Jackson County
Died: Nov. 27, 2022
‘Daddy’s not breathing’
Linda Elder was heading home from Walmart with her granddaughter shortly before noon the Sunday after Thanksgiving when her phone rang.
“Daddy’s not breathing,” her 12-year-old grandson told his older sister, who answered the phone because Elder was driving.
“I didn’t hear that part,” Elder said. “And I told my granddaughter, ‘Just tell him that his dad’s sleeping because he works nights.’
“They hung up, and then he called back. And I knew when he called back that my son was gone.”
They rushed to Elder’s Kansas City home to find her son unresponsive and slumped over in the bathroom. Her distraught grandson told her he had pulled a needle out of his dad’s arm and put it on her vanity.
Brandon Elder, 38, had died of fentanyl intoxication.
Linda Elder doesn’t believe Brandon knew there was fentanyl in the drug he took.
“He was afraid of fentanyl,” she said. “If he had known it had fentanyl in it, he wouldn’t have messed with it.”
Brandon had struggled with addiction for years, his mother said, starting with oxycodone and Percocet. He told her they were pain pills for his back. She thought he’d gotten a prescription from a doctor. She had no idea he was buying them off the street.
Then came the heroin.
“Before he even started really using heroin, he had a good job,” Elder said. “He was always just a real happy, humble person. He would give you the shirt off his back, he would help the homeless. And even when he lost everything and became homeless himself from the heroin, he still always put others over him.”
When he was clean, she said, “You couldn’t ask for a better dad. He was really great with the kids, and the kids were always happy around him.”
But the cycle continued. “He would cry to me sometimes and say, ‘Mom, I want to quit,’” she said. Eventually, she said, she had to kick Brandon and the children’s mother out. She took care of the children and figured he’d get straightened out.
“I gave them two years to get clean, but they couldn’t get clean,” she said. “I didn’t want my grandkids to get lost in the system. So I adopted them.”
In August 2022, Brandon was in “really bad shape,” Elder said, and there was a warrant out for his arrest for a probation violation.
“He had used that day, and I just couldn’t take it anymore,” she said.
She drove him to a police station and pleaded with officers to arrest him so he could get clean. He was locked up for two months and released Oct. 27.
“And when he got out, he was happy, the old Brandon that I knew,” Elder said. “He got back on his feet, got a good job. He was doing really good.
“He was only out for like a month, and then he made that fatal call. Just that one call.”
This past August, Elder assembled a display on her front porch to commemorate National Drug Overdose Awareness Month. She painted an empty chair purple — a symbol used internationally to represent the overdose crisis — and placed one of her favorite photos of Brandon on it. Included in the display is a poster she made that contains the names of other fentanyl victims who have died in Kansas and Missouri. The list has grown to dozens of names, the victims ranging in age from 14 to 47.
“Each one is someone’s brother, sister, son, daughter, father, uncle, cousin,” she said, tears pooling in her eyes. “It just breaks my heart to see all of them.”
Like other family members who have lost loved ones to fentanyl, Elder said she’s frustrated at the lack of prosecution of those dealing the fatal drugs. She said she went through Brandon’s phone and discovered that after he got out of jail, his dealer had threatened him over money he said was owed him.
That man’s phone number, Elder said, was the last one Brandon had called the morning he died, and someone from that number had called Brandon back at 11:14 a.m. that day.
Elder called the number from Brandon’s phone. The man who answered told her his name was Steve.
“And I said, ‘You know your name isn’t Steve.’ I said, ‘You killed my son.’ He hung up on me and he wouldn’t answer the phone any more.”
Elder said she showed Brandon’s phone to the detective and played the threatening voice message.
“She didn’t take the phone or any messages or take down the guy’s phone number,” she said. “None of that. And she told me there’s not a whole lot that we can really do about it. That was the only time I saw the detective.
“It was just like they didn’t care. To them, it was just another junkie that’s off the street.”
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