On a recent summer evening, dozens of people gathered at the Keeper of the Plains to remember their loved ones who lost their lives to fentanyl.
People who were taking their evening walk along the river weaved through the crowds at times, looking at banners with the names and faces of people who died from the drug.
Three mothers who lost their children – ranging in age from 18 to 32 – organized the gathering to raise awareness of fentanyl-laced drugs in the community.
“So, hopefully, they don’t have to travel down this long, and I’d like to say lonely road, but it’s not,” organizer Lisa Bortz said. “It’s a long, crowded, rocky road getting more and more traffic on it all the time, and hopefully tonight we can bring awareness to somebody and save a life.”
Her daughter Jillian, or Jill, struggled with addiction for years.
“We would get her sponsors and a couple of other people, and they would go to some desperate places to get people and bring them back,” Bortz said in an interview. “ She was just that dedicated to recovery, but then she would slip, for whatever reason.”
But fentanyl changed everything.
“The cycle would repeat itself until when fentanyl came along,” Bortz said, “and that was the end of the story. It took about three months once she got a hold of fentanyl for it to take her over.”
After Jillian died, Bortz said she started learning more about the drug. She created a Facebook group to help support others who were going through the same thing.
That’s where she met Valerie Sandoval and Hazel Dornshuld, who also helped organize the rally.
“So when he passed [in 2022], I think the number was 6,000 people,” Sandoval said about the Facebook group. “One year later, it’s already over 17,000.
“That just tells you in one year, in just a small area, how many we’re losing and still losing. It’s so scary to me.”
At the rally, Sandoval said she lost her 18-year-old son, Isaac, after he took what he thought were Percocets a month before his high school graduation.
“So, we were no longer planning a graduation, we were planning a funeral.”
She describes Isaac as her boy. He enjoyed working out and always made sure people felt included.
“He has all walks of life coming through our house,” Sandoval said. “It wasn’t just … the athletic people, it was a group of many and from all different schools … he knew so many people.”
After her son’s death, Sandoval also began raising awareness about fentanyl. She now often speaks at school events in the Maize School District, where her son went.
“It needs to be talked about more, we’re just too quiet about it,” she said.
“Especially where I live in Maize, people … on the west side think, ‘Oh, we’re in a safe area, it can’t happen to us.’ It did.”
Dornshuld lost her son Joey Giurbino after she said he used what he thought was cocaine. Toxicology reports later showed it was mostly fentanyl. He was 27 years old.
“Anybody I know that's done it like that, they end up dead or they get on something harder than that,” Dornshuld said.
“But he paid his bills. He paid his rent, and he also took care of his boy and himself. So I couldn't, I didn't think, in my mind, he was all that bad.”
According to his mom, Joey worked as a chef at the hotel near Eisenhower National Airport in Wichita. He moved here from California to be with his mom and his younger brother.
“He was so kind,” she said.
“The Facebook thing, ‘Joey, you were there for me.’ ‘You gave me a place to sleep.’ ‘You gave me money.’ ‘You fed me.’ ‘You took me to eat buffet food’ or just stupid stuff like that,” Dornshuld said about memories people posted on social media about her son.
Bortz and Sandoval said they were also flooded with messages of memories of how their children helped others.
“Everybody was texting me about how she had come to the bowels of addiction and had pulled them out. But who was there for her?” Bortz said.
“Yeah, I know, and that night, why was Isaac alone? He was never alone. Why that night?” Sandoval said.
In all three deaths, no one has been arrested, and all three mothers said they want justice for their children.
“They need to start treating these cases as a murder and convict people,” Sandoval said.
Along with their advocacy and awareness work, the moms have also started passing out naloxone, a medicine used to rapidly reverse opioid overdoses, and fentanyl test strips.
On some of the naloxone kits Valerie hands out, she tapes pictures of her son Isaac to it.
For Bortz, she’ll pass kits out while she’s feeding the unhoused community in south Wichita.
Dornshuld puts up a sign in her yard letting people know when she has naloxone, sometimes referred to by the brand name Narcan, and fentanyl test strips, which she says are going fast.
"I have a bunch of people coming to me for those now … [fentanyl test strips] are going faster than the Narcan.”
“Well, prevention, I mean, good,” Bortz said in response.
“When you’re testing, you don’t take it,” Sandoval added.
At the rally, they passed out those materials. Bortz also arranged for sober living groups to speak.
“Bringing awareness to Wichita not only needs to be about awareness,” she said, “it needs to be about harm reduction, it needs to be about mental health, it needs to be about recovery, it needs to be about sober living.”
After the rally, the work of the three mothers will continue – and it likely will for some time.
“We are not going to back down,” Bortz said at the rally. “We are not going to give up, and we are not going to go quietly.”
