Jackson County
Died: August 24, 2022
CARSON MOPPIN, 16
‘It’s horrendous — just horrendous — losing your kid’
The day before Carson Moppin was to start his junior year at Oak Grove High School late last summer, his mother went to the teen’s room to wake him up.
Tammy Moppin was working from home that day because she’d promised to take her 16-year-old son to get his driving permit, and it was already after 11 a.m.
“And when I went to get him started for his day, he was unresponsive,” she said. “He had probably been gone for about five hours, six hours.
“That’s when my nightmare started. Never in my wildest dreams did I think that something like this could happen. It’s horrendous — just horrendous — losing your kid.”
Carson was a typical teenager, his mother said. He went to school, played sports, had a part-time job and two dogs named Paul and Earl. But in March 2022, he came to her with a shocking revelation.
“He said he needed to go to the hospital because he wasn’t feeling right,” Moppin said. “He’d been drinking alcohol and trying a bunch of drugs. And he felt like he was going to hurt himself.”
She took Carson to Children’s Mercy that night. He had to be placed on a waiting list for a bed at a rehab hospital in the area, she said, because everything was full. They finally found an open spot in a facility near St. Louis, where he spent seven weeks.
“When he came home, the plan was to keep him off drugs and keep him busy,” Moppin said. “And he started working again and doing normal things, hanging out with friends, getting his freedoms back. He was showing real progress. And then we made this plan that we were to finally get his driving permit.
“And every day when he was walking out the door, I was always telling him, ‘Carson, do not do pills. These people are lacing these pills with fentanyl. One pill kills.’ And he’s telling me, to my face, ‘No, mom, I’m not taking pills. I’m not doing that.’”
But Carson had been running around with some older kids, she said.
“He was a very big, tall kid,” she said. “He looked like a grown man, had a full beard. So it was not surprising that he was acting older. He got involved with them, and it just kind of spiraled. He became an addict and I didn’t even know.
“He knew the dangers of it. I think he thought, ‘Hey, I’m a big man, I can handle anything.’ He was 300 pounds. He was 6 feet tall. He thinks, ‘Oh, that’s not going to happen to me. That happens to other people.’”
But less than a year after he first started using drugs, Moppin said, Carson was dead.
“It’s terrible to think that I woke up, got ready, and started working on my laptop at home, and my son was already dead in his room,” she said.
“That just haunts me every day.” The autopsy reported the cause of death as fentanyl intoxication with acute pneumonia.
“When the fentanyl kills you, basically your breathing gets shallower and shallower, and it causes pneumonia to build up in your lungs,” Moppin said. “The police found 1 ½ pills in his room in a paper cup. So obviously he did not take all of it. But it takes 2 milligrams to kill you, and he had 6 in his system.”
Carson’s funeral was packed, Moppin said.
“There were so many people,” she said. “And so many kids reached out to me and said, ‘Carson was the guy I went to, he was the guy that helped me through this situation or that situation.’ To find out that he was this rock to all these people, it broke my heart. But at the same time, it made me happy that he meant so much to everyone.”
The family had an open casket for the service. Afterward, Moppin said, Carson was cremated.
“I did the casket for his friends,” she said, “so they could see his body lying there and see what happened to him after he took the pill.”
Some of the kids got up and spoke at the service, she said, including Carson’s best friend, who was released from rehab so he could attend.
“He talked, and then other kids got up and talked,” Moppin said. “And they said, ‘We’re never going to touch the stuff again.’
“Twelve days later, three of his friends overdosed — all on the same night.” One, she said, was dropped off at his front porch and nearly died. “His mom had gotten up at Carson’s funeral and said, ‘My son just told me that he’s never going to touch another pill.’”
Earlier this year, Moppin said, three more of Carson’s good friends overdosed as well. Unlike Carson, they survived.
Moppin struggled to keep her composure when talking about what she wants others to know about fentanyl.
“I used to think nothing’s going to happen to my kid,” she said. “He’s a good kid.”
He was a Boy Scout, she said, played sports most of his life and sang in the school choir.
“We are a normal family,” she said. “We don’t even have alcohol in our house. My husband and I don’t drink, we don’t smoke. But you know what? My kid had all of that when he came and asked me to take him to the hospital. So these kids are able to get the stuff.
“So don’t think that it’s not going to happen to you, because I thought it wasn’t going to happen to me. And it did. And it took everything from me.”
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