What happened to my daughter?

This article is the latest development to the December 9, 2022 article, Fentanyl Death of Tiffany Reeves. In this exposé, Reeves shares the pain, concerns, and questions she has been carrying since the day of her daughter’s death. She was accompanied by , Brenda Sturgeon, a representative of Drug-Induced Homicide.Org, who also knows the pain of losing a child to Fentanyl, losing her own daughter 7 years ago.

Reeves describes her daughter as a “happy, loving child” with plenty of friends who called her Titi. She also loved children. As Tiffany was the only family Reeves had, and vice versa, Tiffany was known to treat her many friends like family.

The struggle for justice began when she reportedly was not allowed to identify her daughter in the morgue for no mentioned reason other than the case was declared a homicide. The situation has seemed to go downhill therefrom.

“The mayor,” said Reeves, “Needs to make public service announcements about Bridgeview and what’s going on. There’s a lot of deaths…90 in Bridgeview from Fentanyl.” She pointed to statistics she obtained from the news that, in Cook County, there were more Fentanyl deaths that there were gunshot deaths: roughly 2,000 to 800.

Reeves then expressed how frustrated she was by the mayor’s seemingly blasé response to her concerns at the January evening trustee meeting.

“These kids need to know what's going on. I mean, how many more kids are we going to see in a casket? What are you (addressing Mayor Steven Landek) saying to those kids here that day [at the trustee meeting]? He wouldn't even say nothing to them. From the high school-- he wouldn't even say a word to them. It's like he didn't care. He's never once said ‘I'm sorry for your loss.’ He's never called; he's never reached out to any of us or our other friend Dan, who lost his son. He sat there for five days. And they didn't even talk to him. They ignored him. He did laugh in my face twice; the first time was terrible.”

Another source of frustration for Reeves is how slow the investigation of her daughter’s homicide seems to be going.

“I have to hound them. I'll show you my phone how many times I call and call and call and call and call. Still nothing. They're off Friday, Saturday and Sunday. They're barely there. Sometimes they don't even answer the phone at the front desk.”

“ It's going on eight months and no answers. “ Sturgeon weighed in. “They have her (Tiffany Reeves) phone open now. They have everything they need and they're still no answers. And the statute of limitations is 3 years.”

“I had to fight,” said Reeves, “to get everywhere we are at right now.” She lamented how this struggle for justice for her daughter does not even allow her to mourn for her properly. “Grieving parents shouldn't have to do detective work for the police. And I'm exhausted from it. I have to call them every other day.”

Reeves believes that the reason why her daughter’s homicide is because of the stigma regarding those who die of drug overdoses.

“[The mayor] probably thinks our kids were some drug addicts and they died,” she said. “No, that's not what happened. Someone gave her a death sentence. That's what they did. Fentanyl; there's no surviving Fentanyl.” She has explained the studies available that demonstrate how strong, and dangerous, Fentanyl is, to the extent that it only requires skin absorption to intoxicate a person. For instance, it typically can take as little as 2mg to kill a person, but Reeves said that her daughter had 3mg of Fentanyl in her system when she died. “If you touch money that has Fentanyl on it, you just overdosed. It’s stronger than morphine. My daughter’s autopsy showed no other drug in her system; just Fentanyl. Even if a kid does drugs, they don't ask for Fentanyl. They don't ask to die. This Fentanyl is killing all our kids… [but] I think [the detectives] started taking [my daughter’s homicide] seriously when we finally started coming there. We started making noise because in the beginning they treated me really bad.”

Reeves has observed that the epicenter of the Fentanyl epidemic is at the trailer park located at the intersection of 88th Street and Harlem Avenue.

“That Trailer Park is a big problem. I fought with them constantly [, but they] will not put cameras up. They won't do anything. There's so many people dying in that trailer park. [Sturgeon] lost her daughter there. There's more and more [deaths] after my daughter, before my daughter, but just they don't care. They said they can't put cameras up. You can put them up and down the aisles. They just won't do it. We did [a protest at the trailer park]. We've done one at 87th and Harlem. And we've done them in front of Bridgeview PD before in the past. We've been on the news, been on TV. He took all their numbers and never called nobody.”

For the problems Fentanyl has caused Bridgeview, Reeves proposes that there are solutions that are known to work. “[The way to start is that the mayor can] go on the news and say ‘We have a problem.’ [The police] should be handing out Narcan,” she declares. Narcan, or Noloxone, is an “opioid rescue drug” that reverses the effects of a Fentanyl overdose. Many social service agencies, community centers, clinics, and drug treatment facilities carry it. “Have an event. Show how this stuff works [and] what this stuff they are selling on the streets looks like.” She believes that, if the crisis is too much for a town like Bridgeview to handle, the mayor can ask the county or the state for assistance.

As Reeves exponentially expressed her concern for the youth, she also expressed the willingness to speak at local schools, where she would give children this warning:

“Be careful. Don't follow people, what they're doing. Don't do drugs because they're telling you to do them, because you don't know what's in them anymore. It's not like when we were younger. It’s in weed. it's in Xanax. It's in Vicodin. It's in coke. It's in everything.”

Mayor Steven Landek and Bridgeview Chief of Police Ricardo Mancha could not be reached for comment.

Except for what was mentioned, all photographs were taken by Devin Andrews