DETROIT – It was September of 2021, and 19-year-old Jack McCarthy had everything to look forward to.
What his family didn’t know was how deep his anxiety ran. He loved mixed martial arts and worked out consistently to channel the anxiety, but that fateful day in September, he was stressed and reached out to a guy on Snapchat to sell him some Xanax.
Except it wasn’t real; It was counterfeit and laced with Fentanyl. The 19-year-old took one pill and died standing in his parent’s Birmingham kitchen.
“Kathy said to me one night, it’s sort of like we’re going to be living the rest of our days in hell,” said his father, Jamie McCarthy.
For the McCarthy family, the last 30 months have been an agony they wouldn’t wish on anyone else.
Jamie, son of Detroit radio icon J.P. McCarthy, a successful advertising executive, knew he had to find some way to channel his rage and grief.
“You have to have a purpose; you have to go find a purpose through loss,” Jamie said.
For Jamie, that purpose is Fentanyl Fathers, which is a group of parents who have lost their children to this scourge the federal government can’t seem to stop.
Jamie and his fellow parents are going from school to school to tell kids in the realest way possible that if they suffer from anxiety and depression, they need to tell someone.
Turning to Snapchat or other digital platforms to get prescription meds to counter anxiety leaves you at an incredibly high risk of ending up with counterfeit pills that will kill you the minute it’s in your mouth.
Fentanyl Fathers has been very well received. For the McCarthy family, that was an outlet, but they wondered if the man who sold Jack the fake pills would ever be arrested.
On Wednesday (March 13), after 30 months of work by the Birmingham Police Department, the accused, 24-year-old Aron Miranda, was arrested and charged with three felonies, including the delivery of a controlled substance causing death.
The McCarthy family is grateful for all the work that went into making the arrest and a push at the highest levels of law enforcement in our state to charge fentanyl-related homicides.
As the family says, they are all too aware of their son’s role in this. He never should have turned to Snapchat to cope with his anxiety. However, as Jack’s mom, Kathy, says, “Kids should learn from their mistakes, not die from them.”