Clover Carter hears her son James’ voice every morning.
It comes from a voicemail he left her last year. She saved it and set it as her alarm.
“Mother, mother, mother, answer the phone before I come over and string you up by your knees and smack you with a tuna fish,” James says.
Clover laughs when she repeats it, doing her best to adopt the same silly tone James used.
“He could make you smile,” she said.
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Amy Joffray described her daughter, Brittany Luttrell, as a “sweet, vibrant young lady with a good family.”
When Brittany was a teenager, she gave birth to a girl named Kaydence. In a photo taken in late 2019, the two stand in front of a fountain at Boonville City Lake. Kaydence is decked out in cowboy boots and an orange hair bow that matches the jack-o-lantern on her shirt.
Brittany stands behind Kaydence and smiles, her hands resting around the little girl’s heart.
Poisonings —-- 'that's what took their lives'
Brittany and James grew up in Boonville. They were friends.
Both died from fentanyl overdoses.
Brittany died on Jan. 2, 2020, at the age of 22. James, 26, followed on July 5, 2021.
They’re two tragic examples of an epidemic that’s tearing through Southwestern Indiana, Western Kentucky and the country as a whole.
In one of the deadliest years in Vanderburgh County’s history, fentanyl killed about half of the more than 90 people who died from drug overdoses in 2021, said Michael Gannon, the Drug Enforcement Agency’s special agent in charge of Central and Southern Indiana. Nationwide, the number balloons into the tens of thousands.
Warrick County, where Carter and Luttrell lived, saw 19 drug overdoses between March 2020 and March 2021, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The casualties come as fentanyl blankets the United States, coming into the country through a pipeline that starts in China and eventually ends with the low-level dealers who peddle it.
It comes in pill and powder form, but can also lurk, often unbeknownst to the user, in any illicit substance bought on the street. It shows up in everything from heroin and pills to cocaine and methamphetamine.
Two milligrams – barely enough to cover the tip of a pencil – is enough to kill someone, Gannon said. Death can come in minutes.
Dealers cut their product with fentanyl to both stretch their supply and make their goods more potent. They then pass it on to users, and many have no idea they’re about to ingest a drug that’s 50 times stronger than heroin and 100 times more powerful than morphine.
Brittany and James’ families believe that’s what happened to them. They don’t call the deaths overdoses.
They call them poisonings.
“They used, but they didn’t know it was cut with fentanyl,” Joffray said. “And that’s what officially took their lives.”
In December, federal officials in Indiana announced a drug-ring bust in which they seized enough fentanyl to kill 350,000 people. And in October, the drug horrifically burst into the public consciousness when four Evansville people were charged with murder after 3-year-old Kamari Opperman fatally overdosed from accidentally ingesting a fentanyl pill.
Drug bust:Fentanyl seized in Southern Indiana bust could kill 350,000 people, officials say
Despite all that, many are still unaware of the scope of the problem.
“I run across people all the time (who say), ‘Oh my gosh, I had no idea it was this bad.’ And I’m like, ‘How do you not know?’” Joffray said. “But if you aren’t a part of it, or haven’t been affected by it, you don’t know.
“We’ve lost a lot of lives. And no one’s really talking about it.”
The Carter and Luttrell families are trying to change that. Both put their loved ones’ causes of death prominently in their obituaries.
And James’ grandmother, Jean Carter, wants to start a nonprofit that would provide families and recovery centers with fentanyl testing strips and Narcan, a medicine that can treat opioid overdoses.
“I wanted (James) to have kids and get married,” Jean said. “But he knew the drugs just had more of a hold on him. He kept fighting it and fighting it. And I think he got hold of something that was laced.
“It wasn’t by choice. It was by accident.”
How Fentanyl gets to the Tri-State
The road fentanyl takes from production to a victim is long.
Unlike heroin, which is plant-based, fentanyl is a synthetic opioid easily made in a lab. Gannon, the DEA agent, said the precursor chemical often comes from China. From there, the drug often makes its way to Mexico, where cartels push it into the U.S.
A huge problem, Gannon said, is counterfeit pills. The cartel churns out them out in large quantities, and they often look strikingly similar to prescription opioids. Gannon said the DEA has seized pill presses from drug traffickers who “think they’re a chemist” but have no idea about the dosages they’re concocting.
That’s one of several reasons no one should ingest prescription drugs they didn’t get from a doctor or pharmacy, he said. The DEA pushes that message in community events and visits to schools, repeating the rhyming tagline that “one pill can kill.”
More in fentanyl exposures:3 other young children also exposed to fentanyl in incident that killed Evansville girl
“Too many times we’re seeing families who (say) ‘My kid was such a great kid. I never knew this was gonna be a problem. He took one pill and now he’s dead,’” Gannon said. “It breaks our heart to hear that.”
How fentanyl kills a person
Hospitals give fentanyl to cancer patients, people coming out of surgery, or someone who lands in an emergency room with a severe injury. Since it’s so powerful, they dole it out in small quantities.
That’s not the case if someone gets fentanyl from a dealer. An unregulated dose can kill someone “relatively quickly,” said Dr. Gina Huhnke, regional medical director at Deaconess Health Systems.
For protection, your body walls off your brain from some substances that enter your bloodstream. Fentanyl, though, is able to cross what’s known as the blood-brain barrier. That’s why it gets users high.
