“Martin Heitzman, Loved by Many.”
The newly inscribed brick, placed by friends in the children’s garden at St. Thomas Aquinas Catholic Church, memorializes a 23-year-old whose cause of death should jolt us all.
Fentanyl poisoning, a drug-induced homicide by one pill that kills.
This lethal synthetic opioid — a cheap filler in counterfeit prescription pills increasingly showing up in North Texas — is as likely to be found in the fake “study drug” Adderall your kid buys in the school bathroom as it is in the anxiety-reducing “Xanax” purchased from a two-bit dealer.
Like most of us, Lakewood residents Judie and Daragh Heitzman knew close to nothing about fentanyl. They doubt their son Martin did either.
“Daragh, as a doctor, knew its medical uses, but we were naïve that it’s become a homicidal poison,” Judie told me.
“Martin didn’t need to die. This doesn’t need to happen to anyone else.”
That’s why Judie and Daragh shared Martin’s story with me and why I need you to not only read this column but circulate it far and wide.
Martin is every kid and the Heitzmans are every family.
“My purpose right now is to tell people that it can happen to you,” Judie said. “It only takes one pill.”
The older of the two Heitzman sons, Martin was athletic, popular, good-looking and charismatic. He loved his dogs, the outdoors and front-yard football in the rain.
His classmates at Bishop Lynch High School can’t recall a day when Martin didn’t give them cause to smile and laugh. Memories made with him in three hours were more lasting than anyone else could provide in 300 years.
But Martin also coped with learning differences, and school difficulties exacerbated his anxiety.
After his elementary years, he attended the Shelton School, where the customized approach buoyed his academic performance. But he felt stigmatized, so his parents let him enroll in Bishop Lynch his freshman year.
Judie and Daragh look back and see how the challenges of traditional and highly competitive academics exacerbated their son’s anxiety and increasing need to self-medicate.
In his junior year Martin made the varsity soccer team but played in only one game before a failing grade knocked him off the roster. “That was his lifeline to normalcy and when that was taken away, things began going downhill,” Judie recalled.
It wasn’t long before substance abuse was wrecking Martin’s life.
Rehab programs worked until they didn’t. He excelled at a therapeutic boarding school in Idaho, only to leave as soon as he turned 18. A brief stint at Texas Tech ended when he again returned home.
“It was six or seven years of pure havoc,” Daragh said.
After a rehab stint last year, Martin seemed to turn a corner. He vowed he was done with self-medicating the anxiety he had tried to hide for so long. He finally had begun to believe in himself and his own self-worth.
The November night before Martin was to start a new job at General Motors, he talked about apartment hunting and the prospect of a family vacation. “He had worked so hard to turn it around,” Judie recalled. “I could see he had started to come out of that.”
Then the anxiety that had challenged him for so many years began to bubble up.
When he asked Judie if she had a drug that would help, she reminded him why that wasn’t the right next step. But she promised they’d get to the doctor after work and see what would be safe for him to take.
Martin later left the house for a short time. Daragh was relieved, if skeptical, to find him in bed with the TV on at 10:45 p.m.
At 4 a.m., Daragh checked on him again and sensed that Martin hadn’t stirred throughout the night. He screamed for Judie to call 911 and began CPR.
“But I knew he was dead,” Daragh said.
As Martin’s room became a forensics scene of police officers, paramedics and yellow crime tape, Judie found a blue pharmaceutical-looking pill in her son’s pocket and heard an investigator say it looked like an “M30.”
It wasn’t until two months later that careful testing showed that a tiny dose of fentanyl had killed Martin.
The dangers of illicit and prescription drugs aren’t a new headline. But the fentanyl twist is — and it’s a story that hasn’t been adequately told locally.
“Fentanyl is the single deadliest drug threat our nation has ever encountered,” DEA Administrator Anne Milgram said last month. “It is everywhere.”
The synthetic opioid, manufactured in Mexico and China, is more than 100 times as potent as morphine and 50 times stronger than heroin, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says. Two milligrams, and sometimes even less, is deadly.
In 2021, fentanyl was involved in more than 77% of teen drug deaths, according to a report published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Ten years ago, even five years ago, fentanyl wasn’t a prevailing problem. Now even if you are a parent who is sure your child won’t get mixed up with drugs, it’s imperative you understand that one pill may be too many.
As one of the tens of thousands of members of several fentanyl-specific Facebook groups and a follower of the Fentanyl Awareness Coalition, Judie reads stories daily of newcomers who have lost loved ones.
These groups are made up of family and friends who spend their own money to try to warn the public, who show up at trials and political offices to get change, and who campaign to make clear that these deaths aren’t overdoses but poisonings.
Daragh says he can still hear Martin’s voice and he knows his son would want him to do everything possible to “make fentanyl stop for others.”
The Heitzmans want to see this crisis talked about in schools, at concerts and on social media and billboards. Daragh also brought up the need to fix the foundational problems that allow the fentanyl crisis to erupt.
Texas is a wasteland for mental health help and, untreated, those issues often exacerbate drug use. The stigma of mental illness, especially among men, remains deeply rooted.
“There are no breaks or excuses for young men these days,” Daragh said.
Add to that the wrongheaded insistence by so many to see addiction as a moral failing rather than the disease that it is and, in turn, advocate for quality treatment resources.
Those failures lead to tragedy after tragedy like Martin’s. The names change, but the stories are almost carbon copies of one another.
Daragh, who is involved in groundbreaking work with the progressive neurodegenerative disease ALS, and Judie, who decorates, declutters and preps homes to go on the local market, find work a necessary distraction.
“It’s not forgetting about your child but staying busy while the grief whittles away at you because it’s going to be there,” she said.
Before leaving the interview, Judie and Daragh showed me the memorial rings they each wear that are etched with Martin’s fingerprints. They acknowledged that our conversation broke open their hearts once again to the pain.
“But that’s OK if some other mom isn’t sitting here and going through what I’m going through — and what the 20,000 other moms in just one of my Facebook groups are going through,” Judie said.
“It’s on me to do this.”
Now it’s on the rest of us to spread this information so the courage of Judie and Daragh in telling Martin’s story is not for nothing.
With fentanyl in the mix, even that one pill can kill.
Read part two: What more Dallas should do to highlight — and fight — the fentanyl crisis.
