A Memphis, Tennessee, woman is now raising five of her grandchildren after losing her two daughters to fentanyl just months apart.
“I’m about all they’ve got, except for their uncles,” the grieving mother, Brenda Diggs, told WREG of her grandkids. “I just don’t know. It’s mind-boggling.”
Her eldest daughter, 42-year-old Kenia Everette Wooten, was trying to turn her life around when she became addicted to drugs.
According to Diggs, Kenia “lost her self-esteem” after becoming a mom at just 15.
“And I guess she thought building her self-esteem and having sex with guys would make her feel better about herself. She just spiraled and it just was bad,” the mom recounted.
Even with the hardships of becoming a teen mother, Diggs said Kenia had begun to get her life together when she was injured at work.
“She hurt her ankle, real bad. In fact, I think she broke it, and then they put her on some kind of medicine,” the mom told the outlet.
By the time her prescription was up, Kenia was addicted to pills.
“That’s when she decided she could buy other people’s prescriptions,” said Diggs.
It was January 22, 2022, when she got the call that her daughter was dead.
“[Kenia’s boyfriend] called me, ‘Ms. Brenda, Kenia’s dead.’ I’m like, ‘What? What are you talking about?’ I’m asleep, and he’s like ‘she died. She took something and she died,’” she recalled.
Diggs got up and rushed to the hotel where Kenia was staying, but it was too late.
“I went in, and lo and behold, Kenia was on the floor. The paramedics were there, but she was dead on the floor.”
The cause of death was ruled as an accidental overdose of fentanyl.
Kenia’s younger sister, 34-year-old Keshia Diggs, had also just been released from a prison stint stemming from prostitution charges.
In just three months, she would die from a fentanyl overdose as well.
Diggs became worried on March 25, 2022, when Keshia did not come home after having been out for a number of days.
The mom discovered that her daughter had never actually left when she checked her bedroom.
“Went in there, and the smell just almost knocked me out. Like, what is that smell,” Diggs said. “I lost it. I ran out screaming, you know and ran down the stairs and outside with my phone. I called 911, and, you know, I told them, I said, my daughter’s not right. Can you please send somebody I think she’s sick or something?”
“Lo and behold, they said it was fentanyl. She died of an accidental overdose of fentanyl.”
Diggs said she noticed that her younger daughter was using some type of drug when she saw her “nodding” out while doing her hair.
“She was just out of it, like, ‘What is wrong with you?’ I’m thinking to myself, she’s doing something.”
Diggs has been left to put together the broken pieces of her family after the deadly opioid took both daughters from her.
David Fuller, an overdose prevention specialist with the Memphis Area Prevention Coalition, said the stories of families experiencing losses like this are far too common.
“I wish I could say that that was the first one of those stories that I’ve heard. But it’s absolutely not,” he told WREG.
Many people do not even realize they are consuming fentanyl, he explained.
“They thought they were doing heroin or something else,” Fuller said. “Then what we saw is fentanyl began to infiltrate the rest of the drug supply. Counterfeit pills. Counterfeit prescription opioids.”
“It’s so powerful that once a user becomes addicted to fentanyl, other drugs are not going to cut it because they’re not strong enough,” he continued, adding that fentanyl is the “deadliest drug that we’ve seen in this country.”
Provisional data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) revealed that approximately 107,543 people fatally overdosed on drugs in the U.S. in 2023. While the CDC does not break down the categories to see the exact number of fentanyl deaths, the most recent data from 2022 shows that 74,000 drug overdose deaths involved synthetic opioids other than methadone — of which the most popular is fentanyl.
As tens of thousands of Americans die each year from the drug, amounts of fentanyl that could kill millions of people are being seized all over the country.
In August, the Citrus County Sheriff’s Office of Florida found over 13 pounds of fentanyl — enough to kill three million people, Breitbart News reported.
In another recent Florida incident, two pounds of fentanyl was found washed up on Daytona Beach in September.
Meanwhile, a traffic stop in Roswell, Georgia, yielded enough fentanyl to kill roughly 60,000 people.
An April report by the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) validated a key claim in New York Times bestselling author Peter Schweizer’s latest book, Blood Money — that China has been subsidizing the production and export of fentanyl precursor chemicals and other synthetic narcotics.
“Specifically, there’s a Chinese gang called UBG that’s widely credited with setting up the Sinaloa Cartel in Mexico and making them the kings of fentanyl,” Schweizer told Fox News in March.
“The leader of that gang is a guy named Chang An-lo who goes by the name White Wolf. It was White Wolf’s business with [a] partner who wired a $5 million if interest-free, forgivable loan to the Biden family,” the investigative journalist said. “And it was specifically designated not just for Hunter, for the family. So does Joe Biden want to have a conversation about these tough issues? Does he want to hold China to account? Absolutely not, and I’m convinced it’s because of these financial entanglements.”