Fentanyl came to a tiny UP town. Then the funerals began

• Four young men in a tiny Upper Peninsula town died of fentanyl overdoses in less than a year
• The deaths were a wake-up call for rural communities that the opioid crisis strikes everywhere
• More than 2,200 Michiganders died of opioid overdoses in 2023

RAPID RIVER — It was bad weather even for the Upper Peninsula, with snow flying so thick and fast that drivers inching along US 41 could barely see the flashing yellow light that marks the center of Rapid River. 

Still, the parking lot of the small town’s combination American Legion and township hall was full as more than 100 people made their way to seats past a table adorned with picture frames.

Five young men smiled in the photographs, one in a muscle shirt and cowboy hat, another in a Detroit Tigers cap. 

Markers attached to the frame listed the day each young man died.

In this unincorporated community of fewer than 400 residents outside Escanaba, four young men died of fentanyl overdoses in the past 12 months, with another dying two years earlier.

The deaths stunned this idyllic northern Michigan town, where the losses touched seemingly every resident. The local football coach lost four of his former players to fentanyl, including his son. Another family lost a son and a nephew. Two young men attended the funeral of a classmate who died of a fentanyl overdose just months before the drug killed them, as well.

Three of the victims were from the same 35-person high school class of 2021.

After the latest death, residents gathered for a soul-searching community meeting in mid-February to try to come to terms with an epidemic that few noticed until it was too late.

“This is our reality now, folks,” John Gudwer, Escanaba’s director of public safety, told the crowd. “We’re not Mayberry anymore.”

‘Doesn’t feel real’

Billing itself as the walleye capital of Michigan, Rapid River is an old logging community nestled in the birch and pine at the tip of Little Bay de Noc. Pickup trucks parked on the ice of the Lake Michigan inlet recently, near fishing shanties. 

At the center of town is the Rapid River Pub, where dart tournament trophies line one wall and the Wi-Fi passcode is taped beneath the mount of a 10-point buck. Alongside a poster advertising the Friday night $19 walleye special was a new sign for an opioid community meeting.

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“People are numb,” said pub owner Thomas Szocinski, drinking a Mountain Dew in a back corner. “We understand this is a global thing and a national thing and a state thing, but for it to impact our small community doesn’t feel real.”

Two of the dead were patrons of the pub, and another, Travis Hebert, was a former bartender at the bar and the son of the former owner.

On March 26, 2022, Mike and Roxann Hebert drove to the home of their son Travis to deliver dog food for Travis’ dog, Harley.

Travis was smart, funny and loved to fish. He’d struggled with addiction, but the 29-year-old had been doing better. He was weeks away from earning a certificate from Bay College as a water treatment technician.

Mike Hebert recalls finding his 29-year-old son lying on the kitchen floor like he’d curled up to take a nap, his arm under his head like a pillow. His skin was blue.

“I instantly knew that he was gone,” Mike Hebert said.

A toxicology report confirmed Travis died of an overdose of fentanyl, a synthetic opioid 50 times more potent than heroin. In hospitals, fentanyl is used for sedation during surgeries and for severe pain relief. On the streets, it has become the synthetic opioid of choice because of its availability and relatively cheap price. It can be injected, snorted, smoked, taken orally by pill or tablet, and spiked onto blotter paper. Sometimes, it is laced into other drugs, unbeknownst to the user.

A 2-milligram dose, similar to five to seven grains of salt, can cause death for an average size adult.

From what he saw in the kitchen that morning, Mike Hebert said it appeared his son had smoked fentanyl, fallen asleep and stopped breathing.

While fentanyl was ravaging much of the state when Travis died in 2022, it has just arrived in the rural UP. 

‘Who's next? Is this the last time I shake their hand? Is that the last time I give him a hug?’

— Thomas Szocinski

Two years later, on March 22, 2024, the sister of Mason Kudlick-Johnson found him dead in their family home. He’d played football and basketball in high school for the Rapid River Rockets and graduated in 2021. The 21-year-old with a “goofy personality and big smile” had gotten out of a stint in drug rehab several months earlier and was working at a local lumber company when he died of a fentanyl overdose.

Two of Mason’s high school classmates and football teammates, Wyatt Smith and Tobias (Tobi) Frederick, attended his funeral. 

Both would be dead in less than a year.

