OMAHA -- Taryn Lee Griffith was the center of attention from the moment she was born.Ìý
A little girl with a big personality, her parents, Mike and Liz, recall a time in which she squabbled with a neighbor boy as a 5-year-old and asked him, "You want a piece of this?"
The Bennington couple remember howÌýshe would careen down the driveway in a pink Barbie Jeep kids' car, blasting music and toting around a friend's ChihuahuaÌýin the passenger seat.Ìý
Parenting Taryn wasn't always easy. She could make friends with anyone, which sometimes put her in tricky situations. She wasn't always keen on taking advice.
But when Taryn gave birth to her daughter in May 2021 — a baby girl she named Bellami RainÌý— things seemed to change. She secured her first "big girl job," as her mom calls it, which she was scheduled to begin in December. She sought counseling on her own accord. She struggled with self-image but was devoted to working through it for the sake of her little family.
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For her parents, watching Taryn blossom as she embraced motherhood was beautiful.
"It was like she had finally found the true meaning of life," Mike said.
"And love," Liz added.Ìý
On the night of Nov. 29, 2021Ìý— just a week before Taryn was slated to start her new jobÌý— she met a friend at a club in Lincoln for a night out. According to her parents, who say that the Sarpy County Sheriff's Office reviewed security footage from the club and shared their findings, she was offered what she thought was a Percocet pill from someone else at the bar.
Taryn took out her phone flashlight and inspected the pill before breaking it in half. She took one half and took the other half shortly thereafter.
But within about 45 minutes, she was barely conscious. Friends wheeled her into a backroom of the club in an office chair. A photo posted to Snapchat by someone in the room shows Taryn slumped over in the chair, clutching her chest.ÌýWhen the club closed around 1:45 a.m., a bouncer carried Taryn out and placed her in her friend's car.Ìý
Under the impression that she was drunk, the friend took Taryn back to the Sarpy County apartment she shared with her boyfriend and laid her to sleep on the couch.
When her boyfriend tried to wake her shortly after noon, Taryn was dead.
The pill she was given had been laced with fentanyl.
She was 24 years old.
* * *
Between 2018 and November 2022, at least 256 NebraskansÌýdied from poisonings and overdoses on fentanyl and other synthetic opioids, according to provisional cause-of-death data from the CDC. More than half of those deathsÌý— 138Ìý— occurred in 2021 and 2022.
In Douglas County alone, at least 89 people died from fentanyl-related overdoses in 2020 and 2021.
Among the dead were teenagers and the elderly, the rich and the poor. They died on the streets of downtown Omaha and in million-dollar homes in the suburbs.
"It happens everywhere around the city," said Dustin Talacko, a firefighter and paramedic with the Omaha Fire Department. "There's really no demographic that's more prevalent than others."
Fentanyl isn't a new drug. The synthetic, lab-made opioid has been used in clinical settings for more than 50 years as a high-strength pain reliever, typically administered intravenously or via a patch. It’s used to treat chronic pain in patients who develop a tolerance to other opioids and often is administered by paramedics to assist with pain resulting from acute traumatic injuries.
It is incredibly potent: approximately 100 times stronger than morphine and 50 times stronger than heroin.
Despite the fact that fentanyl has been around for decades, the drug is making headlines as synthetic opioidsÌý—Ìýmainly fentanylÌý—Ìýare responsible for nearly 70% of overdose deaths in the U.S. In 2014, just over 5,500 Americans died from a synthetic opioid overdose, according to the CDC. In 2021, that number grew to more than 71,000Ìý— an increase of nearly 1,200% in just seven years.
The meteoric rise in overdoses can be largely attributed to fentanyl powder being used to "cut" or dilute other drugs, such as cocaine, heroin and methamphetamine, or pressed into pills made to look like pharmaceutical-grade prescription medicationsÌý — like oxycodone, Xanax, Adderall and Percocet. The pills often are indistinguishable from actual prescription medications, according to the DEA.
According to the DEA, officials are seeing an unprecedented number of pills laced with fentanyl arriving in Nebraska.
Nebraska law enforcement agencies seized only 46 fentanyl pills in 2019. In 2020, that number rose to about 4,000. By 2021, pill seizures increased at a rate of nearly 2,000% in a single year with close to 83,000 pills seized by the DEA alone.
“The pills just started to show up in the last three or four years, so you can really see the steep increase since then,†said Emily Murray, a DEA spokeswoman. “It’s just exploded.â€
And the numbers continue to climb. In a July press release from the DEA, the agency said it had seized more than 151,000 pills in Nebraska in the first six months of the year. That doesn't consider pills seized by state and local agencies, which could add hundreds of thousands more to the total.
* * *
Joe LeDuc and his wife, Margaret, welcomed their first child, Eugene, in 1985Ìý—Ìýthe beginning of a self-proclaimed big Catholic family that now boasts five children and nine grandchildren.
