‘It’s heartbreaking’: Family grapples with loss as overdose deaths spike in Horry County
At 1:36 p.m. Dec. 20, Zachary Daniels pawns a $3,000 gaming system for $150.
He goes to a nearby trailer park in the Conway area, just around the corner from where he lives, and spends his money on drugs.
And at 4:38 p.m., he’s pronounced dead - that’s how quick it took for drugs to take his life, his mother Connie Daniels said.
“Over across the street was where his body was,” Daniels said. “I ran. I fell five times trying to get to my child.”
Her son was one of more than 100 fatal overdoses in Horry County last year. Daniels found her son’s body across the road from their home after a neighbor warned her that her 28-year-old son was lying on the side of the road.
Daniels, who said she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, said she’s not supposed to walk more than 100 feet, but she did not hesitate to run to her first-born when she saw him lying there unresponsive.
“I knew when he left me,” she said, of holding her son. “He’s at peace.”
Zachary Daniels battled mental illness for most of his life, his mother said, and was diagnosed with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder at a young age. Daniels said she began to see signs when her son would talk about seeing angels at 3 years old, and then when he set a bedroom on fire and just sat there in front of the television at 6 years old. He was first admitted into a mental hospital in Charleston at 6, she said.
When he was on medication, he acted like a zombie - something he hated, Connie Daniels said. Not taking his medicine properly and having mental illness led to Daniels starting to smoke marijuana at 12 years old, and it led to cocaine and heroin use, Daniels said. And for a long time, she did not know he was on heroin.
“We put him in rehab after rehab,” Daniels said. “Suboxone clinics did not work for him.”
Daniels said her son overdosed at least 15 times in his life and suffered three heart attacks from the drugs he used.
On the day he died, Daniels said she found a crack pipe in his jacket pocket and there was a used needle on his person at the hospital.
“Zachary was an extraordinary young man who had a mental illness,” Daniels said. “He was one of the most caring, thoughtful young men you’d ever meet.” But, she says, he was a “tortured soul.”
His grandmother, Lois Edge, said losing her grandson was one of the hardest situations she has ever lived through.
“He was always a good person, until he got messed up,” she said.
Overdose numbers
Fatal overdoses increased in 2019, with 97 confirmed and at least 25 cases pending autopsy reports, according to the Horry County Coroner’s Office. The last high spike of fatalities was in 2016, with 126 overdoses.
Horry County Coroner Robert Edge said he believes Narcan has stemmed the increase in overdoses in Horry County, but it still “hasn’t slowed it down.” Narcan is typically used to treat the impacts of an overdose.
“At least half of accidental deaths are overdoses,” Edge said.
Autopsy reports from overdose deaths in the county typically show a mixture of drugs in a person’s system, and many times fentanyl is one of those drugs, Edge said.
“It’s heartbreaking,” he said. “The hardest is these families having to endure it and knowing there’s not a lot they can do to help.”
| Overdose deaths in Horry County by year | |
| 2012 | 47 |
| 2013 | 56 |
| 2014 | 69 |
| 2015 | 92 |
| 2016 | 126 |
| 2017 | 94 |
| 2018 | About 93 |
| 2019 | 97, with about 25 pending |
Now, Connie Daniels is left with a box of her son’s ashes, a prayer he wrote years ago, photos and memories.
Daniels said she saved her son “more than a mother should have to save a child.”
After suffering the loss of Zachary, she said she believes dealers need to be held accountable for selling drugs that cause fatal overdoses, and is actively making calls to lawmakers.
“I want to get something done that will save another life,” she said.
