The ‘day of death’: How a mystery drug, spate of ODs changed west Michigan

• An awful stretch of overdoses last year in Kalamazoo is now known as ‘the day of death’ by police
• Users dropped dead not long after taking what they thought was cocaine 
• Rather than punish, police worked with health officials to warn users, an approach that could save lives 

KALAMAZOO — Night had long fallen. Inside a tidy, stainless steel lab on Upjohn’s downtown medical campus, Prentiss Jones peered at 14 drops of blood, looking for a killer.

In less than 29 hours, emergency crews had crisscrossed the city, responding to at least 19 overdoses. Three floors above Jones, bodies had arrived at the morgue. 

By 11 p.m., the toll had reached a half-dozen: a chef at his girlfriend’s house, two cousins in a Jeep, a couple in their home, a man in a hotel. As Jones examined their blood to identify the drug that killed them, a college student who had gone out with friends the night before clung to life in a nearby hospital.

In Kalamazoo, some investigators now call it “the day of death.” Casual and longtime drug users ingested what they thought was cocaine. Moments later, they were “overdosing, dying,” said Ronald Maynard, a long-time cop turned lab technician.

The mystery began to unravel not long after Jones slipped samples of victims’ blood into the Randox Evidence Investigator, which uses light to tease out the chemical signatures of drugs in the blood.

As it turned out, those who overdosed were hit with near-pure fentanyl, an opioid that shuts down the central nervous system. Typically smuggled from Mexico, it is exacerbating a drug crisis that kills nearly 3,000 people per year in Michigan.

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What was happening in Kalamazoo on April 13-14, 2023, was so swift and deadly that it required a new level of cooperation among police, public health officials, first responders, community groups and others. Not long ago, overdoses were a police matter, but Kalamazoo and other communities have adopted harm-reduction approaches that eschew zero-tolerance and instead work with users and police to save lives.

Within hours of the first deaths, Dr. William Nettleton, the county’s medical director, called together dozens of leaders, issued news alerts and fanned out messages on social media warning users.

He “was right in the middle of it,” said Dr. Joyce deJong, medical examiner at the time. 

Police would later arrest two low-level dealers. But in the first hours, “it really was primarily about public health,” she said.

The approach may have saved lives. But it couldn’t prevent a tragedy whose ripples are still reverberating.

A dream, then nightmare

Brooke Brennan was shaking off her dream. In it, she had reached for her boyfriend, Dustin Marshall, 37, a local chef.

“I looked back at Dustin, but I couldn't get to him, and he smiled,” she said. 

She awoke at her home in Portage about 8 a.m. on Thursday, April 13, 2023,  to the sound of a running shower upstairs. 

She knew.

Marshall had gone upstairs shortly after 8 p.m. the night before for a shower. She went to bed, fell asleep. Now, 12 hours later, the water was still running.

Brennan threw herself against the bathroom door. He was on the other side, slumped on the floor, his face blue.

When police arrived, they found marijuana ash, but also a white powdery substance wrapped in a lottery ticket. That was a surprise to Brennan, who knew Marshall might smoke what he called “a shower joint.”

But hard drugs?

“That is a deal-breaker for me,” said Brennan, who told Bridge she wouldn’t have stayed with him if he was doing more.

Marshall’s cousin, Stevie Hatch, agreed: Dustin’s occasional cocaine use was a thing of the past, wasn’t it?

“It didn’t make sense,” Hatch told Bridge last month.

What Portage police didn’t know at the time was that doctors at Bronson Methodist Hospital the previous evening had treated patient after patient who’d arrived sluggish, unconscious and sometimes not breathing.  

Emergency medical crews had responded to at least 10 ODs in less than seven hours starting at 4:08 p.m. April 12, according to a health report. Most patients were treated and released. But life support pumped oxygen to Elaina Whittemore, 21, who had been a student at Kalamazoo Valley Community College.

She went out with friends drinking and dancing the night before at Papa Pete’s, a bar.  She’d taken pills. At a friend’s place, she “fell unresponsive,” according to a police report.

Toxicology tests later revealed a mix of benzodiazepines, cocaine, marijuana, fentanyl and MDMA, a drug normally sold as ecstasy.

Brain scans at Bronson confirmed the worst: She would not survive. Whittemore had registered as an organ donor; a message notified Gift of Life.

Just before noon, at a Days Inn motel north of Brennan’s house, medical crews tried unsuccessfully to revive Brandon Steven Kitson Redmond, 38, a master mechanic.

Redmond was expecting to be a father in two months, according to his obituary. He’d been trying to kick heroin, too. His fiancee told police the two of them were to meet for his appointment at a nearby methadone clinic. 

Redmond never showed.

