Fox News
It has been over a year since Chris and Laura Didier found their 17-year-old son, Zach, slumped over his desk inside their home near Sacramento, Calif.
Their son “appeared to be asleep, and when I approached him, I knew something was horribly wrong,” dad Chris Didier told Fox News, recalling the moment when he entered his son’s room on Dec. 27, 2020.
“I just felt something dark and something empty — and it haunts me,” he said.
Fearing the worst, Didier did what any father would do — he attempted to bring Zach back to consciousness.
A former U.S. military service member, Didier used his CPR training to try to revive Zach while shouting out for his other son, Sam, to call 911.
Medics arrived a short while later and took over the rescue efforts.
It was about 10 minutes later when they realized there was nothing more they could do for the teenager. Dad Chris Didier recalled what happened next.
“I didn’t accept that. I said, ‘That’s not acceptable,’” he said. “So, I resumed CPR and I fought as hard as I could to prevent the loss. And sometime later, one of the responders took me away from Zach.”
The stricken father added, “And that’s when it stopped.”
“I know what fentanyl is, but how does that get into my house?”
Chris Didier said coroners arrived at his home to examine Zach’s room over the course of several hours.
“They said, ‘Chris, this is a real mystery,’” he said. “’We — obviously, if someone dies — we want to figure out what happened, if there’s any obvious clues.’”
The investigators told the Didiers there were two possibilities regarding the cause of Zach’s death: natural causes or fentanyl.
“I know what fentanyl is, but how does that get into my house?” Chris Didier asked. “My child is inside my house. He’s not out in the dangers of the world. How does he get it into his room? How does it get into his body?”
What Chris and Laura soon learned was 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.
“We’d never heard of counterfeit pills,” said Zach’s mother, Laura Didier.
“We never heard about drug dealers preying on young people through social media apps. This was not something we had any knowledge of, nor did our neighbors or our friends or Zach’s classmates. I mean, we were all completely blindsided to learn that all of this was happening.”
“Social media is a very common platform. You can get whatever you want on social media at any age, and I had no idea that [this] was going on.”
Both she and her husband were shocked to learn that their son, Zach, was able to obtain the tainted pill so easily on social media…
