She died of a heroin overdose on his 4th birthday. This is the family she left behind

Four-year-old Joseph Zuniga is building a rocket ship. But it isn’t to travel to the moon, meet Martians or race through the stars.

“He’s going to build a rocket … to go see his mom because he knows she’s up in heaven watching over him,” said Lynette Spencer, Joseph’s grandmother.

Spencer’s daughter, Tara Ashley Danielle Olalde-Zuniga, died of a heroin overdose on her son’s fourth birthday, March 29. She was 29 years old.

“My oldest grandson told me I’m not allowed to cry anymore. I try not to,” Spencer says. It hasn’t been easy.

Spencer has been raising Joseph and his 5-year-old brother, Joshua, for three years now.

She always told the boys that their mother had a sickness. That sickness was a deadly addiction to heroin.

It led Olalde-Zuniga to overdose three times this year. The third time killed her.

Myrtle Beach police were flagged down for an overdose in a room at the Aquarius Motel minutes before midnight on March 18. Officers found Olalde-Zuniga lying on a bed, gasping for air.

Medics used the Narcan to revive her. She told police that she had only used one slip of heroin and refused to go to the hospital, according to an incident report.

Eleven days later, she overdosed again at an apartment on Yaupon Drive in the south end of Myrtle Beach. Medics couldn’t make it in time to save her.

“… Heroin and crack cocaine. That’s the biggest addictions on this beach right now. But the crack’s not killing them; it’s the heroin that’s out there right now,” Spencer said. “One shot, and they’re dead. It’s within a few minutes.”

“They’re killing these young kids out here, but it’s like nobody’s going after these dealers,” Spencer said.

Police have made several arrests of suspected dealers, some snagged after undercover buys, in the last few months. But the opioids remain and its users continue to die.

More needs to be done, Spencer says.

She is calling for “tougher laws” that put dealers behind bars for longer periods of time and “harsher consequences” for users when they overdose to push them to identify the dealers.

“If they’re caught with the stuff and it’s proven that it’s cut with something that will kill them, I think it’s manslaughter,” she said. “Who cares if they can’t prove which one you killed? You’re killing people. … You’re peddling death.”

Spencer also is calling for more affordable treatment options.

“Here, if you do not get it through drug court, you can’t afford these rehabs,” she said. “It’s the mothers, the children, the brothers, the sisters, we’re the ones that have to deal with this. We have to live with this. … It just feels like we don’t matter.”

The addicts aren’t the only ones who suffer in addictions.

“I’ve been dealing with this for 14 years, her addiction,” Spencer said. “I’ve got her out of police cars. I’ve got her out of walking down the street barefoot. I’ve got her out of back closets. I’ve been through hell.”

No matter how many times she tried or how many different strategies she used, Spencer couldn’t stop her daughter’s addiction.

“It makes you feel empty, worthless. There’s nothing you can do. You cannot help them,” she said. “And it makes you feel angry that nothing out there is even trying to help them.”

After her last stint in jail, Olalde-Zuniga was supposed to go straight to a halfway house. She didn’t.

“Instead of them making sure she went to the halfway house, she called a friend and went right back on the beach,” Spencer said.

Olalde-Zuniga’s drug problems started at a young age, her mother said. By the time she came to live with Spencer at the age of 16, “she was already terribly gone and messed up,” she said. “When I got her down here and put her in school, she’d skip. … You can put them on the bus. You can send them off to school, but that don’t keep them in school.”

It wasn’t always bad. Spencer said her daughter had moments of sobriety when she would do well with her two boys. But then that old crowd of friends and old way of life would call her back again.

Olalde-Zuniga suffered from attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder; she was bipolar and borderline schizophrenic, Spencer said.

Olalde-Zuniga was medicated for her mental illnesses when she went to prison and Spencer said that helped, but they couldn’t keep up the $700-a-month bills for those prescriptions when she was released. She turned back to drugs.

Spencer said her daughter came over to spend time with the boys the week before her death. She “took them down to the pool and played with them,” she said. “We had three good days in a row.”

Those happy moments and good memories are what they try to hold onto now — that and Joseph’s plan to build the rocket.

Olalde-Zuniga “loved to sing. She loved to dance. She loved people,” Spencer said. “When she was around the kids, she was loving. (They would) kiss, hug, they snuggled together. She loved her brother, liked to laugh a lot and then she had her demons.”

This story was originally published April 10, 2017 at 4:42 PM with the headline "She died of a heroin overdose on his 4th birthday. This is the family she left behind."