After Yelm High School student Collin McLaren’s passing in 2022, his mother, Karisa Carpenter, has tried to educate the community on the dangers of fentanyl and drug use.
Her outreach to the community will continue from noon to 5 p.m. Sunday, Aug. 20 with the second annual Skate for Collin event at the Yelm Skate Park.
The event will honor McLaren’s life after he tragically died on May 1, 2022, from fentanyl poisoning and raise money for the Skate for Collin cause.
Carpenter first began to raise community awareness on the topic of fentanyl and drug use with the first Skate for Collin event last August.
“My goal is to reach families and kids to bring awareness to the dangers, and to teach kids that sober is safe,” Carpenter said. “That’s the only way we can guarantee we’ll be safe, is if we don’t do drugs. I’m trying to create a culture of ‘being sober is cool’ amongst the skate community. I want to educate, make families aware of what fentanyl is. There’s a difference between overdose and poisoning. Overdose is when you consume too much of a substance that you know what it is, like consuming too much heroin or cocaine. But when you’re consuming a drug like heroin and you have no idea there’s fentanyl in it, you’re dying from fentanyl poisoning.”
At the event, Carpenter will recite statistics and new information from 2022 about fentanyl. Skateboarders will also compete for prizes in the best trick contest, which will begin at 3:30 p.m. There will also be pizza from Pizza Hut on site, as well as several performances throughout the day. People can order Skate for Collin shirts, and proceeds from the shirts will go back into the Skate for Collin fund.
Carpenter said her son had an amazing sense of humor and described him as a goofball. She said he was extremely caring to other people and was very smart.
“I called him an old soul, especially as he grew up. He always looked into things, researched things and continued to educate himself,” Carpenter said. “Unfortunately, Collin knew the dangers that were out there, but he had already experimented with drugs and had developed an addiction, is what I believe. He was struggling.”
Carpenter said her son had only been using drugs for a year.
“It started in ’21’, and he passed away in ’22,” Carpenter said. “It was in the midst of COVID when he started experimenting with Xanax. Doctors don’t want to prescribe medications for anxiety to kids because the pills can be addictive. He just started getting them off the street, but I don’t know who or where they came from.”
Carpenter said her son was into skateboarding, and that he began to pursue it again during the COVID-19 pandemic because it was a physical outlet for him. She said he loved to do the “pop-shove-it” trick, which was one of his favorites.
Though skateboarding provided a physical outlet for her son, Carpenter said the skateboarding culture can include drug use.
“Kids congregate at the skate parks. It’s a hangout spot. Even if a kid doesn’t skateboard or scooter, they hang out there,” Carpenter said. ‘That’s where a lot of drug deals happen, or where kids get their vape pens. A lot of those transactions happen at the skate park and even the Yelm City Park. I just want to make parents aware of what’s going on through their child’s social media, Snapchat.”
Carpenter added that fentanyl does not discriminate and has affected people of many different backgrounds, cultures and financial states. “Celebrities have died, countless celebrities. Robert De Niro’s grandson was also just killed from fentanyl. It doesn’t care who you are,” Carpenter said. “You can be rich, poor, an addict or not an addict. There’s kids out there that are 12, 13, 14 years old and they try a pill that their friends gave them. They take it and try it for the first time, and then their parents find them dead.”
She added she wants youth and parents to know about the dangers and uncertainty of fentanyl, as it can be present in street drugs that buyers believe are Adderall, Xanax or oxycodone. She added that it’s even in marijuana concentrates that can be bought “on the streets.”
“Nothing you buy on the streets is safe. Nothing,” she said.
Growing up, McLaren was drawn to sports and played football, baseball and wrestled. Carpenter described the sports community in Yelm as their “second family” while McLaren was coming up in sports.
“I’ve developed relationships with a lot of families in Yelm because of sports. All of Collin’s best friends were met through sports,” Carpenter said. “Unfortunately, when the pandemic came, all the sports stopped. They took school and sports from the kids, and the kids had nothing to do all day. He began hanging out with different people while we were in all of this isolation, close to where we lived. Some of them were not good influences.”
She said that growing up, McLaren was always the kid who said he wouldn’t touch drugs and wouldn’t take pills.
“He gave in,” Carpenter said. “He finally said, ‘fine, what’s it all about,’ and tried it. He tried it with a friend who I still have good relationships with. His friends are clean now, but they were able to tell me some of the inside information, what it was like the first time they took a pill together.”
She said her son seemingly became addicted immediately, as he and friends were looking to buy more pills the next day.
“Were there fentanyl in those pills? It’s a possibility. But it’s just Russian roulette,” Carpenter said.
Carpenter said last year, most of the people who attended the Skate for Collin event were kids and few adults.
“I was hoping to reach the parents and let them know this event is for them as well,” Carpenter said. “Just to attend and hear me out, get some information, because I feel like people don’t take this seriously until it affects them. I didn’t. It took me losing my son to understand the depths of this crisis, and I’m trying to reach people before they have to go through what I went through because it was literal hell.”
Carpenter added that she hopes to start a nonprofit this year to raise money for the Skate for Collin cause in order to expand the event to other parks in the area.