As police packed up evidence, including a small plastic bag with white powder, dispatchers were called to yet another overdose. Paramedic Ryan Mejeur said those calls “almost always” go one of two ways.

“If we get there early enough … we give them Narcan and wake them up, … and they're fine,” Mejeur said.

Other times, “we get there and they've been down for so long that they're dead.”

It was too late by the time Mejeur arrived at the call in a Kalamazoo apartment parking lot.

James Williams, 42, was behind the wheel of a Jeep. His cousin Steve Williams, 32, was in the passenger seat. 

The Williamses were jokers and family men. They loved fishing at nearby West Lake — a pastime they shared, even after a long prison term for James for sexual misconduct, and until the time of their deaths, said James’ mother, Mae Williams.

“If the sun was out, James was fishing,” she told Bridge from her home, studying a photo of the two of them on her 60th birthday.

On the night of April 12, a neighbor’s motion-detection camera flickered on at 10:46 p.m. as Steve Williams’ Jeep pulled into the parking lot. 

Moments later, sensing no motion, it flickered off again.

No use in lectures

Kalamazoo County usually responds to one or two overdose calls each week.

Mejeur, the paramedic, doesn’t lecture users who survive. Substance use disorder doesn’t work that way, he knows.

“They've heard speeches probably a million times: Don't do this. It's bad for you. It could kill you,” he said.

Steve Williams knew. He’d graduated less than a year earlier from the Drug Treatment Court Program of the Ninth Circuit Court, a 10-minute walk from the parking lot where he died with his cousin.

In court, “it was always ‘yes, sir’ for him,” said Sara Green, court administrator. “He always had a sense of courtroom decorum. He was respectful, and he worked hard.”

Steve Williams juggled several jobs to support his family. He was struggling in the days before his death, said case manager Bryan Stapert.

Stapert urged him to drop by to talk. Williams sounded “enthusiastic” and promised to visit the courthouse on Monday.

‘These pieces have to add up’

By midday Thursday, medics had already responded to 16 overdoses. At Bronson Hospital, they told supervisor John Pinkster that they needed more than the usual single dose of Narcan to revive victims. 

“Everybody's like, ‘Wait, these pieces have to add up to something,’” Pinkster said.

Emergency room Dr. Tim Schiller had already pronounced the Williams men dead. He was performing a tracheotomy to insert a breathing tube into a user at the hospital when yet another call came in.

“I’m thinking, what the heck is going on?”

At the same time, county and city leaders exchanged texts and calls.

The health department’s Nettleton called a virtual meeting with about four dozen police, medics, doctors, dispatchers and public health officials. Among them was Dr. Bill Fales, medical director of the Medical Control Authority. He’d mapped a report of the overdoses.

Most were downtown, but they fanned out as far as Portage. Most victims preferred cocaine, a stimulant that can cause psychosis and heart failure, but they arrived at Bronson sluggish, unconscious and struggling to breathe.

They “clearly sounded like opioid overdoses,” Fales said.

‘What is this stuff?’

Just after 1 p.m., medics received a call to respond to the second double fatality of the day.

Wilson Rodgers, 58, was in bed, dinner on his lap. His wife, Sophia Rodgers, 56, was in a living room chair, a line of white powder nearby.

They had been together for so long that Wilson’s mother, Florine Rodgers, couldn’t remember when they met. Wilson Rodgers worked for an air-conditioning company. He often called to check on his family.

“It was always, ‘Mama, I’m out, do you need anything?’” Florine Rodgers, told Bridge.

A witness told police the couple used cocaine. Sophia’s cousin used cocaine, too, and had OD’d the night before but survived, the witness said. As workers began to move the bodies, Florine was asked if she wanted anything from her son’s house.

“What I want,” she recalled answering, “you can’t give me.”

By mid-afternoon, relatives of several victims had gathered in the parking lot of the Kalamazoo Public Safety building, seeking answers. Inside its crime lab, Maynard was running test after test, finding nearly pure fentanyl, but nothing else.

As night fell Thursday, the county’s chief medical examiner — deJong — decided that she couldn’t wait for autopsies scheduled the next day. She unzipped the protective pouches that carried the dead and drew their blood. 

County health officials had begun alerting the media, treatment centers and more to spread the word.

At police headquarters, officers began referring to it as the “day of death,” said Capt. Mike Ferguson. 

No ingredients list

Near midnight, the Randox Evidence Investigator spat out preliminary results from the blood samples.

They confirmed what was becoming clearer as the day progressed: The killer was fentanyl — surprising in its simplicity.

