Families Rally At Motel Where 3 Died Of Fentanyl Poisoning

CHICAGO, IL — The saddest club in the world gathered Friday evening in front of a motel on Cicero Avenue. It’s a club that no one wants to join. They are the parents, siblings and relatives of people who’ve died from drug overdoses.

Standing in front of the Aloha Motel at 85th Street and Cicero Avenue, the group came to remember a 32-year-old Hometown man, Teddy Ryan, on the first anniversary of his death. The sidewalk rally was organized by Terry Almanza, a Chicago police officer and the mother of an 18-year-old daughter who died in 2015 after ingesting MDMA that she purchased from her cousin and friend.

Within the span of a month in 2019, three people, including Ryan, died of fentanyl poisoning at the Aloha, a low-budget motel where people go to disappear, shoot up or live below the radar, according to investigation reports from the Cook County Medical Examiner. Their families want their loved ones' deaths investigated as possible drug-induced homicides.

“A young 22-year-old girl, Alyssa Morris, lost her life here in February 2019 and two others in March 2019,” Almanza said. “There has been no criminal investigation or justice. There have only been three drug-induced homicide convictions [in Cook County] since 1989. That’s unacceptable and thousands more lives have been lost in this opioid epidemic.”

Ryan’s sister, Selena, said her brother visited some guests in their room at the Aloha on March 6, 2019. Ryan was captured on motel security cameras being walked out of a room to his truck by two people. After her brother was placed in the passenger seat, the truck was seen leaving the parking lot. Her brother was found dead in his truck a few blocks away, the family was told.

The Cook County Medical Examiner attributed the cause of death to fentanyl, heroin and cocaine toxicity. Her brother’s death was ruled accidental.

“My brother was very protective of his truck,” Selena Ryan said. “He never let anybody drive it, including his family.”

Christopher Pfannkuche, who is running in the upcoming Republican primary for Cook County State’s Attorney, stopped by to speak with the grieving relatives. If elected, Pfannkuche says he will implement steps to reduce the opioid drug epidemic by prosecuting major drugs dealers, particularly when the drugs they sell cause another person’s death.

“I am the only one who is talking about the issue,” Pfannkuche said.

Despite being a Chicago police officer herself, it took Almanza 16 months to convince colleagues to investigate her daughter Sydney Schergen’s death as a homicide under Illinois's drug-induced homicide crime statute.

The Mount Greenwood teen’s cousin, Cynthia Parker, was 17 when she and her then 21-year-old boyfriend Brent Tyssen sold ecstasy to Schergen in May 2015, according to police. When Schergen’s father, a Chicago firefighter, couldn’t rouse his daughter from bed the next morning, Schergen was pronounced dead at Advocate Christ Medical Center. Free on bail as they awaited trial on the drug-induced homicide charge, Parker and Tyssen were arrested for selling 110 hits of LSD and one gram of MDMA to an undercover Orland Park police officer in 2017, prosecutors said.

Parker, of Alsip, was charged as a juvenile and pleaded guilty to selling lethal drugs to Schergen. Tyssen, an aspiring DJ from Midlothian, is serving a six-year sentence for drug-induced homicide in the Illinois Department of Corrections. He’s due to be paroled next year. Almanza hopes that Tyssen will turn his life around when he is released “so another life isn’t lost.”

When her daughter died, Almanza started the Forgotten Victims of Drug Induced Homicide Facebook group, to help other families find justice for loved ones who died of lethal overdoses.

“My daughter made a bad decision, but she didn’t choose to die” Almanza said.

Rally in front of the Aloha Motel in Chicago, March 6, 2020.