Carrollton mother grieves loss of 14-year-old to fentanyl poisoning
CARROLLTON, Texas (CBSDFW.COM) – Lilia Astudillo holds a stack of her son's neatly folded clothes to her nose, inhaling the scent still lingering on them.
"They smell like him," she says.
She now keeps the outfit 14-year-old Jose Alberto Perez wore the day before he died next to a picture of him in his football uniform running into his mother's arms after a game.
"He was my son. It wasn't an animal that died," she said sobbing.
Jose, known to his family as "Beto," is one of at least nine Carrollton-Farmers Branch students poisoned by pills laced with fentanyl. Three of those who overdosed died.
Astudillo describes her son as kind, loving child who loved making people laugh.
When school resumed after the winter break, though, she noticed his behavior suddenly change.
He walked out of school one day and disappeared for a week. When he returned home, he called police and begged offices to lock him in jail.
"I went to the school. I asked for help many times," said Astudillo.
His mother says police never followed up when she reported her son missing. She said she turned to administrators at Long Middle School asking for help getting her son committed, unable to control him, worried he'd leave again, and suspected he might have started using drugs.
One night, she says he started acting rude and aggressive toward her. It was so out of character she tried taking him to the hospital, but he refused. She said he managed to calm down and go to bed.
When she went to wake him the next morning, he was dead.
Carrollton police working with the US Drug Enforcement Administration arrested two suspects last Friday accused of running a drug house.
Federal court records allege they distributed the pills poisoned with fentanyl that caused CFBISD students to overdose.
The district says it held presentations for parents on the danger of fentanyl in November, stocked its campuses with Narcan in October, and scheduled a meeting for families this Friday on fentayl awareness before news of the recent arrests.
"Our hearts are very heavy at the loss of young lives," reads part of its statement to parents.
The district says its counselors have developed student drug awareness lessons now being shared with high schoolers. Random canine searches, it says, have also begun on campus.
Astudillo hopes her son's death forces people to take notice and take action.
Every morning, she says she still wakes up and goes his room to wake him up for school, unwilling to accept he's gone.
"I don't know how to live without him," she said.