Once it’s in there in any sizable quantity, it can be disastrous.
“It has a central respiratory depressant effect,” Huhnke said. “It tells the brain you don’t need to breathe anymore.”
She encouraged anyone who has a loved one addicted to drugs to keep Narcan on hand and learn how to administer it. That’s possible in Indiana, which is one of several states where you can get it at a pharmacy without a prescription.
“Every second counts if you find a loved one who’s not breathing,” she said.
Brittany Luttrell's story
Brittany Luttrell used for about three years before she used the fentanyl-laced heroin that killed her. She was a “good girl” for most of her life, Joffray said. And when Kaydence arrived, she was a good mom, too.
Her addiction upended things. There were minor arrests and increasingly frayed relationships with family.
“It destroyed her,” Joffray said. “And it destroyed our family for quite a while.”
When Brittany died, Amy was in a position countless parents who lose children to addiction aren’t. So many families dump their life savings into rehab and other drug treatments, and then don’t have money left to pay for a funeral if their loved ones die. They’re forced to turn to GoFundMes or social media fundraisers.
But Joffray had life insurance on her daughter. It “took away the pain of not being able to give her a proper burial or service,” she said.
Joffray believes Brittany used drugs to fill a void – one that may have been left after her grandmother died. And now Luttrell’s death has left a void of its own.
The one who hurts the most is Kaydence. She was only 4 when her mom died, and she struggles sometimes to get through a school day. She’s sad. Her teachers can see it. Grief, Joffray said, “trickles down.”
“Everyday we miss her,” she said of Brittany.
Amy has been open about the cause of her daughter’s death. She thinks people should know what happened so they can use that knowledge to protect loved ones of their own.
One person she talked to a lot in the aftermath was James Carter. She implored him to stop using. It was dangerous, she said, and he could never be sure what was waiting inside the drugs he took.
“A year later,” she said, “we lost him.”
The story of 'J'
James was always big-hearted. As a kid, he’d want to bring home stray animals or help every homeless person he saw.
His papaw is named James, too, so the family called him “J.” He spent a lot of time with his grandparents, enough that Jean thought of him as both a grandson and a son.
“He was quite the smooth talker. He was charismatic and cute and likeable,” Jean said. “Everybody liked the sober J. Not so many people liked the high one.”
When J was in eighth grade, Clover got a call from the school. Someone had been passing out pills and J was caught with one. As he got into high school, he turned into a pot smoker and “occasional pill popper,” Jean said.
About six years ago, J turned to heroin.
“He was a follower, not a leader,” Jean said. “He would do what anybody else was doing to be cool.”
J tried to quit. He went to multiple recovery centers. Jean and James helped him get an apartment close to their home in Boonville, and they spent a lot of time trying to keep him sober.
The problems persisted. In spring of 2021, medics revived him with Narcan after he overdosed in Evansville. He called Jean from the back of the ambulance and said he was headed to Deaconess Gateway. A few minutes later, he called back. The first responders said he was acting fine, so they let him go.
Then came July 2. It was the last day Jean and James saw their grandson alive.
He came over to their house for pizza, and they sent him home with an armful of leftovers and plans to drive him to the grocery store the next day. They wanted to coax him into coming to a family Fourth of July party.
They said they didn't worry at first, when he didn’t answer his phone in the following days. He was notorious for leading a night-owl life, so they figured he was either sleeping or missing calls while out with his friends.
But the worry became too much. And on July 5, Jean’s husband and son-in-law walked into J’s apartment and found him slumped in a chair.
Jean wishes she could do it all over again. But even then, she doesn’t know if the outcome would have changed.
“He had such a great outlook on life, and I always told him the world was at his feet if he could just see himself and his future through my eyes,” she said.
“There’s nothing that can bring him back. And I wouldn’t want him back with him fighting his demons.”
Surviving by helping others survive
In another picture, Kaydence stands in front of her mother’s grave. On her shirt is a purple ribbon promoting overdose awareness. “I Wear Purple For My Mommy,” it says.
“This generation of kids are losing people (in a way) we didn’t have to deal with as young kids,” Joffray said. “Losing their aunts and uncles and moms and dads and brothers and sisters.”
Jean described herself as emotionally drained. The grief made it hard to do her job at Boonville High School, where she worked as a teacher’s assistant. Around the holidays, she said she planned to take a leave of absence.
This has all affected her husband’s health, too. And she’s doing her best to help him.
“I told (J) if anything happened to him, it would kill the both of us,” she said about her and her husband. “And I think it’s getting done.”
Despite their grief, all of them, in some way, are trying to keep what happened to them from befalling others.
Clover leans on her faith and reads as much as she can about fentanyl – and the more-powerful drugs that might come next.
Joffray shares stories about her daughter on social media and highlights ways others can get help if they have a loved one struggling, too.
And Jean collects supplies for the nonprofit she wants to start. She believes every home should have Narcan. Every police officer should have Narcan. Every school should have Narcan. Because it can save someone’s life.
Those addicted to drugs, she said, are just average people.
“You have to let them know they’re loved. They’re down enough on themselves because they feel like failures,” she said. “You can’t keep a girlfriend if you’re high. If you don’t have a job. If you’re living at home or on the streets. So you’ve got to talk them up instead of talking them down. And you’ve got to talk real.
“You’ve got to love them through it. Hopefully, they’ll turn around and survive.”