‘I was afraid he’d yell at me for going in his room. What I heard was him dying.’

Eden Neville was only 12 that night — the night her brother took the pill he thought was Oxycodone.

Her room was right next to his. She got up in the wee hours to use the bathroom and heard strange sounds coming from behind his door. “I wanted to go check on him to see if he was all right,” the Aliso Viejo teen says in a devastating new short film.

But she didn’t. “I was afraid he’d yell at me for going in his room,” she says. “What I heard was him dying.”

Her brother, Alexander Neville, was 14 when he died of fentanyl poisoning on June 23, 2020, after taking a pill he bought on SnapChat to ease his anxiety. Since then, mom Amy Neville has thrown herself into doing everything she can to make sure others don’t make the same fatal mistake. Her efforts have ranged from making films to organizing protests to making school presentations around the country.

“It is really hard,” Neville said of the work. “But it’s harder to not do it. A little bit of information that night would have made all the difference.”

The latest short film to sound the heartbreaking alarm — from the Alexander Neville Foundation, the O’Connell Family Foundation and filmmakers Dominic Tierno and Christine Wood — is “Come Back Home,” which will have a private screening Jan. 4 in San Juan Capistrano and stream online starting Jan. 5. There will be an online panel discussion with the brothers and sisters of those lost on Jan. 8, focusing on the lasting impact these tragic deaths leave on the often-younger siblings. Links to the film and Q&A will be at the foundation website, https://anfhelp.org/.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control projects that there will have been some 112,000 deaths from drug overdoses in 2023, overwhelmingly due to fentanyl. California’s death toll is expected to be about 13,000, a 7.7% jump over the year before.

The half-hour film underscores how this tragedy strikes everywhere. Sharing their experiences on screen are Caden Norring of Minnesota, Daniel Romero of Colorado, Yareni and Destiny Pelayo of Orange County, Ayida Sanborn of Southern California and North Carolina, Michael Gray and Denzel “Terrez” Williams of Maryland, and Jaylyse Gilliam of Michigan and Oklahoma.

Loss

Ayida Sanborn’s brother, Kinhthi, had always been the gregarious, people person; the beloved funny guy. So the isolation of the pandemic hit him hard. “This indescribable feeling. This chaos within me,” he wrote on social media. “…this whole covid thing just meeesssed up my sleep scej…. Anyways this was super hard to say I’m glad y’all r so understanding.”

He sought to take the edge off, his sister said. He found someone selling “Xanax” on SnapChat. He died on May 12, 2020, in Torrance. He was 19.

“When my mom told me the news, everything else didn’t matter,” Ayida Sanborn said.

Michael Gray was in college in Virginia when he got the call that his sister had overdosed in Maryland. He jumped in the car and raced to  see her — but she died before could made it. “My desire was to just hold her hand,” he said, tears glistening on his cheek. “I learned how to live life, be a good person, do good things, from her.”

Caden Norring’s brother, Devin, had been on a health kick, hitting the gym and pestering his parents to drink less Mountain Dew. But he also was suffering from migraines and had a couple of bum teeth, and had appointments set up to deal with all that — until the pandemic hit and the world came to a halt. Devin sought out something to ease the pain, and turned to SnapChat to connect with a friend who lived a couple of blocks away. Devin died on April 4, 2020, age 19.

The family still sees that “friend” around town, and knowing he gets to walk free is hard for them to deal with.

Mission

The foundation’s previous film, “Dead on Arrival,” is a gut-wrenching, 20-minute documentary/public safety announcement that they hope every parent will watch — with their children.

Like “Come Back Home,” it’s a visceral scream meant to deliver the warning that no street drug should be considered safe. It features gut-wrenching interviews with surviving parents remembering the people their children were, the details of last conversations, how they found their children unresponsive, or dead, on their floors or beds.

The kids weren’t hardcore drug addicts. They had just started experimenting, or were just recreational users. Fentanyl didn’t care.

The film is available online but Alexander’s mom, Amy Neville, speaks and shows it in person everywhere she can. She’ll do the same with “Come Back Home.” There are some openings in her calendar, but she has events scheduled all the way through September.

Neville and the filmmakers started working on “Come Back Home” last summer. They assembled families from all over the country in Los Angeles, rented a house so the youngsters could get to know each other and feel comfortable “before doing the really hard thing we were going to do,” she said.

It was hard — but it was soothing as well.  There was a therapist on hand to deal with any major meltdowns that needed professional attention (there were none). There was camaraderie. There was ice cream.

“There’s something about being with people who know,” Neville said. “It’s where you feel the most normal. Those questions – those dreaded questions — you don’t have to deal with them.”

Lawsuit

Neville is also a lead plaintiff in a lawsuit filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court against Snap and SnapChat, where parents say so many of those who died arranged their drug buys.

“Despite Snap promoting and portraying Snapchat as a ‘goofy’ app for kids to use to send each other silly pictures, its known common use is as an ‘open-air drug market,’ ” the complaint says. “Snap and Snapchat’s role in illicit drug sales to teens was the foreseeable result of the designs, structures, and policies Snap chose to implement to increase its revenues. …

“Snapchat originated with its founders’ desire to create an application that would automatically erase evidence of illicit conduct — such as organizing events for underage drinking, sex, and illicit drug use. It was foreseeable — if not intended — that with its many data deletion features and functions, Snapchat would become a haven for drug trafficking.”

Snap has denied the allegations in the lawsuit. In an emailed statement, Snap said this:

“It is devastating that the national fentanyl epidemic has taken the lives of so many people and we have great empathy for families who have suffered unimaginable losses. At Snap, we are working hard to stop dealers from abusing our platform. We use cutting-edge technology to help us proactively find and remove drug content and accounts. We block search results for a wide range of drug-related terms, redirecting Snapchatters to resources from experts about the dangers of fentanyl. Working with parent groups and safety experts, we created Family Center to allow parents more visibility into how their teens are using Snapchat. We continually expand our support for law enforcement investigations helping them bring dealers to justice, and we work closely with experts to share patterns of dealers’ activities across tech platforms to more quickly identify and stop illegal behavior.”

Hearings on the suit are slated for Jan. 24.

The world has changed, the youngsters in “Come Back Home” want everyone to understand. Once, kids could experiment with drugs and live to tell about it. Now, they can’t.

“There is no experimental phase anymore,” Eden Neville says in the film. “You can die from the first ever time you try something. Alex only experimented for a week before he passed away, and there are people who passed in even less time.”

Sometimes, in the quiet hours, Eden Neville still hears the sound of brother Alex’s labored breathing behind his door. “What if I went in his room and found him?” she wonders. “It’s possible we could have gotten him help….”

That is a pain that will never go away.

Source: Orange County Register