- Leire Sales
- BBC World correspondent in Los Angeles
image source, Ramos Family
Melanie Ramos was 15 years old when she died.
Melanie Ramos’s life ended in one of the bathrooms at Helen Bernstein High School in Los Angeles, California.
There they found her lying on the floor and unconsciousaround 8:30 pm on September 13, a school employee and the stepfather of a classmate.
The latter was the one who came up with the clue when he found his stepdaughter in the park next door with overdose symptoms but still able to talk, and stammered to her that she had taken what she then believed was the opioid Percocet (oxycodone) with her friend.
Luckier, her life was saved in the hospital. Melanie was pronounced dead at the scene by paramedics.
Days later, the police would confirm that the pill he had consumed actually contained fentanyla synthetic opioid with an analgesic and anesthetic effect that is 50 times stronger than heroin and 100 times stronger than morphine.
“My daughter had to lose her life like this, at the age of 15, due to an overdose at school,” she tells her mother, Elena Pérez, to BBC Mundo.
“She died alone, in a bathroom. There ended her dreams, her plans, and my life also ended.. It has left me devastated. I can not get over it”.
image source, Leire Sales
Elena Perez, the mother of Melanie Ramos, filed a lawsuit against the Los Angeles Unified School District for negligence.
Although he still has the strength to demand justice, “so that no parent has to go through the same thing.”
And with that goal just suing the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), the public body that governs the center his daughter attended and 1,300 other schools in Southern California.
hours of anguish
“These incompetents didn’t even have the goodness to look for her when they knew she was missing. This is a huge negligence“said his lawyer Luis Carrillo a few days ago when announcing the legal action before the media.
He thus referred to the fact that about eight hours before the minor was found, the school notified his mother that he had not attended the after-lunch class.
image source, Getty Images
Melanie’s mother, Elena Perez, filed a lawsuit against the Helen Bernstein High School District for negligence.
“They called me around 12:30 to tell me that she was not there, that the teacher had her as absent. But I assured them that yes, that she had gone to school in the morning, and I asked them to please look for her.” , he said into the microphones, with another of his daughters in his arms.
“It took them hours to find my niece,” continued the deceased’s aunt, Gladys Manriques.
“Where was the staff? Where (were) the teachers? Where was the administration? If it wasn’t for the other parent, then my niece wouldn’t have been found until maybe the next day.”
It was actually the next day, at dawn, when the teenager’s mother heard the fateful news.
After spending the afternoon unable to concentrate on work and finding Melanie still nowhere to be found when he got home, he reported her missing by calling 911.
“The police arrived at the house at 2 AM to inform me of the death of my daughter,” recalls this woman from the Mexican state of Oaxaca.
image source, Getty Images
Melanie Ramos died of a fentanyl overdose, the investigation concluded.
Xochitl Quintero, aunt and godmother of the deceased, was in charge of giving the bad news to her two sisters, Briana and Jazmine.
“I had to tell (one of them) that her older sister was not coming back. She is 7 years old. How do you tell a 7-year-old that her sister is not coming back? I left her crying for a long time,” he told reporters during a vigil held at Helen Bernstein High School in September.
In the lawsuit—for damages for negligence and wrongful death— alleges that the school and district failed to protect their student, and that the lack of supervision led to a “delay in the application of treatment that could have saved her life.”
It also makes sure that school staff and administrators knew that campus bathrooms were “a safe haven” in which students bought, sold, and used illegal substances. And on that basis, a jury trial is requested.
Before Ramos’s death, school staff had to call emergency services. six times for possible drug overdosesMichael Carrillo, the other attorney representing the victim’s family, said at the press conference.
Y That month alone, in September, there were seven overdoses on different campuses in the school district..
“We know we have a urgent crisis on our hands,” LAUSD Superintendent Alberto Carvalho acknowledged at a press conference on September 14.
image source, Getty Images
The superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District, Alberto Carvalho, acknowledged at a press conference the day after the death of Melanie Ramos that they have a crisis on their hands.
