My son was given pure fentanyl by his dealer’s girlfriend and told it was heroin on Halloween night in 2021.  He ingested it around 1am on November 1st after getting home from a Halloween party and died instantly.  I found him in his apartment 17 hours later.  The coroner didn’t come to the scene or care how my son died.  She’d been told it was “a possible drug overdose” and dispatched her deputy coroner who she knew was not certified to draw blood.  My son’s body was not examined in any way.  He was not touched until the funeral home arrived to pick him up.  The local police had no interest in investigating his death and weren’t even going to write a police report until a week later when I asked for a copy of it and then they wrote one.  A corporal in the town where the dealer lives wanted to see Jimmy’s phone but only to get information.  He told me he had more than enough probable cause to kick the dealer’s door in and charge him with distribution but a year later the dealer hadn’t even been charged with possession and now he has died also.

Even if the police in my town were capable of seeing my son’s death as a crime and not a self-induced mishap, the county coroner failed to collect the evidence needed to secure a conviction.  Cedar County Missouri has a “We don’t do autopsies unless the family pays for it” policy and that apparently goes for toxicology also.  So you have to be wealthy to get the evidence collected that is necessary for a victim to get justice.  The stigma in my rural community is horrible.  They have an attitude of victim-blaming and think the victim got what he deserved for doing something he shouldn’t have been doing.  They just let the dealers continue because they’re only killing “druggies” anyway and they don’t consider those human lives a loss or deserving of justice.

I’d tried to speak with the Chief of Police but he made excuses to avoid talking to me.  Now the brother of the woman who gave my son pure fentanyl is a city councilman and since the city council is over the police, I’m sure he will do whatever it takes to protect his sister and keep her from being held accountable for causing my son’s death.  That’s the way the law is or is not enforced in a “Good Ol’ Boys” town.