Three days after Mason’s death, Eric Mallard didn’t show up to his job as a heavy equipment mechanic. He’d been celebrating his 25^th birthday over the weekend when his family found him dead in his apartment. In his body was alcohol, cocaine, marijuana and fentanyl.

“He was in a good place — he had a girlfriend and a job he liked,” said Eric’s mother, Julie Mallard, who is the executive director of the Delta County United Way. “He liked to party, but we thought his main problem was alcohol.

“The word that kept echoing in my head was how senseless it is — all these senseless deaths.”

On Dec. 28, the second member of the Rapid River class of 2021 died of a fentanyl overdose. Wyatt Smith was known around town for a big smile and an even bigger personality. His family held weekly Bible study classes for young adults, and Wyatt had been working as a lineman for a utility company.   

At Wyatt’s funeral, Tobi Frederick got a hug from Rapid River Principal Rachal Gustafson. 

“I told him how proud I was of him,” Gustafson said. “He was proud of himself. He said he’d just gotten his CDL (commercial driver’s license), was a truck driver and had a girlfriend. Things were going great.”

On Jan. 28, a month after Wyatt’s funeral, a friend found Tobi dead in a home owned by Tobi’s family. His death is believed by the Frederick family to have been from a fentanyl overdose, though toxicology reports are not complete.

“It’s unfathomable,” Gustafson said. “We’re all so interconnected in a small town, (but), as adults, we may have been naive about what has been happening.”

A statewide crisis

Rapid River is learning what much of the rest of the state already knows about fentanyl. There were 2,287 opioid-related overdose deaths in Michigan in 2023, a 250% increase from a decade earlier. More than six Michiganders die from an opioid overdose on an average day — a five-death Rapid River-level tragedy every 20 hours.

Of those deaths, 95% are from synthetic opioids like fentanyl.

The fentanyl crisis took longer to reach the UP, but the cheap, easy-to-transport drug is now mixed with many of the drugs that can be purchased illegally north of the Mackinac Bridge, said Greg Toutant, CEO of Great Lakes Recovery Centers, which provides drug treatment and recovery services across the Upper Peninsula.

Delta County is older and poorer than the state average, with few large companies where young people can get jobs.

“There’s a demand (for drugs) in a lot of these high-poverty areas,” Toutant said. “There’s a lot of isolation here, and, when young people don’t feel connected, they’re going to experiment, and that leads to harder and harder substances.”

Catholic Social Services provides addiction assistance in Marquette and Escanaba. 

“I thought we maxed out (serving) 3,000 in 2023,” said Kyle Rambo, executive director of the Marquette-based agency. “It looks like we served over 4,500 in 2024.

“We’re starting to see the scope of the problem.”

Of the typical headcount of about 80 inmates at Delta County Correctional Facility, about 75% are there on drug-related charges or have drug addictions, said Delta County Commissioner Kelli Van Ginhoven, who serves on the county’s opioid task force. 

“Medical costs at the jail have been skyrocketing because of it,” she told Bridge. The county spent $560,000 on jail medical bills in 2024, overwhelmingly for drug treatment.

“In our highly conservative area, we brush things under the rug, we don’t talk about our problems,” Van Ginhoven said. “It goes to a long history of issues.

“Yoopers like their beer and alcoholism is part of our bloodlines and it’s part of our culture. A lot of our kids, unless they go to college, they end up working at Meijer and getting pregnant or doing drugs. It’s just a cycle.”

Those who fall into addiction face a crippling shortage of drug treatment in the region, said Great Lakes Recovery Centers’ Toutant. 

“There’s not enough trained professionals out there to meet the true need,” he said.

That’s what the Mallard family found out. 

Before he died, Eric, the 25-year-old heavy equipment mechanic, had agreed to go into drug counseling, but “the wait locally was three months,” said his mother, Julie Mallard. “He could get into a counselor in Iron Mountain in three weeks and he said yes, but by that time, he’d changed his mind.”

‘The word that kept echoing in my head was how senseless it is — all these senseless deaths.’

— Julie Mallard

Money is supposed to be available to help remediate the region’s drug crisis. Delta County is scheduled to receive about $1.6 million over an 18-year period as its share of national settlements with opioid manufacturers and distributors that were deemed partly responsible for the ongoing opioid epidemic. 

As of June 1, 2024, the county had received $193,000 to help with education, treatment and recovery efforts. But the county still hasn’t spent any of the funds, which began arriving into its bank accounts in January 2023, before the string of fentanyl deaths in Rapid River. 

