When former Taylor High School student Grace Samuelson was a little girl, her parents took her to see Disney on Ice’s “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” and she attempted to warn the fairy tale princess that she was about to be poisoned.
“She stood up and yelled, ‘Don’t eat that apple,’ when she was getting ready to eat it,’’ said her mom, Billie Samuelson.
Grace Samuelson’s own life was cut short Oct. 3, 2021, at age 29 from a poisoned pill she didn’t know was laced with the synthetic opioid fentanyl — and her mom wishes someone would have tried to warn her, too.
“If someone would have been able to tell her that, (maybe she could have survived),” Samuelson said. “If she had known that was in there, she wouldn’t have taken it.”
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and law enforcement, pharmaceutical fentanyl is legally used to treat extreme pain after surgery and cancer treatments in humans and animals, but an illegal version of the drug is being manufactured and smuggled into the United States from Mexico by cartels and others.
It can be up to 50 times stronger than heroin and 100 times more potent than morphine.
This illicit fentanyl is often pressed into pills that are made to look like legitimate prescription medications and sold on the black market, causing a rash of overdose deaths both nationally and locally, according to investigators with Williamson County’s organized crime unit.
“It’s really bad, not just in Williamson County,” said an officer with the unit, who requested anonymity for security reasons. “It’s all over the nation and we have seen from our stats that the deaths are increasing.”
According to the state, more than 2,000 Texans’ lives were claimed by fentanyl poisonings in 2022, or more than five fatalities per day.
Many people still see these deaths as just drug overdoses and not poisonings, the investigator said. “I believe that’s what the outside world sees it as,” the officer added. “Because when you hear overdose, you think, ‘OK, they are already drug addicts,’ but these are kids thinking they are taking Percocet or Xanax, and it’s laced with fentanyl. The kids that are dying from this have no idea that it’s fentanyl that they are taking.”
Samuelson said she knows her daughter’s death from fentanyl was a poisoning because Grace, a veterinary technician, was already well-versed in the dangers of the synthetic opioid.
“My daughter worked with fentanyl in veterinary oncology, and she was afraid of it,” said Samuelson, who also is a vet tech. “She knew what it could do. She wouldn’t touch it without someone with her.”
Therefore, when her daughter was found dead in a neighboring county, Samuelson recoiled at a medical examiner’s designation of “accidental drug overdose.”
“The worst part of any of this is the stigma involved with it,” Samuelson said. “An overdose implies that is something you meant to take, that you took too much of something that you meant to take in the first place. I would understand if she had way too much Xanax in her system, but it wasn’t that. It was whatever she took, and a lethal amount of fentanyl, which is two grains of sand worth.”
Though Grace’s poisoning adds to the grim statistics of fentanyl deaths, loved ones remember her as a vibrant young woman who made the world a better place.
“She was crazy energetic and so full of life,” said close friend Stephanie Schwan, who attended Taylor High with Grace. “Talk about walking to the beat of your own drum — that was Grace. She was awesome.”
Samuelson said her daughter was an artistic girl who loved animals and would sometimes wear fairy wings on shopping trips to Walmart or bond with her over attending Van Halen or Rick Springfield concerts.
“She was eccentric, unique, talented and an amazing vet tech,” Samuelson said. “She could have been anything she wanted to be.” Schwan said Grace was the best friend anyone could ever have.
“When I went into labor with my first son, she was right by my side,” she said. “She did not leave my side from the moment I went into labor until I walked out of the hospital with my son. She got me water, snacks and got me a birthing ball to help me through the process of labor. Though my husband was there, too, it was incredible to me that she would go to such great lengths to be there for a friend.”
On June 14, Billie Samuelson, along with dozens of fellow parents of children who died from fentanyl poisonings, witnessed Gov. Greg Abbott sign into law four fentanyl related bills, including House Bill 6, which creates a criminal charge of murder for a distributor whose client dies of a fentanyl overdose.
The new statute also classifies the incident as a poisoning on the death certificate.
“The fentanyl epidemic has taken far too many innocent lives, but thanks to brave parents and loved ones, like those here today, we have made Texans aware of this crisis,” Abbott said. “These four laws will forever change Texas through new protections that will help save lives.”
Samuelson, a member of Texans Against Fentanyl, an organization that played a key role in advocating for the new bills, said being able to witness the historic event was personally meaningful. Many of the group’s members had friends or relatives who fell to the scourge of fentanyl poisonings.
“It was very powerful to be there,” she said.
In fact, the new laws could have helped provide justice for Grace, whose case was never prosecuted, Samuelson added.
“That would have changed everything,” she said. “It is now considered murder and can be prosecuted as such.”
Still, the mother said knowing these parents in TXAF and being a part of this change has provided some measure of healing, though the pain is still raw.
“We don’t want to know each other,” Samuelson said. “We don’t want to ever have had a need to have our paths cross. We are together because our children died.”
“If someone would have been able to tell her that, (maybe she could have survived). If she had known that was in there, she wouldn’t have taken it.”
- Billie Samuelson, Grace’s mother
On June 14, Gov. Greg Abbott signed into law four bills aimed at addressing the fentanyl crisis in Texas. These include:
• House Bill 6 creates a murder designation for supplying fentanyl that results in a death, enhances the criminal penalty for manufacturing or delivering it and changes the designation from fentanyl overdose to poisoning on a death certificate. Current law does not require such classification on a death certificate, with most fentanyl-related deaths currently listed as an overdose.
• House Bill 3144 establishes October as Fentanyl Poisoning Awareness Month to help educate people about the dangers of the synthetic opioid.
• House Bill 3908, also known as Tucker’s Law, requires public schools each year to provide education about the dangers of fentanyl for students in grades six through 12.
• Senate Bill 867 allows the distribution of opioid overdose reversal drugs to Texas colleges and universities.
