This spring, when a friend sent Juli Shamash a Scripps News article about a pair of infant twins who survived a 2024 fentanyl poisoning in southern California, she says she started crying tears of joy.
“I was like, ‘Oh my gosh!’ I was so happy,” she said.
In 2018, the California mom had lost her own son, Tyler Shamash, 18, to a fentanyl overdose.
In the years following his death, Shamash relentlessly and successfully pushed for a new state law in Tyler’s name that requires most California hospitals to include fentanyl testing in urine drug screenings to help determine what may be causing a patient’s symptoms.
A test like that, she said, might have prevented her son’s overdose.
Tyler’s Law took effect in 2023.
Last year, the twins received hospital fentanyl tests, their parents say saved their lives.
“It kind of makes me feel like (Tyler’s) death was not in vain. Like, something positive came out of his death,” Shamash told Scripps News.
Who was Tyler Shamash?
Tyler Shamash was an adventurous teen who had a love for computers, an interest in Bitcoin, and a knack for building and fixing things.
“He was like a little professor. He was on the spectrum (with) mild Asperger (syndrome), so if there was something he was interested in, he would know everything about it,” Shamash said.
He was articulate, loving, polite and funny, but he also suffered from “bad anxiety,” Shamash said, and when he was 14, he started smoking marijuana.
“He said, ‘Mom, when we’re high, I fit in. No one notices I’m different,’” Shamash recalled.
Eventually, he sought out stronger drugs, “and then we noticed he had a problem,” Shamash said.
Tyler attended a wilderness program, boarding school, therapy, and he was in and out of various sober living facilities to help kick the drug habit. However, he eventually started using heroin and overdosed.
At the time, no one knew the drugs also contained fentanyl, Shamash said.
“We got a phone call at 3 o’clock in the morning saying, ‘He’s ok, but he’s on his way to the hospital,’” she said. “I should have had it on my radar because he was using drugs, but I just never thought that he would overdose because he is so smart. He knew every drug and what was in every drug.”
Tyler was released from the hospital without being tested for fentanyl, according to Shamash, and the next day, she said he died from fentanyl poisoning.
Tyler’s Law
After Tyler’s Law passed in California, Shamash continued to push for federal legislation in his name.
Twice in recent years, members of Congress have introduced a bipartisan bill in Tyler’s name that would require the United States Department of Health and Human Services to study how frequently hospitals test for fentanyl and “use the results...to issue guidance to hospitals on implementing fentanyl testing in emergency rooms.”
So far, the bill, supported by bipartisan members in the Senate and the House, seems to be stalled.
However, several states have proposed or enacted similar laws since California’s law went into effect.
Two mothers connect
After Shamash read the Scripps News article in which the mother of the twins, Lauren Hinton, credited Tyler’s Law for saving her two boys and the rest of her family, Shamash said she reached out to Hinton on social media.
“I just said, ‘I was so happy to see that this law in honor of my son was able to save her boys,’” Shamash said.
In the spring, Hinton told Scripps News she believed the fact that her children were tested for fentanyl in the hospital helped trigger a chain of events that also allowed her and her partner to seek support for their addiction.
“All I know is they caught it in enough time because (the twin I took to the hospital) could have overdosed and died,” she said. “It saved his life. It saved my life. It saved everybody’s life involved. Everybody.”
Knowing the family is working on recovery and that the twin boys survived, “that was like the icing on the cake,” said Shamash.
