It's been nearly two years since Kelly Hintemeyer buried her son Zakary.
"I keep thinking he's at a friend's house spending the night, that he'll come home any day,” said Hintemeyer.
The baby of the family, she says the 15-year-old was goofy and loved giving bear hugs. He should have started the spring football season at Bedford’s L.D. Bell High School the morning everything went wrong.
“I set my alarm for 5:45 that morning because he had to be at football practice at 6:15. I went back there to wake him up and he was blue, his lips were blue, and he had vomit in his mouth,” she said. “I started doing CPR on him. My older son called 911.”
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Hintemeyer would later learn that the night before, Zak and a friend split what they thought was a Percocet pill.
An autopsy later showed it was laced with fentanyl, the synthetic opioid the CDC says is 50 times stronger than heroin.
Like Zak, many have no idea they're taking it, resulting in accidental poisonings.
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“It's just overwhelming, and the kids are getting younger and younger and younger,” she said.
In just two years, numbers show deaths tripled for kids ages one to four and increased four-fold for infants and kids between the ages of five and 14.
As she prepares for the second anniversary of her son’s death, Hintemeyer said the grief doesn’t ease.
"He should be graduating high school. He should be going to his football banquet this weekend. He should be going to prom in a couple of months,” said Hintemeyer.
Like other parents, she’s now advocating for more awareness of a drug the DEA says is the single deadliest drug threat our nation has ever encountered and that can be lethal with just a 2 milligram dose.
Like so many other parents, Hintemeyer maintains Zak was poisoned by a drug he didn’t intentionally ingest.
"Unless you get it from a doctor, don't take it. Plain and simple,” she said.
