Behind each fentanyl dying is a household in grief. After younger John Venters died final week close to Stearns Wharf, one in every of his cousins contacted the Impartial to specific how unhappy it made his household to see the grim photograph. “We’d love if we might make clear the particular person behind the physique bag and the disaster at hand,” his cousin, Payge Bellini, mentioned.
“Sonny,” as he was identified to his family members, had turned 20 a few month earlier than. He had been fighting drug use and was launched from a sober dwelling facility on the town simply three days earlier than his dying. He’d been discovered unresponsive in a rest room close to the Dolphin Fountain and was given first assist, in addition to Narcan, a drug used to counteract an opioid overdose. Nonetheless, Venters was unable to be resuscitated and was pronounced lifeless on the scene.
Bellini mentioned Venters was “only a good child” who was “all the time loving and worrying about everybody else.” He moved from Arizona out to Santa Barbara County to stick with his prolonged household in recent times, and was an lively teenager who liked to skateboard and was “a drive to be reckoned with.” He’d needed to develop up too quick in recent times, she mentioned, after coping with a historical past of drug use and a tough dwelling life.
“Johnny wasn’t a person,” mentioned Venters’s older cousin. “He was a child who tried to numb his ache with fentanyl.”
Venters’s grandparents and older brother had taken turns elevating him, and in accordance with his household, he had been dwelling within the New Home Sober Residing facility only a few days earlier than his dying.
Bellini helped create a GoFundMe web page to lift cash for Venters’s prolonged household to have the ability to attend the memorial service in Santa Ynez.
Credit score: Courtesy
“There are a lot of rapid relations with zero means to journey and I can not think about the grief and ache they’re feeling, not to mention the haunting feeling that they’ll’t get to the memorial,” the web page reads.
In a current replace posted on GoFundMe, Bellini wrote: “I’m blown away by the quantity of help our household has acquired so rapidly throughout this horrific loss. I can’t even start to specific our gratitude. Nothing could make this okay however love does preserve us going and bear in mind to skate on for Johnny. To our associates, household, communities in Massive Sur and Santa Barbara and past, thanks. Actually, deeply, thanks. To everybody who liked Sonny and everybody who felt known as to kindness, we respect you. We can pay this ahead all the time. Keep in mind to examine in in your family members and allow them to know you’re keen on them.”
To donate to the household’s bills, go to the GoFundMe web page right here.
