On the recordFebruary 5, 2025
on April 1, 2020, U.S. Marine Corps veteran Jaime Puerta lost his 16-year-old son Daniel. That dark day, Jaime found Daniel lying on his bed nonresponsive, ultimately seeing what looked like to be a half tablet of oxycodone on his dresser. Paramedics arrived and tried their best, but Daniel's brain had gone too long without oxygen. Five days later, Daniel's parents had to make an unimaginably difficult decision to take him off of life support. Soon after, Jaime got a call from the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Office. He ultimately learned that pill was not an oxycodone pill. It was actually fentanyl made to look exactly like a pharmaceutical-grade oxycodone. That is what killed Daniel. My colleagues on the Senate Judiciary Committee and I heard, yesterday, Jaime's story. We heard the passion in his voice. You could still feel the hurt. The name of this hearing was ``The Poisoning of America.'' We not only heard his story; we also heard of Bridgette Norring, whose son Devin lost his life to fentanyl poisoning the same week that Daniel died at the age of 19. Devin had suffered from blackout migraines and dental pain to the point that he sought black-market prescription drugs--opioids--on Snapchat. This was the same platform where Daniel found the counterfeit pill that killed him. On April 4, 2020, Devin Norring took what he thought was a Percocet. His younger brother Caden, just 14 at the time, found him in his bedroom the next morning.…
Source
govinfo.gov




