Died: Jan. 18, 2023
Leavenworth, County
A late night deal over Snapchat. In the morning, he was dead.
It was a typical Tuesday night early this year when Andy Burris stopped to talk to his son before heading to bed.
After asking Cruz — a freshman at Lansing High School — if he wanted to go to the gym in the morning, Andy told his son good night and that he loved him. And just like always, Cruz responded with the same.
The next morning, around 6:30 when his wife Rhonda went to wake Cruz for school, Andy heard a scream that would replay in his head for months. A scream that he shares with groups he talks to as he warns about the danger of a synthetic opioid that is killing teens across the metro area.
“Andy, Cruz is dead!”
The parents would later learn that while they were sleeping that Tuesday night in mid-January, Cruz contacted a “drug dealer” over Snapchat and got a pill that he thought was a Percocet delivered to his home at 11:30 p.m.
The Burris family lost their little comedian, an aspiring musician who played piano and guitar. A boy who liked to help his parents rehab homes, who wanted to be an engineer or contractor and who his parents say operated “outside the norm.”
“He was much on his way to becoming anything he wanted to be,” Andy Burris said.
Cruz had a way of relating and talking to people, Rhonda said.
“You know, he had a lot of common sense,” she said. “He really could pick up any conversation and talk to you about it. I mean, he’s a very incredibly smart kid.”
Hours after their son died after taking the pill laced with fentanyl, Andy and Rhonda Burris said they found out who sold it to him. They knew where the young man lived and told everything to the police.
“We were told we didn’t have enough information,” Rhonda said. Police couldn’t get into Cruz’s phone because he had changed the code and his parents no longer knew it. Nine months after his death, authorities still haven’t gotten into his phone.
The two wonder how many other people the dealer sold to? Did anyone else die like their son? The Burrises say they aren’t going to let Cruz’s death “go in vain.”
They want others to heed the warnings their son didn’t. So they run the “Cruz4Life” foundation, raise money and fund billboards. Andy speaks at area high schools.
“We both are on a crusade and a mission to spread the word on the real effects of fentanyl and how it will kill a child,” Andy Burris said.
They want to teach parents about social media and send a message to young people – “If you continue to dabble in fake pills, guess what? You will die.”
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