‘That was it’: Fresno mom loses son to fentanyl, hopes to avoid more deaths
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FRESNO, Calif. (KGPE) – Pamela Smith is the mother of 22-year-old Jackson Smith, who lost his life from an accidental fentanyl overdose.
“The doctor sat down next to me, and he said, you know, we’ve been working on him for over an hour and it’s going to get to the point that we’re breaking ribs and there’s really nothing more we can do.”
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Smith says her son loved helping others, skateboarding, his friends, and math. Described as a young man with an unforgettable laugh and so much promise for a bright future, his death proves that just one pill can really kill.
“There was this room just filled with doctors and nurses and all this life-saving equipment and Jackson was on the gurney and there was a very large male nurse straddling him, giving him chest compressions, trying to save his life and within seconds of entering that room the doctor said, time of death, 3:18 and that was it,” said Smith. “That was it.”
That was the moment Smith was forced to say goodbye to her only child, Jackson Henry Smith.
“I didn’t think this would ever affect me or my family and when it did, how could this happen? How could this happen? I did the right thing in life. I raised him right.”
Wading through tortured thoughts, Pamela went back to better times, describing her kid as a sweet and funny young man.
“Jackson he was a great kid. He was just so sweet and kind and just really funny and he had the greatest laugh. He was always so helpful!”
Smith says her favorite story about Jackson is when he and his dad were skiing, and came across an older man in Lake Tahoe, struggling with groceries on an icy street.
“Jackson just stopped and said, ‘Dad hold my skis’ and he went to that gentleman, grabbed the groceries, and carried them into this man’s house for him. That’s the kind of person he was.”
Jackson was a graduate of Central West High, who majored in Math at Fresno City College. At 21, the young man moved to Los Angeles to attend CSU Northridge— where his mom says he started to spiral.
“I found out 13 months later from a phone call from his roommates that he was doing an awful lot of drinking and doing pills and they were very worried about him. They said he’s going to die if he doesn’t stop.”
Smith says she drove to Los Angeles, packed up Jackson’s things, and brought him back home in the fall of 2015. Soon, Jackson admitted he had a problem and needed help. He checked himself into an out-treatment program at St. Agnes.
“He started looking much better, much better in April and May, and then in June he started looking bad again. And I asked him. I said, ‘Are you taking drugs again?’ And he swore to me he wasn’t.”
However, Jackson was consuming Oxycodone, which his mom says was laced with fentanyl.
“It was counterfeit; it was laced with fentanyl. Just one pill, one pill it’s all it took.”
Since then, Smith wakes up every morning with one goal— stopping another mother from suffering the loss of a child.
“A lot of kids these days are seeking out fentanyl as crazy as that sounds, but they are and 70% of the pills that are taken off the street are laced with fentanyl, okay, so it’s a very, very dangerous situation.”
Today, Smith runs a support group for other mothers and speaks all over the Central Valley and California on the deadly consequences of fentanyl.
“These dealers are not your friend. The only thing they care about is your money, okay? They know what they’re doing, they know what they’re selling, and they know what they are selling you is killing you and that is not a friend.”
To parents, Smith says their [children] business is your [parent] business, and there are signs to look out for that may signal that a child is struggling with addiction.
“Search those rooms. Search those backpacks. If they have a car, find out what’s in that car because if you start finding pieces of aluminum, spoons, needles, little baggies that are ripped open, they have a problem.”
Smith prays sharing her story saves lives. The goal is for no other parent to have to bury their child to fentanyl and wonder what would have been.
Today, Jackson would have been 30 years old.
“I think about if he was alive and 30 that he would probably be married, and I would be a grandmother, something that I will never get to experience and he would probably have a great career and he loved kids, he just loved little kids and he would probably just be a terrific dad and it makes me so sad that I’ll never experience that.”
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