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Hospital, school, baseball team all turned their backs. Then his addiction killed him

The October night Peggy Walcott’s 16-year-old great-nephew, a junior at William Chrisman High School in Independence, died of an opioid overdose, she curled up on her living room couch and, in her mind, drafted a letter “to all the people who knew this family was in crisis and could have helped him but didn’t.”

After talking to some of those to whom she’d address such a letter, we join Walcott in asking why they ran away from young Levi Jennings instead of toward him. Because he did not have to die.

Walcott became a parent to Levi and his two siblings after their mother died exactly a year ago, in December of 2020, of a degenerative disease exacerbated by COVID-19. Her children were devastated, of course, and Levi soon began self-medicating with pills.

He later told his aunt that a friend had told him they’d make him feel better, and help him sleep. That “friend” did not mention that he might never wake up.

Over the next 10 months, his school kicked him out and his baseball team gave the talented catcher the boot, too, though that team and those teammates had been at the center of his life. After that rejection, he also lost most of the friends he’d grown up playing ball with.

Children’s Mercy Hospital treated the symptoms of his first accidental drug overdose and sent him home with no resources or information about how to fight substance abuse.

Months later, the rehabilitation center where Levi finally found a bed gave up after only two days. They put him out because he was going through withdrawal, and staff at the facility said they weren’t set up for that.

“I don’t think anyone gave Levi any empathy for his grief.” his aunt said. “I can not name one person who lifted a finger to help make a difference in his 10-month nightmare. Not one.”

Independence schools, Children’s Mercy deny a role

Officials at the Independence School District and at Children’s Mercy deny failing Levi, and talk about how their protocols work to catch and save young people in crisis. The president of the baseball team doesn’t remember the boy being told he couldn’t come back.

But officials are denying a lot more than that they let Levi down. Their denial is so strong that school officials refuse to discuss the larger opioid problem among students. If they’re hoping that it might go away if they avoid looking it in the eye, it won’t. And that refusal is part of the problem.

Levi Jennings is one of 12 local young people whose lives have been lost to opioids between January and November of this year, according to the Jackson County Medical Examiner’s Office. Last year, there were seven. This July, Taylor Siebert, a 19-year-old former William Chrisman High School homecoming queen, died of a fentanyl overdose after sharing a pill with two friends.

Just weeks after Levi’s mother died in December, Walcott became painfully aware that he was developing a drug problem. One night in February, he smoked a marijuana cigarette and overdosed — not on the pot, but on the fentanyl it was laced with.

First responders revived him with Narcan, a medicine used to reverse the effects of an opioid overdose. He spent five days at Children’s Mercy.

“While we can’t discuss specific patient information, adolescents that come to Children’s Mercy would receive medical treatment for their drug-induced symptoms, meet with a social worker and be given drug treatment resources in support of their continued recovery,” hospital spokeswoman Lisa Augustine told us.

Walcott remembers what happened very differently.

“I asked the doctors two or three times about the overdose,” she said. “I asked, ‘What drugs was he on and what did he do?’ They kept blowing me off. They‘d say ‘Oh, we have another doctor that’s gonna come in and talk to you about that.’” But that doctor never materialized.

Then, Walcott says, “they sent us home. No resources. No, ‘Hey, your kid took an opioid and they are really addictive. … The hospital, Children’s Mercy, didn’t even send me home with a pamphlet.”

Someone did talk with then-15-year-old Levi a few minutes alone in his hospital room. “They did tell Levi” he’d gotten an overdose of fentanyl, said his older brother, Kash. “But who is going to tell their parents that they were doing hard drugs like that?”

After her great-newphew went to Children’s Mercy for an accidental overdose, “they sent us home. No resources. No, ‘Hey, your kid took an opioid and they are really addictive,” said Peggy Walcott.
After her great-newphew went to Children’s Mercy for an accidental overdose, “they sent us home. No resources. No, ‘Hey, your kid took an opioid and they are really addictive,” said Peggy Walcott.

Pills didn’t help young athlete cope with grief

Levi, his aunt said, “was a jock.” He’d played football and wrestled for years. A big anchor in his life had always been playing spring baseball with the Lightning, a Queen City Athletic Association club team. He’d played with Queen City since he was 4 years old.

After he showed up to practice high, four of his coaches, Walcott and her husband had a talk with him.

For the first time, Levi talked about the pills he’d been taking because he thought they would help him cope. “But now I can’t stop,” he told his aunt. “When I don’t take one, my stomach hurts, I don’t feel well and I’m crawling out of my skin. I itch and I twitch and I can’t take it. I feel so bad I feel like I am going to die if I don’t take one.”

At that point, she knew he needed treatment ASAP, and began frantically looking for a rehab center that would take him. Three legal pad pages filled with notes about substance abuse recovery groups, rehab facilities and nonprofits show how hard she looked.

“They all said, ‘Nothing is available at this time.’ Or they said, ‘It’s going to be six months before we have a bed.’ I was like, he will be dead in six months.”

She was right.

In June, Queen City kicked him off the team. Club president Brian Hutton said he thought “Levi had just stopped showing up.”

Walcott says he stopped showing up because he was told that the coaches had decided he was no longer a “good fit” for the team.

Peggy Walcott says Levi’s Queen City Athletic Association club team no longer considered him a “good fit.”
Peggy Walcott says Levi’s Queen City Athletic Association club team no longer considered him a “good fit.”

