A Plano mother is sharing her loss due to fentanyl and how just half a pill claimed her daughter's life.
Rebecca Reveles lost her 19-year-old daughter, Schuylar Marie Montelongo, to fentanyl poisoning in August of 2021.
"He told me, 'we tried everything we could,' and I kind of just fell to my knees," Reveles recalled from the day she was notified by a doctor of her daughter's overdose death. "And I just begged him; I was like, 'no, please. Just go back in there. Just keep trying.' And then, when I went to go see her, she looked very peaceful. She looked like she was asleep."
Montelongo had died just half an hour after talking to her little sister on the phone.
Get DFW local news, weather forecasts and entertainment stories to your inbox. Sign up for NBC DFW newsletters.
"It was hard that whole night. But waking up Saturday to tell her sister she wasn't coming home," Reveles said through tears.
Reveles said she knew her teen daughter occasionally smoked marijuana. And only when her prescription for Xanax had run out had the teen started to seek pills from people she knew.
"She got some pills from somebody in hopes it was her Xanax," Reveles said. "There was very little Xanax in that pill. The majority of it was fentanyl."
Half of the pill was enough for a fatal dose of fentanyl - a synthetic opioid that is 50 times more potent than heroin that authorities say is easy to make and smuggle across the southern U.S. border with Mexico.
Still grieving, Reveles has taken her mission to prevent another tragedy to lawmakers in Washington.
"I try to talk to anybody," Reveles said, describing how she'll spread her warning to others. "If I smell weed on them, I tell them, just be careful."
She also hands out "one pill kills" bracelets in pink, which was her daughter's favorite color, "to just about anyone who is willing to support us," she said.
Reveles also gives parents Narcan - a potentially lifesaving treatment that if given quickly, cold save lives.
"I carry two, actually, if one is not enough. Like I said, Schuylar had half a pill, and they said she did not stand a chance. So, one of these would not have saved Schuyler."
She added that at the time, the dangers of fentanyl weren't widely known. "We’re just trying to save others since we couldn’t save our own."
