She found her teen son dead from ‘fake fentanyl.’ Now an Oklahoma mom is sounding the alarm as deaths rise across the US
On Christmas Eve, Malisa Hepner hung up a stocking for her 18-year-old son, Jake Scoufos, as she’d done every year for each of her three children, and left his carefully wrapped gifts beneath the tree.
The Oklahoma mom had been looking forward to the holidays, but 11 days earlier, things had taken a tragic turn when she discovered Jake dead in his bed from a drug overdose.
“He still had a stocking, he still had gifts … because we do the same amount of gifts per kid,” Hepner told The Independent. “And so there was the exact same amount under the tree for him.”
Hepner found her boy still half-propped up on his bed, as though he had fallen asleep while scrolling on his phone, with three pink pills beside him.
“It looked really peaceful,” the grieving mom said, taking a small measure of solace in the idea that Jake didn’t suffer.
At first, she feared that Jake had died of a fentanyl overdose, even though she said her son was “afraid” of the drug and was not aware he had ever taken it.
But three months later, when her son’s toxicology report came back, Hepner was told that a powerful synthetic opioid known as cychlorphine had been detected in his bloodstream and had contributed to his death.
She’d never heard of it.
“My first thought was, is this just another name for fentanyl?” Hepner, from the Oklahoma City suburb of Yukon, recalled. “So I Googled it, and the very first thing that popped up was the stories from Tennessee, because at that time they had 16 deaths…”
Jake Scoufous is one of the 55 Americans whose deaths have been linked to the new synthetic opioid, as more states have issued urgent public warnings about the deadly drug in recent months.
Cychlorphine is incredibly difficult to detect and does not show up in drug test strips or in routine hospital opioid urine screens. For that reason, experts fear the number of linked deaths is likely even higher than 55.
Initial lab testing shows the synthetic could be up to 10 times more potent than fentanyl—and those taking and dealing it likely have no idea it’s lurking in the pills, experts said. It can be found mixed in with fentanyl, or methamphetamine, bromazolam, cocaine and other substances, according to the Office of National Drug Control Policy.
So far, it has been traced in at least 13 states – California, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Nevada, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Washington.
“We believe that this young man did not realize he was buying cychlorphine, and probably the person he bought it from did not realize they were selling cychlorphine,” Mark Woodward of the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics told The Independent. “Because it’s so new, they probably thought they were either selling fentanyl or selling oxycodone. And so it’s another cat-and-mouse game.”