Even as a child, Gene had a passion for baseball. He was a pitcher and took pride in passing down his knowledge to his younger brother, even though he was a little jealous that his brother was a lefty.
Gene played baseball throughout high school at Lincoln Pius XÌýand later accepted an offer to play for Missouri Western University before returning to Nebraska to play for the University of Nebraska at Omaha.ÌýShortly after starting at UNO, a years-old sports injury resurfaced in the form of a torn ligament in his elbow.
The injury and subsequent surgery was career-ending, so Gene instead tried his hand at coaching while studying sociology at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. While finishing his degree, he took an internship caring for people with disabilities, which quickly evolved into a career.
By all accounts, Gene loved his work. He first worked as an office manager for Extended Families of Nebraska, an agency providing day and in-home services for people with developmental and intellectual disabilities, before being promoted to day programs coordinator in February 2020. Joe said Gene took the new responsibilities in stride.
"He always tried to help his clients get out of their clinical life," Joe said. "A lot of them have so many appointments throughout the week, a lot of medical needs. He loved getting them out to a park when the weather wasn't too cold."
Then COVID hit. Disability service organizations scrambled to find the best ways to serve their clients. And now that he had supervisory responsibilities, Gene was the point of contact in the chaos.
“As March ended and the anxiety and acute nature of COVID grew, we think that he reverted to something that in the past had provided him comfort,†Joe said.
On an unseasonably snowy Friday in April, Joe received a call that Gene wasn’t feeling well at work. He and his wife went to pick up Gene, who was nauseated and dizzy and seemed down. He spent most of the weekend sleeping at their house.
By Sunday, it seemed as if Gene had recovered, and he left his parents’ home in the morning hours. Meanwhile, Margaret was tasked with getting Joe away from the house for a few hours so that the rest of the family could gather to plan a surprise party for his upcoming birthday.
Instead, as Joe and Margaret walked their favorite path at Holmes Lake, they received a phone call from their youngest daughter.
“You guys need to come home,†she said. “There’s a police officer here.â€
For an unknown amount of time, Gene had been buying what he thought were 30 milligramÌýoxycodone pills to cope with stress and anxiety. On April 19, someone called the police after noticing that a man had been sitting in his car for hours in a Lincoln parking lot.
By the time help arrived, Gene was already dead.
The oxycodone pill was laced with fentanyl.
He was 34Ìýyears old.
* * *
Substance Use Disorder (SUD), the medical term for addiction, has been recognized by the American Society of Addiction Medicine as a chronic brain disorder, not a moral failing or an issue of choice, for more than a decade. Still, societal and medical treatment of the condition lags.
Dr. Ken Zoucha of the University of Nebraska Medical Center is a widely respected expert in the treatment of SUD. He is the director of addiction medicine for UNMC's Department of Psychiatry and championed the establishment of a fellowship in addiction medicine at the university.
He brings something else to the table: Zoucha is in recovery from Opioid Use Disorder and Alcohol Use Disorder, something he talks about openly and uses as an asset to his position.
“To reduce the stigma, we have to tell people that we’re in recovery,†he said. “We have to show them that people get better.â€
Zoucha began seeing an uptick in fentanyl in his clinical work over the past two years. Previously, people who use drugs were getting fentanyl that had been legitimately prescribed and then diverted. Now, illicit, lab-made fentanyl —Ìýthe kind that is pressed into look-alike pills and used to cut other drugs like methamphetamine, cocaine and heroinÌý—Ìýhas become much more prevalent.
Zoucha gave the example of a client who sought treatment at UNMC for Opioid Use Disorder, saying that he had been buying 30 milligram oxycodone pills from the streetÌý—Ìýas Gene had been doingÌý— and taking three or four per day.
When his lab results came back, there was no trace of oxycodone. It was only fentanyl.
Dr. Eric Ernest, an associate professor of emergency medicine at UNMC and an assistant medical director for the Omaha Fire Department, noticed the same rise.Ìý
“Omaha is an interesting story,†Ernest said. “It’s been kind of a slow rise. But over the past two years, there’s been a gradual uptick in overdose incidents that we’re seeing both in the hospital and pre-hospital with EMS.â€
As people like Zoucha and Ernest look for ways to better treat people with SUDÌý— especially with the lethality of fentanyl for non-opioid-tolerant users —Ìýthey often look toward harm-reduction practices.
Harm reduction, a broad term encompassing a range of tactics used to reduce the chance of serious injury or death for people who use drugs, sometimes gets a bad rap. Especially in Nebraska, Zoucha said, the idea of reducing harm often gets confused with encouraging or facilitating drug use —Ìýsomething that goes against “Nebraska values.â€
But harm reduction isn’t a radical concept, and it has been utilized in non-drug contexts for decades.
