The McDermott family has suffered two unimaginable losses, with two of their sons dying as a result of taking drugs laced with fentanyl.
Now, the family has gone to Washington, D.C., along with hundreds of other families who have been devastated by the lethal drug, to not only share grief but also raise awareness about the drug and call for changes to laws.
The McDermotts lost two sons to fentanyl, Max and Gannon, who died within a few months of each other due to the drug.
Their mother, Carolyn, is a school nurse, and their father, Lee, is a teacher. The couple said they did whatever they could to warn all of their children about how dangerous drugs were, especially fentanyl.
But, as Carolyn said:
“They knew better than to ever touch it. And they still did.”
Gannon got addicted to prescription pain medications first, the McDermotts said, but eventually started buying illicit street drugs, and they contained fentanyl.
Lee commented:
“Fentanyl changes the brain. Literally physically changes the brain. And it’s so addictive and so deadly that when it attaches to the brain, that’s all they think about. Gannon used to tell me, ‘I don’t want to do this, but I have to.’”
Gannon, who was 22 years old when he died in November of 2023, was a bright and ambitious person who was an apprentice plumber. Yet, all of that was undone by his addiction to drugs.
The McDermotts didn’t have to just deal with Gannon being addicted to drugs, but also their 19-year-old adopted son Max. He died due to a fentanyl overdose at the house of one of his friends, only six months after Gannon overdosed.
The parents learned that Max had died while they were taking a trip to Washington, D.C., to meet with members of Senator Jon Ossoff’s office about the fentanyl crisis.
Even though they had just learned that Max died, the McDermotts’ daughter urged her parents to still go to the meeting instead of immediately leaving and flying home.
It was even more important to attend now that the family lost two sons to fentanyl overdoses, the daughter said.
In July, Devin Wells, a career drug dealer, was sentenced to 40 years in jail for selling Gannon the deadly drugs.
As Patsy Austin-Gatson, the district attorney of Gwinnett County who oversaw the case, said:
“What this does is show our community that we are serious about stopping this as much as we possibly can, but we need the help of the entire community. We need the schools to make our children aware. We need parents to understand this is deadly and they could lose their child.”
Prosecutors in Georgia will now be able to use “Austin’s Law” at their disposal. It provides them legal tools to charge sellers and manufacturers of fentanyl with aggravated involuntary manslaughter in connection to any overdose deaths from fentanyl.
That bill was signed into law by Republican Governor Brian Kemp back in April.
