Janel Firestone found her son — the 24-year-old, just-resigned mayor of the tiny Pennsylvania town of Mount Carbon — in what she assumed was a deep sleep. She tried to wake him for his overnight shift at the local supermarket, but he could not be roused, even after she sprinkled him with water from a wet washcloth.
She was not concerned. Brandon Wentz had always been a heavy, heavy sleeper.
The preceding days had been hard for him. The family had just moved to a nearby town, requiring him to give up his office, and he had agonized over his resignation letter. He felt like he was letting his constituents down.
Photo: AP, courtesy of Michael Bunner
It was a small thing, that letter, but Wentz’s inability to write it reflected his recent struggles.
“You could just see the stress and sadness in him,” Firestone said.
Wentz finally submitted a rather perfunctory 180 words and met up with a close friend, Ryan Fessler. They hung out in Wentz’s room for a while and Fessler left.
A few hours later, Firestone tried to roust her son. She gave up, deciding to let him sleep off a migraine. What she did not know was that her son was not sleeping — he was dying of a fatal overdose of heroin and fentanyl.
By the time Firestone found him at 6:30am the next morning, foaming at the mouth, he was gone.
A police investigation was launched into Wentz’s death and state troopers sought to question Fessler, but they would never get the opportunity. Fessler, too, would die of an overdose less than six months later.
Two friends poisoned by the same deadly cocktail — two families left to suffer and to question who, and how and why.
Wentz’s passing on Nov. 9 last year came near the end of a year that saw a record number of drug overdose deaths — more than 72,000 nationwide, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said.
Two weeks before Wentz died, US President Donald Trump declared the opioid epidemic to be a “public health emergency.”
By that time, fentanyl had emerged as one of the biggest threats. A synthetic opioid both cheap to produce and more powerful than heroin, it has flooded the illicit drug market in recent years.
The drug was implicated in two-thirds of Pennsylvania’s 5,456 overdose deaths last year, a 150 percent increase over just two years in one of the nation’s hardest-hit states in the ongoing opioid epidemic.
Wentz’s family members said that they never saw it coming.
“I never would’ve thought he had an issue,” said Firestone, speaking publicly about the circumstances of her son’s death for the first time. “Brandon made a mistake and paid the ultimate price.”
Wentz had a lot going for him. The young man known to all as “Honcho” was just 22 when he became mayor of Mount Carbon, population 87, a speck of a town in eastern Pennsylvania’s coal region.
Wentz, whose grandmother had served as Mount Carbon’s first female mayor in the 1980s, relished the role and took it seriously, fielding constituent concerns and helping the volunteer fire department rebuild after its firehouse burned down.
“We greatly appreciated him. The compassion that he showed for us, I can’t even explain it. It was overwhelming,” fire department trustee Mary Ann Sadusky said.
Apart from his mayoral responsibilities, Wentz was a doting older brother, a professional writing major at Kutztown University, a basketball fan who covered the NBA for a sports Web site.
Universally well-liked, he had a wide circle of friends and could make anyone laugh.
“He essentially was a mayor before he became The Mayor,” said a longtime friend, Brandon Radziewicz, who credits Wentz with bringing him out of his shell in high school.
However, Wentz had another side. His closest companions were aware that he was dabbling in heroin, which they frowned on, but felt powerless to address.
Once Ryan Fessler entered Wentz’s life, his behavior became more difficult to ignore.
A couple years older than Wentz, Fessler was artistic and musical, quick-witted and sensitive. He worked a succession of low-wage jobs, but never seemed to have a grand plan for his life.
“He just wanted to do his music,” his mother, Kim Kramer, said.
Fessler’s own struggle with drugs started with the prescription painkiller Percocet and then, when that became too expensive and difficult to obtain, shifted to heroin. He asked his mother for money, but she refused, knowing where he would spend it.
By the fall of last year, Fessler was profoundly addicted — a “lost soul,” said Julie Sears, a friend from childhood who began dating him that summer.
A few months after becoming mayor, Wentz was pulled over by state police, who found a small bag of marijuana and a glass pipe in his Pontiac Grand Prix.
Wentz pleaded guilty to DUI and was sentenced to 72 hours in jail. He also lost his driver’s license, which forced Wentz, a commuter student, to take a leave from Kutztown.
It was his first and only brush with the law, aside from a few traffic tickets, and it affected him deeply. He was upset that his classmates were leaving him behind, and disappointed that he had let himself and his family down. He wrote a note from his jail cell, apologizing to his mother for what he had done.
Wentz had suffered anxiety and depression since high school, and now those symptoms grew worse. He began seeing a psychiatrist, but did not think the medication was working.
Friends believed that his heroin use became more frequent in the summer and fall of last year.
Fessler was beside himself when he found out his good friend was dead — as distraught as his mother and girlfriend had ever seen him — and insisted on going to Wentz’s house.
A few weeks later, on Christmas Eve, his girlfriend found him in bed. He was high and he was crying.
“I killed my best friend,” he said. “I gave it to him.”
In his grief, Fessler’s addiction grew worse.
Kramer begged her son to move to Florida to be with his father. He had no drug contacts there, and would have a shot at recovery.
Fessler agreed. He spent the early part of this year in the Sunshine State, in treatment. He was doing better.
However, Fessler also faced unrelated drug charges in Pennsylvania, and he had to return for a hearing. His family worried that he would relapse. They plotted to bring him back just long enough to go to court, to watch him closely and whisk him back to Florida as soon as it was over.
Firestone caught wind of Fessler’s scheduled court appearance, alerting state police that he would be back in town. A trooper told her he would go to the hearing to ask him about Wentz’s death, but Fessler never made it.
Early on the morning of April 16, he fatally overdosed on heroin and fentanyl, the same combination that killed Wentz. He had been in Pennsylvania for just more than two days.
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