“We use harm reduction in other parts of our culture,†Zoucha said. “Speed limits are a form of harm reduction, as are seat belts. Filters on cigarettes are harm reduction. Even sunscreen is harm reduction.â€
Perhaps the most well-known example of harm reduction is increasing public access to naloxone, which most people call Narcan, a brand of naloxone. The nasal spray is an opioid antagonist, meaning that it can reverse an overdose by attaching to opioid receptors in the brain and reversing the effects. All Omaha police and fire personnel carry naloxone and are trained to administer it.
Nebraska’s naloxone distribution through pharmacies is relatively robust, particularly when compared to other Midwest states. There are 17 pharmacies in Omaha offering no-cost, no-prescription naloxone, and there are dozens of rural pharmacies providing the medication for free. A list of all participating pharmacies can be found at .
Outside of working for OFD, Talacko owns a company that offers naloxone trainingÌýfor area schools, businesses and organizations. He has trained nurses at the Omaha Public Schools and the Westside Community Schools, as well as security personnel at a handful of large area businesses. He thinks that Narcan is something that every person and family should have access to and know how to use.
“When I first became a medic nine years ago, I remember using Narcan sometimes, but it was mostly at the Francis House and other places where there might be some illicit drug use,†Talacko said. “Fast forward to today, there’s really no rhyme or reason to where we’re finding these patients. It’s not just a problem for a certain demographic. It’s a problem for everybody in our society right now.â€
Through his work, Talacko has noticed a pervasive attitude of people thinking that it can’t and won’t happen to them, their families or communities. It’s this type of thinking, he said, that will lead Nebraska further into a crisis.
* * *
When friends and family talk about Owen Joyner, one thing usually comes to mind first: his smile.
Gregarious since childhood, Owen was a charmer. He was an academically gifted kid, but he set his sights on pursuing art and music. His teachers would remark that he was one of the few kids left to actually read books, a surprise to his parents since they rarely saw him reading.
His charm and intelligence were some of the first things that his stepmom, Sara Adkisson-Joyner of Omaha, noticed about the then-7-year-old Owen when she came into his life.
“He was very, very smart,†she said. “He was extremely intelligent. And on top of that, he was super charismatic and good at making people feel listened to and loved.â€
He smoked weed and partied throughout his early teen years, but it wasn’t until joining a fraternity in college that substance use became a serious problem for OwenÌý— first with alcohol and then benzodiazepines like Xanax. It devolved into an addiction to opioids in his early 20s. He had been using fentanyl intentionally years before it was a well-known substance.
After a stint at an area rehab in 2016, Owen tried his hand at staying sober on his own. At some points, he managed it better than other times. But when Owen experienced depressive episodes, he often would find himself back at day one.
"He had a lot of pain in his life," Sara said. "And he suffered from depression, honestly. When you're an opioid addict, it's a double whammy. It just sucks all of the serotonin out of your brain, and it takes a few years to rebuild it if you can be sober. So, when he would go into depressions, he would start using again."
To assist in his recovery, Owen was prescribed naltrexone, a medication approved to treat Opioid Use Disorder by blocking the effects of opioids if consumed, and an antidepressant in early 2020. According to Sara, the medications made a big difference, but Owen always felt that he should be able to do it on his own.
After a near-overdose and formal intervention from friends and family in late 2020, Owen agreed to live at the A.R.C.H. Men’s Halfway HouseÌý—Ìýa strict, 12-step residential treatment program in Omaha. He stayed there until February 2022, progressing through the halfway house to the three-quarters house.
It was at A.R.C.H. that Owen became something of a pillar in Omaha’s recovery community, working with the youth Alcoholics Anonymous group and becoming a frequent source of inspiration for others in the house.
“When he was using naltrexone and taking his antidepressant and living in the halfway house, it was the best he’s ever beenÌý— in his whole life, I felt,†Sara said. “He was the happiest, most stable, creative, energized I’ve ever seen him.â€
He got a job at Triage Medical Staffing upon his release and immediately excelled, making good money thanks to his sales skills and becoming a source of joy for his co-workers. In one message posted to Facebook after his death, a co-worker described Owen as “the heart and soul of Triage.â€
Then, in April, he relapsed. He had stopped taking his medications after about a year of sobriety, a decision Sara feels was influenced by the stigma of medication-assisted treatment within recovery communities.
Owen relapsed again in July and admitted himself to a less-strict halfway house in Omaha. On Aug. 21, he charmed an employee at the house into letting him leave, saying that he had to go see a friend who needed him.
Instead, he drove to Council Bluffs and bought fentanyl. Owen overdosed and died that night.
He was 27 years old.
* * *
The stories of Nebraskans who have died fentanyl-related deaths differ greatly. Some had established histories of substance use, while others died trying a drug for the first time. Some were well aware of the dangers. Others had never even heard of fentanyl.
