WASHINGTON (NewsNation) — A Michigan mother shared a very personal story with House lawmakers about her two sons’ fentanyl overdose deaths during her wrenching testimony on Capitol Hill.
Rebecca Kiessling spoke at Tuesday’s House Homeland Security Committee hearing on the human cost of the humanitarian crisis happening at our nation’s southern border.
“My children were taken away from me,” Kiessling said, fighting through tears as she spoke to the committee.
Kiessling’s sons, 20-year-old Caleb and 18-year-old Tyler, died two years ago after taking what she described as “fake Percocet laced with the deadly drug fentanyl.”
On “Morning in America,” Kiessling said she thought that just one death from fentanyl coming across the southern border would be enough to sound the alarm. However, since the deaths of her two sons, the CDC reported an increase of nearly 15% in fentanyl deaths from 2020 to 2021.
“The numbers are going up instead of down,” she said. “They’re having the biggest drug bust they’ve ever had for fentanyl. And yet the numbers, overdosing and dying are still going up.”
Kiessling said it’s important to note that her sons did not know that what they were taking was lethal. She explained that they thought what they were getting was safe, but they ended up getting straight fentanyl pills disguised as Percocet pills.
“Fentanyl, they’re murder pills,” she said. “They got fake Percocet. They were all fentanyl. My son Tyler had five times the amount enough to kill.”
Kiessling’s testimony echoed House Republicans’ stance about the fentanyl crisis being a direct result of the border crisis but urged that the federal government needs to react to this crisis as they did to the recent Chinese spy balloon.
Watch Rebecca Kiessling’s full interview in the video player above.