The Big Island Is Confronting A Big Problem With Fentanyl….One person dies every 11 days on the island from a drug overdose. A growing majority of those deaths involve the powerful, synthetic opioid fentanyl.
Kym Gentry-Peck was at her job as a Big Island event planner on Oct. 25 when she received a heartbreaking phone call.
“My husband said, ‘Come home right away. (Our daughter) is dead.”
The girl was two weeks shy of her 15th birthday and attended high school in Kona.
Gentry-Peck raced home, screaming the entire way. When she pulled into the driveway of her Kona Palisades residence, police were swarming everywhere. Her daughter’s body lay on the family’s lanai, a sheet covering her.
“I completely broke down. I lost it,” said Gentry-Peck.
Toxicology results revealed that their daughter had died of a fentanyl overdose, she said.
