Jackson County
Died: December 19, 2021
‘They were poisoned. This was a homicide’
James Addams Jr. couldn’t contain his excitement when he called his mom on Dec. 16, 2021.
“He said, ‘Mom, I got it! I got it!” Katrina Smith recalls her son saying. “And I said, ‘You got what?’”
James had taught himself to do information technology work, she said, and he’d just landed his first IT job.
“They even gave him a company truck,” Smith said. “He was on top of the world.”
But when she tried over and over to reach him that weekend and never heard back, she sensed something was wrong. So late Sunday afternoon — three days after they’d talked — she drove to the Independence townhome he shared with his fiancee.
“The car was there, and the screen door was locked, so I knew somebody was there,” she said. “So I just started banging on the door.” After about 20 minutes, she said, the fiancee’s 4-year-old daughter came to the door. Her 3-year-old sister was inside with her.
“I said, ‘It’s Grandma Trina. You need to unlock the door and let me in.’”
“Grandma, Mommy and Daddy won’t wake up.”
Smith still struggles to describe what she found inside — a scene so disturbing, she said, that she’s only now speaking about it publicly.
She said she screamed when she saw James and his fiancee lying motionless together on the kitchen floor. She soon learned that their deaths had been captured on the couple’s home security video.
“The cops offered for me to watch it,” she said, but she couldn’t bear to do it. “Watch a video of my son dying? Are you for real?”
Police told her the video showed that the two had each taken a pill around 10 p.m. Friday. James’ fiancee then sat down in a chair and grabbed her face.
“My son said, ‘What’s wrong?’ She said, ‘My face feels funny.’ And she fell over,” Smith said. “My son went to her, and she had her arms wrapped around him and he had his arms wrapped around her. He tried to pick her up, and then he dropped. And that’s how they died, in each other’s arms.”
The video showed that the two were unconscious about nine to 11 minutes after taking the pills, Smith said.
As the couple lay dead on the floor for nearly two days, Smith said, “the girls were trying to cover them up and feed them cookies.”
Smith said James’ fiancee had told her that they’d decided to take a “Molly,” a synthetic “party drug” also known as ecstasy. But what they unknowingly took, Smith said, was fentanyl.
She said police told her that James’ toxicology report showed “he had enough fentanyl in his system to kill 10 people.”
“They were poisoned,” she said. “This was a homicide. There’s no other way to look at it.”
She said police called her the morning after she found the bodies.
“And they said, ‘We’ve all been watching the video, and we just cannot let this go. Can we have their phones?’” she said. “And it took them a year to break into the Apple phones, because I didn’t have the ID. They sent them to the FBI, and now the DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) has them back.”
Smith said Independence police closed the case, considering the death an accidental overdose, but a DEA agent continues to look into it and checks in with her occasionally.
She said James had become hooked on oxycodone years earlier when he took it for pain after a 500-pound wall fell on his foot at work and broke it.
“And then his baby mama left with their son, who was 3 months old, because of the drugs, and he went off the deep end,” she said.
She and James were extremely close, Smith said.
“I was 17 when I had him, so we basically grew up together,” she said. “We had a bond that was above and beyond. He was an amazing person. A dad, a brother, a son, you name it.
“Everybody knew him. He was popular, very outgoing, very understanding. Before he passed, he used to do gaming online. And every night, he would open up a chat for mental support. And him and his friend would talk to people if they needed to talk.”
James also loved to fish, his mother said, and he participated in lots of tournaments. And though he “could not sing to save his life,” he was a talented rapper, she said. He wrote his first song, called “My Mother,” when he was 18.
“And there’s a verse in there that says, ‘Mama, if I die, wipe a tear from your eye because I’ll always be here by your side.’”
Smith visits James’ grave on the 19th of every month — his “angel date,” she says — and also every Friday.
“I talk to him,” she said. “I tell him that this is all just a joke and that he needs to come home, because I can’t make it without him.”
She won’t rest, she said, until the person who sold the deadly pills to her son and his fiancee is found.
“I want him charged with manslaughter,” she said. “I want to write an impact statement and to read it to him in court. And then I hope that he dies in prison. That would be my justice.”
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