Opioid Crisis Fridays: True Stories from Missouri – Zach Anderson, 17

Jackson County

Died: January 29, 2023

He would do anything for anyone’

On Aug. 10, what would have been Zach Anderson’s 18th birthday, his mom and family held a “Forever 17” party. Friends and family decorated lanterns and released them into the sky.

They talked about the teen who worked several shifts a week at Dairy Queen — he had been learning to drive and saving up to buy a car. They remembered the young man who loved to make music with his friends, play video games with his younger brother and be around those who mattered most.

“What I hope people know about my son,” Gabrielle Anderson said as her voice began to break and she paused, “he had the biggest heart and cared for everyone around him, he would do anything for anyone. He loved fiercely.

“He wanted people to be happy and loved and cared for and I don’t want to leave out the fact that how much he loved our family.”

When he was 8 or 9 years old, he used his birthday and Christmas money to buy his friends the same video games he had so they could play together. His home, in the basement where he had what his mom calls “his own little man cave,” is where he and his friends would hang out.

Two weeks before Zach passed away, his mom said, the two of them had a “big conversation” after a teenage girl in a nearby town died of a fentanyl overdose. Anderson knew that teens experimented with drugs and some were dying because they didn’t know what they were taking or how much.

“I told my son, I was like, ‘If you ever touch that, that will kill you instantly,’” Anderson said. “He swore to me, and we made a pact, that he would never, ever touch anything with fentanyl in it. That was our biggest pact.”

First responders found powder residue in her son’s bedroom. It was fentanyl.

Within days after her son’s death on Jan. 29, she said she told a Blue Springs detective the name of a student at her son’s school who was known for selling “Percs,” the name given to what are fake Percocet pills that contain fentanyl. Her son was with that student the night before he was found.

Anderson said she initially told police the name of that student and recorded the testimony of someone else who knew what happened that night before her son died. But nothing happened.

She’s still waiting for an update on the case, which investigators have told her is still open.

“I don’t think they are going to voluntarily give me any information,” Anderson said. “I have to keep the case alive by constantly calling for updates myself. … And every time I call, there’s no new information.”

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