But also “we know that things have not changed because only a month later another teenager had an overdose at school. Where are the changes?”, questioned the lawyer Carrillo.
“The Los Angeles Unified School District does not comment on pending or ongoing litigation. However, the security and The well-being of our students and employees remains our top priority.“, is the response that BBC Mundo received when he contacted the agency to find out his version and his reaction to the lawsuit.
crisis on the rise
The entity, the second largest in the United States after that of New York City and with more than half a million students in charge, has tried to combat the crisis by organizing webinars for parents and launching awareness campaigns on social media.
It has also distributed two doses per campus of naloxone, a overdose antidote which is often marketed as a nasal spray under the name Narcan.
And it works with the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) to identify areas of the city where drug transactions may take place.
In relation to Melanie’s case, a week after her death, the LAPD reported the arrest of a 15 year olda student at an academy that shares a campus with Helen Bernstein, accused of involuntary manslaughter for allegedly selling him the pill.
They arrested him along with another 16-year-old boy, for allegedly selling the same narcotic in an adjoining park.
“But these young people are just pawns being used by drug trafficking organizations,” said LAPD Commissioner Michel Moore, who has vowed to work to crack them down and stem the exponential rise in fentanyl overdose deaths.
image source, Getty Images
Nasal spray naloxone is marketed under the name Narcan.
And it is a problem that does not stop growing.
More of 100,000 people die each year in the US from overdoses, 80,000 of them from opioid useaccording to the most recent data from the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), a number that has increased by 850% in two decades.
And the segment of the population among which deaths are growing the fastest is that of adolescents.
According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), drug use among teens ages 14 to 18 has remained virtually stable over the past decade.
However, Fentanyl overdose deaths among that population have increased: they doubledfrom 253 to 680 in between 2019 y 2020, according to CDC statistics. In 2021, the 884.
“We are by far the world leader in overdose deaths,” Joseph Friedman, a researcher specializing in drug abuse at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), told the BBC.
“And drug use among teens is becoming not more common but more dangerous,” he concluded.
Fentanyl was the cause of 77.14% of drug-related deaths that occurred last year.
image source, Getty Images
Fentanyl is the leading cause of overdose death in the US.
Often used to mix with other hard drugs, fentanyl is also sold in pill form, sometimes with the appearance of other drugs such as Xanax, Ritalin, Adderall or the Percocet that Melanie and her friend thought they bought, experts say.
In addition, the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) has warned of the existence on the black market of “rainbow” pills of fentanyl, “candy-like”, intended for a young consumer.
Just like its victims, fentanyl seizures have multiplied: in 2020 the LAPD’s Narcotics and Gangs Division seized 117,000 pills, 858,000 in 2021 and so far this year it has already had more than three million.
“Just seeing her made me happy”
Melanie’s is one of the faces of this year’s dire statistics, something her mother can’t stop thinking about.
“I fall asleep thinking about her and wake up thinking about her.. I spend the day with her in my head, thinking about what I would be doing right now,” he tells BBC Mundo.
“And it’s just that I miss seeing her. Just seeing her made me happy. That was my happiness. Her gestures, her smile.”
image source, Leire Sales
Elena Pérez says that she goes to bed thinking about her daughter Melanie Ramos and wakes up thinking about her.
That smile that he brought from his last trip to Mexico, where he visited family.
After the holidays, he joined his new school, Helen Bernstein High School.
“Three weeks he spent there,” emphasizes his mother. In that bathroom where they found her on September 13, her laughter disappeared, her desire to conquer the world, her dream of traveling, of joining the army..
Her mother said goodbye to her on the day of the funeral, a day she finds especially hard to talk about.
“It was very hard, it was the moment when she realized that she would never be able to see her daughter again,” Melanie’s godmother, Xochitl Quintero, tells BBC Mundo, seeing the interviewee’s inability to respond.
“It was very hard,” he manages to articulate. “But I decided to dress her. I dressed her, I was with her, I talked to her. I know she listens to me.”
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