But the stories of the parents and families left to cope with the losses follow a common thread. The first few weeks are a blur of condolences; a painful emptiness sometimes accompanied by a sense of guilt.
"It was my worst nightmare realized," Sara Adkisson-Joyner said. "I thought about it happening so much that when he died, I felt like I had manifested it somehow."
The funeral comes and goes. The world keeps moving.
“My life, our life, completely stopped,†Mike Griffith said. “A lot of days, you just don’t want to get out of bed. You don’t want to wake up. You just have no drive, no ambition. Nothing.â€
Then, the urge to do something with the pain sets in.
It manifests in different ways. The Griffiths set their sights on raising awareness on Nebraska’s Good Samaritan law,Ìýwhich grants immunity from drug paraphernalia and possession charges to the overdose victim and the first person to call for assistance so long as the person calling stays on the scene and cooperates with medics and police. This would have protected Taryn and her friends from legal consequences had someone called 911.
They also are advocating for a drug-induced homicide law called "Taryn’s Law,’" which is set to be introduced to the Nebraska Legislature in the upcoming session. Drug-induced homicide laws, which have been enacted in 23 states and the District of Columbia, give prosecutors the ability to charge the person who supplied drugs to the deceased with murder or manslaughter.
While proponents like the Griffiths argue that a further crackdown on people supplying drugs will curb rates of overdoses, critics of drug-induced homicide policies say that friends, family members and romantic partners are being prosecuted in these cases far more often than high-level drug traffickers.
Douglas County Attorney Don Kleine said that a federal law already is in place to prosecute drug dealers who cause deaths. But the Griffiths have worked tirelessly since Taryn’s death to get a similar law on the books in Nebraska, seeing it as a way for families to get justice.
“Pushing for this has prevented us from going down a rabbit hole,†Mike said. “It’s something we can do for Taryn.â€
For the LeDuc family, finding a way to honor Gene's legacy was crucial. With help from the Lincoln Parks Foundation, the LeDucs raised money to establish a wheelchair-accessible path at Holmes Lake to a tribute bench at Gene's favorite spot, now known as Gene's Point. Joe goes to the bench often to clean limestone rocks off of the wheelchair path.
In addition, he's pushing for law enforcement agencies and city officials to provide continuous updates on the fentanyl crisis. In August, he helped persuade the Lancaster County Health Department to issue a health alertÌýafter 50 overdoses were reported in a single month.
"You know, we constantly get alerts that there's, say, listeria in (a type of) salad mix," Joe said. "And I'm like, 'Hey, there's a ton of fentanyl out there.' We need to be talking about it consistently."
The Joyners have made it their mission to lessen the stigma surrounding Medications for Opioid Use Disorder (MOUD) for those in recovery. In some 12-step, abstinence-based programs, people utilizing medication-assisted therapies are shunned and not considered drug-free.
"My advocacy is focused on encouraging these sober living situations to treat opioid addiction as something other than alcoholism and not be opposed to using these tools like naltrexone," Sara said. "You got to have a way to give people a fighting chance to beat this."
Despite a vast body of evidence showing that such therapies are highly effective in helping opioid users get and stay sober, access remains scarceÌý— particularly in rural areas.
There are three main medications used to treat Opioid Use Disorder:
- Methadone: Reduces cravings and withdrawal symptoms. Must be taken every day at a methadone clinic.
- Buprenorphine: Reduces cravings and withdrawal symptoms. Taken daily as a pill or injected monthly.
- Naltrexone: Blocks euphoric effects of opioids on the brain. Taken daily as a pill or injected monthly.
There are 21 buprenorphine practitioners and 21 naltrexone prescribers in Nebraska, and only three methadone clinics, according to the SAMHSA treatment locator.ÌýAll of the methadone clinics are located in Omaha and Lincoln.
Aside from their personal endeavors, the three families are dedicated to raising public awareness so that no other family has to go through the same pain.
"I felt like Taryn was finally coming along," Liz Griffith said. "She was starting her job, she loved her baby, and she was just so excited. And then it's gone. All these things could've been, would've been if they could've."
The strangest court stories from 2022
Reporter Lori Pilger reviews hundreds of court cases each year. Here are some of the oddest stories from 2022.
Prosecutors described a crime scene in Texas a day before a 17-year-old got into a police chase in Nebraska with his mom's body in the trunk.Ìý
The man suspected of killing four in Laurel has been charged with 10 felonies for his alleged role that rattled the town's 1,000 residents.
AÌýLincoln doctor was arrested in connection to alleged sexually inappropriate behavior with patients.
In October, prosecutors chargedÌýSallie Gilmer with first-degree murder, accusing her of killing her father, 70-year-old Jesse Gilmer Jr.
An investigation into many stolen semi-trailers in the Lincoln area revealed an alleged crime ring Miami-based that targeted packing plants.
Ìý