California mom who lost son to fentanyl overdose raising awareness on opioid crisis
Laura Didier, who lost her son Zach to a fentanyl overdose, joined 'America's Newsroom' to discuss how she has volunteered her time to raise awareness as she fights for justice.
A California man was sentenced Thursday to 17 years in prison in the December 2020 fentanyl death of a teen to whom he sold the deadly drug through Snapchat.
Virgil Xavier Bordner, 22, had pleaded guilty in July to all charges relating to the death of Zachary Didier, a teen from Rocklin, including involuntary manslaughter and two counts of selling a controlled substance to a minor and admitted to the special allegation of inflicting great bodily injury.
Bordner was handed the sentence, with credit to timed served, at the Placer County Superior Court.
"My children are my world, and my world was shattered on December 27, 2020," Laura Didier, Zachary’s mom, said at a news conference after the sentencing.
Laura Didier and her husband Chris found their son slumped over his desk at their home near Sacramento on Dec. 27, 2020.
Zach Didier was found slumped over his desk by his father after he had taken a counterfeit Percocet he purchased through Snapchat. The pill turned out to be a lethal dose of Fentanyl. (Courtesy of Laura and Zach Didier)
They later learned that their son had purchased what he thought was a Percocet pill from someone on Snapchat. Instead, he ended up with a counterfeit pill made up of fentanyl.
Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid that "is approximately 100 times more potent than morphine and 50 times more potent than heroin as an analgesic," according to the Department of Justice’s Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) National Center for Health Statistics estimates that there were 107,622 drug overdose deaths in 2021, with 71,238 of those deaths related to synthetic opioids such as fentanyl.
Laura Didier remembered Zachary as "incredible" and, along with his sibling Sam, "the best son."
"You knew what a giant heart he had," she said. "And how he always wanted to make the world a better place. He truly did that in his short 17 years."
CALIFORNIA'S DRUG CARTEL CRISIS FUELING NATIONAL FENTANYL EPIDEMIC
Placer County District Attorney Morgan Gire said that while the court case has ended, it merely marks the beginning of her office's advocacy efforts to "attack this fentanyl crisis from every angle."
Rainbow fentanyl (DEA)
"We will shout this message in education and awareness forms to our schools, on our billboards, on our city buses, to our parents, to our teachers, to everyone who will listen, we will shout the message loudly about the dangers of fentanyl and the effect it is having on our community," Gire said.
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Since Zachary’s death, his parents have spoken out to help inform other parents of the dangers of the counterfeit pills and the open drug markets on social media.
"If we had known about this problem — if we had seen a news report about this or seen a program in our school about this … we could have had this specific conversation," Laura Didier told Fox News in June.
Fox News’ Angela Bertorelli contributed to this report.
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