Fentanyl is about 100 times more potent than morphine and an increasingly common additive to street drugs because it is cheap to make and highly addictive. About half of counterfeit opioid pills contain fentanyl, according to the US Drug Enforcement Administration, which reported seizing 80 million fentanyl-laced fake pills and nearly 12,000 pounds of fentanyl powder nationwide last year.

Most of the dead in Kalamazoo weren’t opioid users. They likely had no tolerance for the drug and no Narcan on hand either.

The effects were swift: Expecting a quick boost, their heart rates instead slowed, as did their brain activity and blood pressure. 

Marshall, the chef, died with a lighter in his hand; Wilson Rodgers held a TV remote.

‘Something out there’

On Friday — two days after the first overdose call — federal District Court Judge Alisa Parker-LaGrone asked for a moment of silence in drug court.

“We know that the road to recovery is tough, that sometimes there is a relapse that happens,” Parker-LaGrone said.

“We don't want you to use, but I'm putting this out here, because right now, there's some really dangerous things happening in our community.”

The address was extraordinary in that it marked a temporary shift from the usually abstinence-only conversations of drug court toward harm reduction, said court administrator Sara Green.

Elsewhere in Kalamazoo, workers set up pop-up Narcan distribution tables in city parks and treatment centers. Recovery advocates sent messages by phone, social media and text.

From the rear of the courtroom, choking back tears, court administrator Green announced that two boxes of Narcan would be located in a rear room, where they could be grabbed without judgment. 

Nearly every kit was gone before the end of the day, she told Bridge.

At Bronson Hospital, life support had been switched off for the 21-year-old patient in intensive care. Time of death: 2:14 p.m.

Across town on Saturday night, Brennan climbed into bed with her daughter. She had celebrated her 8th birthday on Friday, the day after Dustin Marshall died. Brennan had delayed telling her the news.

The girl wept.

“But why?” Brennan remembers her daughter asking.

“I don't know,” Brennan answered.

“How long am I going to be sad for?” 

“I don’t know.”

Epilogue

How many people that day were brought back from the brink of overdose by naloxone will never be known. 

It’s equally impossible to know to what extent the health department’s warnings, news reports and pop-up tables prevented more death.

The overdose cluster stopped as abruptly as it started.

Those who worked those days say the overdoses laid out a blueprint for swift, collaborative efforts — built on existing relationships and focused on saving lives above anything else.

“I didn't even know we had that kind of collaboration up to that point,” said Ferguson, the police captain. “I knew that there were separate entities that did a lot of work, but I didn't realize that we could spin up and get that much going so quickly.”

The deaths accelerated harm reduction efforts in the Kalamazoo area. Free naloxone kits to treat overdoses are now located in the city and will soon be in hospital properties throughout Kalamazoo, Calhoun and Van Buren counties.

“You're kind of being naive … if you think that not giving (people) a safe way to use — even while you're trying to convince them to stop — is a bad idea,” said Dr. Mark Kerschner, an emergency medicine doctor at Bronson Methodist Hospital. “It's a good idea to educate people.”

Police haven’t revealed the source of the fentanyl. Ferguson, the police captain, would only say that “the investigation is ongoing.”

Two months after the deaths, police arrested two lower-level dealers. They were friends of some of the deceased. One tried to warn customers something was wrong with the drugs.

“That shit is goin back it’s no good,” read one message to Marshall, the chef, according to a police report. 

By that time, Marshall was dead. His phone had been seized as evidence.

Last month, James Smith, 41, pleaded guilty to distribution of a controlled substance and faces up to 20 years in prison when he is sentenced Feb. 6. Known as Jamie, he grew up with the Williamses, their family said.

A codefendant, Patrick Martin, 27, was friends with the chef, Marshall, according to Hatch, Marshall’s cousin. Martin pleaded guilty to using a communications device to commit a drug felony; he faces four years in prison. 

“I struggle with this,” said Nancy King, who founded the COPE Network, a Kalamazoo County harm-reduction effort, in 2016 after her daughter, Marissa, died of an opioid overdose.

“Most of the time, they're just prosecuting other drug users and people who have addictions instead of helping them” King said.

She spoke from her office in the city’s east side, where 11 chairs formed a circle for support meetings and a Dr. Seuss poster exhorted: “Today is your day! Your mountain is waiting. So go on your way!"

At West Lake in Portage, a recent late afternoon wind sent oak leaves skittering across the sidewalk and dock.

Natasha Williams sidestepped a couple of men walking onto the dock. They were holding fishing rods and tackle boxes, much like her brother, James Williams, and cousin, Steve Williams, had countless times before.

It’s here where the cousins grew up together, and it’s here where she goes to talk to James in the quiet.

“I tell him I miss him,” she said, wearing a T-shirt featuring photos of both men, holding fish.

“I tell him nothing will ever be the same without him.”