In late July, Walcott finally did get him into a treatment center in Rolla, and he went right away. “He was ready to get help,” Walcott said. “He didn’t want to die.” Only, Levi was in withdrawal. He got angry during a session and flung books off a table. A notepad hit a counselor, and on only his second day in the place, he was out again.

The center did not return our calls.

Somehow, he did stay clean for three months. But on Sept. 28, he drove three friends to school and on the way, some or all of them smoked marijuana and then went to class smelling of pot. The butt of a joint was found in Levi’s car, and he was suspended. After a disciplinary hearing on Oct. 5, he was expelled for the rest of the year.

School officials defend the decision by saying he’d gotten in trouble more than once before. And yes, he had: The school records we saw, with Walcott’s permission, do show a pattern of disruptive behavior, all of which began after his mother’s death. After that loss, he started showing up late, showing up high, and behaving disrespectfully when he got there.

Obviously, the school had to act. But was throwing him out — effectively, throwing him away — really the way to go?

It wasn’t, says Jenny Armbruster, executive deputy director of Prevent+Ed, a Missouri nonprofit that works with school districts to help counsel students who have shown signs of drug use.

“When a school recognizes a student is struggling, they need to provide support before it becomes a crisis,” Ambruster said. Acting out in school is often a sign the student needs help. Yes, misbehavior has consequences, she said, but nowadays “most schools are embracing wraparound services for the student and family,” rather than kicking the child out of school. “They recognize the need for behavioral health intervention and want to get to the root of the problem.”

Why expel student instead of in-school suspension?

Levi’s expulsion terrified Walcott, and she begged for in-school suspension instead. What good could come of leaving an idle, drug-abusing teen home alone every day while she and her husband had to go to work?

“An addict alone is in bad company,” Jeff Howard, CEO of Midwest Recovery Centers said of the impact of COVID-19 and isolation on substance abusers.

Because he wasn’t allowed on school grounds, for a while, on Friday nights, Levi would watch his girlfriend cheer at football games from the hood of his car in a parking lot near the field. But the girl’s father didn’t want him spending time with her any more, either.

So instead, he started hanging out with “the crowd that doesn’t go to football games,” Walcott said. “I knew he was getting high again.’’

Of course, no good dad would smile on his daughter’s relationship with someone struggling with an addiction. But somewhere between all of this “you’re dead to me” behavior and the kind of acceptance that ignores substance abuse, what about the option of intervening for the good of the person in free fall?

On the one end of the spectrum of possible consequences for worrying behavior, we have the truly inexplicable, and possibly even criminal underreaction of alleged school shooter Ethan Crumbley’s school in suburban Detroit. In that case, you had a 15-year-old who had literally drawn teachers a diagram of bodies covered in blood. He was begging for help to make thoughts like that stop. Yet his parents somehow convinced officials at Oxford High School that that was no reason to take him out of class that day. They left him there, and four young people lost their lives as a result.

Levi Jennings’ school, on the other end of the spectrum, bounced him forever for actions that ought to have been seen as a problem that required treatment rather than banishment. His behavior was as much a cry for help as Crumbley’s drawing. And the response — cutting him off from his whole world — put his own safety at even greater risk.

Much of the conversation about “cancel culture” is political theater. But what is true is that we on all sides of our various divides are increasingly eager to cast into the outer darkness all of those who transgress in our eyes.

Off the island they go, with no mercy and no forwarding address. Is that why Levi really did get canceled rather than helped back to safety after his mother died? What makes his expulsion from polite society, and then from the world, even more shameful is that the cause of the sudden change in his behavior was so obvious.

School reports do note a recommendation that Levi talk to a school counselor via Zoom. But Walcott says she spoke only once with the person who was supposed to do that counseling. Walcott told the counselor that she thought Levi would do better with some in-person counseling. If Levi wasn’t receptive to Zoom sessions, the woman said, then “counseling was a waste of her time. I never heard from her again.”

Levi Jennings’ brother Kash, back center, says kids know fentanyl is deadly, and “that’s part of the thrill.” Their mother Anna Jennings, right, died of a degenerative disease complicated by COVID-19.
Levi Jennings’ brother Kash, back center, says kids know fentanyl is deadly, and “that’s part of the thrill.” Their mother Anna Jennings, right, died of a degenerative disease complicated by COVID-19.

Deadly risk of fentanyl is ‘part of the thrill’

“Criminalizing a 15-year-old kid who has turned to drugs to cope with grief is no different than blaming a sex traffiking victim. He was a victim,” Walcott said. His bad behavior was “a huge cry for help,” she said. It was a sign that he was in trouble and needed more help from his school rather than less — and in the end, none.

On Sunday Oct. 25, about three weeks after he was kicked out of school, Levi came home after hanging out with friends. He took half of a pill — maybe a Xanax or OxyContin — and lay down to sleep. He was supposed to start a job on Tuesday.

The next day, his 11-year-old sister and 16-year-old cousin found him cold and unresponsive in his bed. A medical examiner’s report says Levi died of an accidental overdose of fentanyl.

The Star has reported multiple times that fentanyl is as deadly as cyanide, and that taking street-dealt pills really is like playing Russian roulette. Parents may be ignorant about the risks of fentanyl-laced counterfeit opioids. But their kids do “know and that’s part of the thrill,” said Levi’s brother Kash.

About 200 people, including former coaches and people from school, showed up on a cold and rainy evening for a memorial for Levi. They released balloons over a ball field in Independence.

Too heartbroken and angry to join them, Walcott sat in her car and watched from afar, just as Levi had watched his girlfriend cheer at football games.

“I really fought for Levi,” Walcott said. “If love could have saved him, he would have lived forever.”