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She came to the U.S. to save her kids. Fentanyl may have killed one.

2023-10-12 00:00:00.0 华盛顿邮报-华盛顿特区原网页

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Janeth Valenzuela has not forgotten what Luz Rodriguez told her years ago.

The two women had met through a school-based moms group shortly after Rodriguez settled in Northern Virginia with her 8-year-old son and 12-year-old daughter. During a conversation one day, Valenzuela asked Rodriguez why she left El Salvador.

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“She said she came from her country to save her kids,” Valenzuela told me on a recent afternoon. “She came to give them a better life.”

Valenzuela recalled Rodriguez saying she didn’t want to lose them to gangs and violence.

“She thought they were going to be saved,” Valenzuela said. “That’s the irony of it. She came to this country to save the lives of her kids and lost one in the process.”

This 9-year-old came to the U.S. alone long before the #WhereAreTheChildren outrage

Rodriguez’s son, Jorge Chavarria Rodriguez, was 16 and had just started his freshman year at Wakefield High School in Arlington when his body was found at an apartment building weeks ago. His family has been told by officials that it will take time to determine a cause and manner of death but that the teenager probably died of a fentanyl overdose. That would make him the second student the school has lost to an overdose in less than a year. In February, Sergio Flores died after he was found unconscious in a bathroom. He was also a freshman at the school.

More than 100,000 people across the nation died of drug overdoses last year. That number is staggering. That number also tells us only so much. To understand the different ways the epidemic is devastating communities takes looking closely at the faces behind those numbers, and in Arlington, the faces that have made the crisis impossible to ignore belong to two Latino boys. Their deaths have caused residents, leaders and parents to grieve, worry and call for more to be done.

“We are devastated to lose another Latino student due to an opioid overdose,” reads a joint statement put out by the Virginia branches of the NAACP and LULAC (the League of United Latin American Citizens) after Rodriguez’s death. “The fentanyl crisis is wreaking havoc on the Latino communities of Arlington, claiming multiple lives and tearing our families apart.”

The statement calls on county leaders and officials to take “decisive steps to combat this deadly epidemic today to save lives.” Among the demands: equitable mental health services; access to youth addiction, treatment and prevention programs; and reimagined after-school activities.

“The current programming is simply not working and the community is crying out for change,” it reads.

Valenzuela, who is co-founder of the Arlington Schools Hispanic Parents Association (ASHPA), said she and others would like to see schools stay open later and programs put in that would give young people whose parents are working, sometimes multiple jobs, a safe place to pass the time.

“We cannot keep losing our kids,” she said. Of the drug crisis, she said: “This thing is growing. It’s like a cancer right now.”

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The drug crisis, of course, is not threatening only Latino students in Arlington. It is threatening people of all ages, races and ethnicities. But the county’s wide economic gap can make Latino students more vulnerable, Valenzuela said. To afford the high cost of rent, many of their parents have to work long and irregular hours, which can leave teenagers unsupervised and spending time in places where they might encounter pressure to use drugs.

Valenzuela said Jorge’s mother dedicated the time she wasn’t working to her children. She volunteered at school and community events. She knew what warning signs to look for when it came to drugs, and she saw none.

“He was always happy,” Luz Rodriguez said in Spanish. “He never wanted to be in trouble. I never observed any changes in his mood.”

She said her son never caused her problems, did well in school and had dreams of becoming a lawyer, entering the police force or joining the military. “He wanted to serve people,” she said.

On the day he died, she sent him a text. She had just left work, and it was their routine to check in with each other. She said he texted her back, telling her he was at a local community center. It was a place where he often spent time, participating in programs and doing his homework because the family didn’t have internet service at home.

They texted a few more times, and Rodriguez sent him another message when she got home and noticed he had forgotten to take his lunch money to school that day. This time, he didn’t respond, which was not like him. She waited a few minutes, then called.

“After I didn’t receive a response from him, I started getting desperate,” she said. “I went out looking for him. I went places I never thought in my life I would walk. I wanted to find my son.”

She said she searched for hours, until after 11 p.m., when she got a call from police. They told her they needed to meet with her about her son. Once she got home, she said, the officers showed her a photo of his body and asked her to identify him.

“There is so much I could say about my son, so many beautiful things,” Rodriguez told me. She described him as a happy child who grew into a helpful teenager. She said he spoke Spanish and English fluently and wanted to learn sign language so he could talk to more people.

An appreciation of a uniquely American language: Spanglish

Rodriguez said she worries about other Latino families. If officials don’t act now to address the drug crisis and make the spaces where teenagers gather safer, the community will lose more children, she said.

“I don’t want any other mom to go through what I’ve gone through,” she said.

Six days after Jorge’s death, at about 11:45 in the morning, police were called to his high school. There, according to reports, officers found two female students suffering from apparent drug overdoses. One was given Narcan, an opioid-overdose-reversal drug, and both were taken to the hospital.

This time, thankfully, no lives were lost.

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