LANTZ TUCKER, 22
Johnson County
DIED: MARCH 4, 2020
‘He always said, ‘Go big or go home.’ And that’s how he lived his life”
Ask Crystal Tucker to describe her son, Lantz, and she doesn’t hesitate one bit.
“The first word that comes to mind is fearless,” she said. “He wasn’t afraid of a challenge. He was that kid that somebody would be like, ‘I dare you.’ And he’d be like, ‘OK.’
“Nothing was too big for him. He always said, ‘Go big or go home.’ And that’s how he lived his life.”
That life ended on March 4, 2020, after Lantz, 22, took what he thought was an oxycodone pill.
“People get complacent about ‘Oh, my kid’s good. This won’t happen to my kid,’” Crystal Tucker said. “Lantz was good. He was incredibly intelligent, a straight-A student, and he had a job. He was doing all the things he needed to be doing.
“Lantz only took one pill. And that is all it takes.”
A 2017 graduate of Olathe Northwest High School, Lantz had always been kind and caring, his mother said.
“He had such a wonderful heart, and he never met a stranger,” she said. “He wanted to take care of people. He wanted to fix them and help them and change them. He was compassionate and funny, and just very charming. The party wouldn’t start until Lantz walked in. Everybody loved Lantz.”
Besides people, Lantz had another passion. Dogs. His mother runs a dog rescue in Olathe called Pawsitive Tails, and Lantz was instrumental in getting it going.
“He loved the dogs,” Tucker said. “He was a volunteer; he did anything I needed him to do. The aggressive ones, he’d be the one that would sit with them for hours trying to feed them treats and make friends with them.”
In March 2020, she said, Lantz had been having some back pain that stemmed from a skateboarding accident years earlier.
“He messaged a friend that night and said he’d just gotten off work and his back hurt,” she said. “He was taking an oxy and going to bed. And his friend said, ‘Make sure somebody’s with you or somebody’s up — you know, be careful.’ And Lantz said, ‘Come on, brother, one oxy and a beer isn’t going to kill me.’”
The next morning, Tucker found her son’s lifeless body in his bed. A Madden NFL Xbox game was playing on his TV, the controller still in his hand.
“His TV still had Post-it notes hanging all over where he’d written the goals that he was going to accomplish,” she said. “He had so much to live for.”
His parents discovered a message from a few weeks earlier on the Snapchat app on his cellphone. “He Snapchatted a friend saying that he had bought four pills, and he called them ‘M boxes,’ which I learned is the lingo for oxycodone,” Tucker said. “And he said, ‘Hey, I scored four M boxes from a random guy at the club. Want some?’ And the guy said, ‘Yeah, I’ll take two.’”
Lantz gave two pills to the friend, Tucker said, and the friend apparently took them and nothing happened.
“Lantz actually had his for three weeks before he took one,” she said. “He had two pills. He only took one of them. The other one was found in his room.”
She said the toxicology report showed that he had fentanyl and acetaminophen in his system — no oxycodone. His cause of death was listed as accidental fentanyl overdose.
Tucker said Lantz had bought the fake oxycodone pills at a club in Lawrence on Feb. 16, 2020.
“But the police said that they pulled surveillance video from the club, and they were not able to find any video of Lantz buying anything,” she said. “They said there was nothing usable from the video.”
She said she had received “very limited details” about the investigation. “So I can’t really say they didn’t try hard enough, although nobody has been charged, so of course I think that.”
After Lantz died, the family received more than $9,000 in memorial donations. They used it to create the Lance Tucker Memorial Fund, a nonprofit that helps pets facing life-threatening or urgent medical situations get the care they need and remain with their owners.
Tucker said she struggled early on over whether to share Lantz’s story.
“At first, I wasn’t sure I was going to, because there’s a stigma around drug use and overdose and addicts,” she said. “And I didn’t want people to view him as just another addict, because that’s not who he was.
“One pill can kill — one time, one pill. And it’s so true. This is a war on our kids. And our only weapon is awareness. There’s nothing else that’s going to protect your kids other than awareness and talking to them and sharing stories like Lantz’s to put a real face to this evil that’s out there.”
Tucker said she hopes people will never stop asking her about Lantz.
“Because not only do we want to share his story to save somebody else’s life,” she said. “We don’t want him to ever be forgotten.”
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