Video Transcript

Penny Churchill: Reed’s bedroom. It hasn't really changed much. We kept all the tennis trophies, baseball trophies. This is all the pictures from high school.

Title slide: Reed Churchill, of Fayetteville, Arkansas, was 27 when he died in 2022 from a lethal dose of fentanyl that he thought was oxycodone.

David Churchill: He was a very quiet kid. Wouldn't hurt a fly, except if you were on the court or playing ball with him. He wanted to win.

Sports were Reed's main thing. He was, from a little kid, if it involved a ball and a stick, he could play it and he could play it very well. And that's what he lived for. That's what he excelled at.

He ended up being the number-one tennis player in the state of Arkansas for a couple of years. And was in the top 65 in the South in tennis. That's how good he was.

He was a big, tall kid and very athletic. But he loved his sports.

Title Slide: The investigation into Reed’s death revealed he had purchased pills on the darknet, an unregulated segment of the Internet known to host illegal content and illicit goods.

David: I don't know how Reed would have heard about the darknet. Other than that it's that generation are so computer savvy and so technical savvy with that stuff. I just assume that's something they all know about. They grew up with it and we didn't.

From an educational standpoint, one thing I would tell you is: if you didn't get the pill yourself from the pharmacy with the prescription with your name on it, don't take it. Don't take a pill from anybody, any of your friends. I don't care if it's your best friend in the world. You don't know where those pills came from, unless it's your prescription that you picked up.

And people are dying every day from that stuff. They just wanted an Adderall so they could stay up and study for their And they're dead because it wasn’t Adderall. It was fentanyl.

These are not good people you're talking to on the darknet, whether it's about drugs or pornography or whatever is on there. Nobody on that side of the computer has any good intentions for you.

Title Slide: Two California men were sentenced earlier this year to federal prison for supplying fentanyl-laced pills to a drug trafficking ring that led to multiple fatalities, including Reed’s fatal overdose.

David: It's been a horrible thing to go through.

We look at this dark web thing and what's going on now and there are probably hundreds or thousands of other people like those guys that sold Reed the fake oxycodone tablets.

These are bad people, and they're out there and they don't care.

Penny: It's just soul sucking. Life won't be the same. We won't have a wedding. We won't have his grandkids. We won't get to see him progress. We've been robbed. We don't want anybody else to have to go through that.