Douglas County
Passed Away: June 7, 2023
‘She wanted to help everybody, especially the underdogs’ Jetaya Lucero “had the most contagious smile,” her mother said. “She wanted to help everybody, especially the underdogs. She wanted to be a teacher for special needs kids.” But as vivacious as she appeared on the outside, Sharen Lucero said, Jetaya had struggled with mental health issues for years. When she was 15, her mother said, she was raped by three men, ages 17, 19 and 38. In the early hours of June 5, her parents learned she was on life support in a Lawrence hospital. The 911 call from the apartment she was visiting was the second fentanyl-related call Lawrence police received that night. Six hours later came a third. Jetaya and a 39-year-old man didn’t survive. A 39-year-old woman required seven doses of Narcan — a medication that reverses the effects of fentanyl — to save her. “It’s past an epidemic,” Sharen Lucero said. “It’s just totally out of control.”
The sound of her phone ringing in the night jolted Sharen Lucero awake in her Gardner home in early June. It was 12:30 a.m., and the Ottawa police were calling. Her 19-year-old daughter, Jetaya, had moved to the town — about an hour’s drive from Kansas City — earlier in the year. Lucero was told that Jetaya was in the hospital in Lawrence, and the police there needed to talk to her. “So I called the Lawrence police and they said that we needed to get there,” she said. “And then I called the hospital.” She asked if Jetaya was on a respirator, and they said yes. “We knew then that there wasn’t a good chance she would make it,” Lucero said. “It did not look good, was all they said.” She and her husband, Lee — who had recently retired after a nearly 48-year career as a respiratory therapist — took off for Lawrence about 40 miles away, calling their other children to let them know.
“I prayed the whole way,” Lucero said. “I just cried and cried. And it seemed like it took five hours to get there. And I felt a hand on my right shoulder and I looked up. And it was Jesus. And he said, ‘Donate her organs.’” The moment they saw Jetaya lying motionless in the hospital bed and hooked up to life support, Lucero said, “We knew she was gone. And it just killed us.” The spirited girl, called “Poofy Poof” by her dad because of her “poofy” hair, never regained consciousness.
Police told them that they’d discovered what appeared to be fentanyl residue in Jetaya’s purse when they arrived at the apartment in the 400 block of Illinois Street that night and found their daughter unresponsive, Lucero said. She said they’d never heard Jetaya mention fentanyl. “I knew she vaped and I knew she was drinking alcohol some, and I knew she smoked some THC,” she said. They were told that when Jetaya showed up at the Lawrence residence, she’d been drinking and said she felt funny. She went to lie down on a bed, and when the others stopped hearing her snoring and realized she wasn’t breathing, they attempted CPR and called 911.
Lucero said she had called to check on Jetaya at 10:10 that night. She found out later that paramedics had arrived at the apartment around 10 p.m. “And this one girl that was at her apartment was holding Jetaya’s phone when it rang, and it said, ‘Mama.’ And they were doing CPR on her at that time.”
‘Really tragic series of events’
The 911 call about Jetaya was the second fentanyl-related call Lawrence police received that June 5 night.
About 30 minutes earlier, police were sent to the 900 block of Connecticut Street. There, a 39-year-old man was pronounced dead at the scene. And six hours later came a third call, around 3:45 a.m. Tuesday, sending officers to a city-sanctioned homeless support site.
A 39-year-old female required seven doses of Narcan — a medication that reverses the effects of fentanyl — to save her. The woman had received the nasal spray before medics and police arrived.
In each of the three incidents, officers found evidence that led them to believe fentanyl was the cause, according to Lawrence police.
“Overnight, we had a really tragic series of events here in Lawrence,” Police Chief Rich Lockhart said at a news conference that Tuesday afternoon. “… One of the things that we really want to emphasize here is that fentanyl is the deadliest drug that’s out in our country today. And last year, the DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) confiscated enough fentanyl to kill every single American.”
Lockhart called the news conference to issue a plea to his community and others to heed the warnings about the drug.
Only a “tiny amount of fentanyl is enough to kill,” he said.
All illegal drugs are now regularly laced with fentanyl, Lockhart said, raising the chance of a fatal overdose.
“It doesn’t care how old you are,” he said of fentanyl. “It doesn’t care what your economic status is. It doesn’t care what race or gender you are. It only knows that it’s deadly.
“We have a saying that ‘one pill can kill,’ and certainly in many of these instances, that’s all it took.”
Police records show there were no fentanyl-related deaths in Lawrence in 2018 and 2019 and one in 2020. But in 2021 and 2022, the records show, there were 28 deaths and 41 overdose survivors.
“It’s past an epidemic,” Lucero said. “It’s just totally out of control.”
“The most contagious smile”
The Luceros have no idea how the fentanyl got into Jetaya’s system.
“Did she know she took it?” Sharen Lucero said. “Was it something in a drink? Did she smoke a joint, and was it laced? We just don’t know.”
They found out at the hospital that Jetaya was an organ donor.
“We had no clue,” Lucero said. “It just melted our hearts.”
But it also didn’t surprise them. That’s just how Jetaya was. Her name came from the phrase Je t’aime, which means “I love you” in French.
“She had the most contagious smile,” Lucero said. “She wanted to help everybody, especially the underdogs. She wanted to be a teacher for special needs kids.”
She loved to go camping and go to church, hated cleaning her room and loved country singer Luke Bryan, her mother said.
“We went to two of his concerts at Sprint Center,” she said, “and to his farm tours.”
As vivacious as she appeared on the outside, Jetaya had struggled with mental health issues for years. When she was 15, Lucero said, she was raped by three men, ages 17, 19 and 38.
“It took 4 ½ years to get those cases resolved,” she said. “They’re all in prison now. That just put her in a spiral and really messed with her.”
Lucero said no one has been charged in connection with Jetaya’s death, but the case remains open.
Sharen Lucero is now a strong believer in spreading public awareness about fentanyl. She’s pushing for every home and business to have Narcan on hand, and on Sept. 14, she spoke to students and parents at halftime of the Mill Valley-Lawrence varsity soccer game.
She displayed what she calls a “shock poster” that includes pictures of Jetaya in the hospital, unconscious and hooked up to the respirator with her devastated family gathered around her. The last photo is of the ambulance door closing as her body is being taken to the Midwest Transplant Network.
“It killed us when they closed that door and we knew that was the last time we were going to see her,” Lucero told The Star. “And my husband, he’s saying, ‘I’ll never see my Poofy Poof again.’”
When Jetaya’s family participated in a “hero walk” as her body was transferred from the hospital to the ambulance, Lucero said, they played Luke Bryan’s song, “To the Moon and Back.”
“And then the second song we played was ‘Reckless Love’ by Cory Asbury, which is about the 99 sheep and the one that is lost, and Jesus goes after the one,” she said.
“And to us, it was like Jetaya was the one lost. And Jesus brought her back to him.”
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