County officials are now requesting proposals for use of the funds.

Teaching parents

Kelly Dittrich stood at the doorway to the community meeting handing out programs for the event and purple ribbons, which she said symbolize drug abuse awareness. In the summer of 2023, Dittrich sat beside her nephew Mason as he went through withdrawals from an addiction to Percocet and fentanyl. Mason went to a rehab facility the next day and returned months later seemingly having kicked his habit.

Looking back, Dittrich admits that her family didn’t recognize that Mason’s addiction struggles could end in a funeral. That’s a common lament heard across the community in the wake of the overdose deaths.

Now, community members, led primarily by the families of Rapid River’s dead young men, are trying to educate the public to ward off more overdoses.

“We had no idea that it (fentanyl) was such an issue,” said Dittrich, who until recently ran the Rapid River Mini-Mart. “I didn’t know fentanyl test strips (which can test drugs to determine whether it has been laced with the potent opioid) even existed. I went out and bought some, and then I found out that the health department gives them away.”

Families of the victims took turns speaking at the meeting, while large cardboard boxes of Narcan were passed through the aisles. An addiction specialist physician demonstrated how to use Narcan to revive someone who had stopped breathing from an opioid overdose.

“I think we’re in a different place, as far as the adults in the community go,” Dittrich said. “I’m hoping that the young adults are, too, but I can’t be sure. We’re trying to make them understand that you’re one decision away from death.”

‘How do we grow from this?’

Puddles formed on the thick ice of the bay in recent days as the temperatures rose above freezing, and the snow drooped along Highway 41, where Dittrich travels delivering Narcan every day to individuals and businesses. A hair salon now stocks the overdose reversal spray at each stylist’s desk “in case someone drops,” Dittrich said. A machine tool shop asked for a supply, too.

There are plans to install boxes around the tiny community where people can pick up free Narcan and fentanyl test strips anytime they want.

Similar efforts in recent years in other parts of Michigan have made a difference. Statewide, opioid deaths dipped by 5% from 2022 to 2023, with experts suggesting that the wide, free availability of Narcan is saving lives.   

Dittrich attended a meeting Feb. 26 with community leaders and state Sen. Ed McBroom to push for legislation to increase criminal penalties for possessing fentanyl with intent to sell. McBroom told Bridge he is likely to introduce a bill this session related to fentanyl, though details currently aren’t set.

Police departments across the UP have partnered to fight the drug crisis with a joint task force called the Upper Peninsula Substance Enforcement Team (UPSET). Residents can leave an anonymous tip online or by calling 906-228-1002.

Life staggers on for the families and friends of those who died. Attendance has gone up at the Bible study sessions at the Smith family home in the months since Wyatt died. 

“We share memories and grieve together,” said mother Becki Smith. “It has been a blessing to me in my time of mourning.”

Julie Mallard now attends the monthly meeting of the local chapter of Face Addiction Now, formerly called Families Against Narcotics. She talks about her son, Eric, and how he died.

 “It’s still hard to understand how one tiny grain of fentanyl can kill somebody and not kill others,” she said. “All we can do is get the message out. We have to increase awareness.”

At Rapid River School, Principal Gustafson now carries Narcan in her purse.

“I know I don’t want to go to any more funerals,” she said. “It’s been too many.”

Staving off more funerals won’t be easy. 

Local addiction specialists say they are beginning to see an even more powerful drug appear in toxicology results. Xylazine, a large animal tranquilizer, is being mixed with fentanyl. And a recent educational forum about the dangers of opioids for students at Escanaba’s alternative high school didn’t go well, said commissioner Van Ginhoven. 

“They didn’t want to hear it,” she said.

“There's a reason why the drug suppliers keep coming up here — there's a demand,” pub owner Szocinski said. “How do you grow from this? We can sit there and stare at that brokenness, or we can grow as a community.”

There already have been fundraisers in the community to support a new group called Overdose Awareness of Delta County, and more are planned. Szocinski is hopeful, but he can’t help but look around his pub at the young adults sitting at the bar and playing pool, and wonder if the community can do enough to keep some of them from the same fate as Travis, Mason, Eric, Wyatt and Tobi.

“I see the young crew still coming in, and I’m thinking, ‘Who's next?’” Szocinski said. “Is this the last time I shake their hand? Is that the last time I give him a hug?”

Rapid River’s lost sons