Carrollton’s mother mourns the loss of a 14-year-old boy due to fentanyl poisoning

CARROLTON, TX (CBSDFW.COM) Lilia Astudillo lifts a stack of her son’s neatly folded clothes to her nose, inhaling the scent that still lingers on them.

“They smell like him,” she says.

She now keeps the clothes 14-year-old José Alberto Pérez wore the day before his death, next to a photo of him running into his mother’s arms after a game in a football uniform.

“He was my son. It was not an animal that died,” she said, sobbing.

José, known to the family as “Beto”, one of at least nine Carrollton-Farmers Branch students poisoned with fentanyl tablets. Three of those who overdosed have died.

Astudillo describes his son as a kind, loving child who loved to make people laugh.

However, when school resumed after the winter break, she noticed that his behavior suddenly changed.

One day he left school and disappeared for a week. Returning home, he called the police and begged the authorities to put him in jail.

“I went to school. I asked for help many times,” said Astudillo.

His mother says the police never responded when she reported her son missing. She said she approached administrators at Long High School asking for help in getting her son committed, unable to control him, worried that he would leave again, and suspected that he might start using drugs.

One night, according to her, he began to behave rudely and aggressively towards her. It was so out of character that she tried to take him to the hospital, but he refused. She said that he managed to calm down and go to bed.

When she went to wake him up 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 den.

Federal court records allege that they distributed fentanyl-poisoned pills that overdosed CFBISD students.

The county says it delivered presentations to parents about the dangers of fentanyl in November, stocked its campuses with narcan in October, and scheduled a fentanyl awareness meeting for families this Friday before news of the recent arrests.

“Our hearts are very heavy at the loss of young lives,” he said in a letter to his parents.

The district says its counselors have developed drug education classes that are now being taught to high school students. Random dog searches also began on campus, he said.

Astudillo hopes her son’s death will cause people to take notice and take action.

She says every morning that she still wakes up and goes to his room to wake him up for school, not wanting to accept that he’s gone.

“I don’t know how to live without him,” she said.