgets. There’s no room in the jails. However, they need to lock them up.”
Ayres is a retired firefighter and EMT.
She now devotes all her time to the program “Light Into Darkness—Fentanyl Poisoning and Overdose Awareness # Angie’s Wish.”
She says Angie’s wish is that her legacy would not be defined by how she died, but instead by how many lives were saved by her story.