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It was a stressful Tuesday morning in San Francisco, and Christina Lacourte went to her son’s bedroom to roust him for school. The door was locked, so she had to wrangle it open with a coat hanger.
Inside, she saw her son in his bed, under the neon storefront “Open” sign he had wanted for his birthday in sixth grade. His face was turning blue, and his veins were visible. Black fluid oozed out of his nose and mouth and pooled on his sheets.
She raced to retrieve the two doses of Narcan she kept in her kitchen drawer for exactly this moment, the one she had long feared, but they did not revive him. She remembers bawling and screaming as she called 911. Her apartment, normally charming with splashes of pink, suddenly became a gray blur of paramedics, police officers and medical examiners.
Her son left in a body bag.
Surely, she figured, her son had died from fentanyl, but the autopsy report came back with no mention of it. Instead, it included a word new to her — “cychlorphine.” It remains the only time it has appeared on a San Francisco coroner’s report.
Dante Paul Lacourte was 16 years old.
A novel drug reaches San Francisco
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The death occurred in Ms. Lacourte’s three-bedroom apartment in the affluent Lower Nob Hill neighborhood on April 7.
