On April 8, Thomas Hayes Mayo’s oldest sister gave birth to the first grandchild in the family and named him Hayes after her little brother. On April 9, Thomas was a groomsman at his brother’s wedding in Florida. On the morning of the 14th, Thomas was found dead of fentanyl poisoning in his bedroom in Oxford – having turned 21 only 12 days before his death.
Thomas is the youngest of four children and is described as a “great, All-American kid” by his father, Cal. He played all sports growing up but ultimately honed in on soccer. He was a good student and very likable. His family said he was one of those unique individuals who never had any enemies and everyone liked him and he liked everyone. Like most teens growing up in Oxford, he started drinking at a relatively young age in early high school. His parents kept an eye on him and knew he was experimenting with partying, but found it to be fairly consistent with the experience they had with their older children – even if he was a bit ahead as the youngest of four.
Thomas always knew he would end up at Ole Miss and, in the fall of 2019, he started his freshmen year. During his sophomore year, he moved into a house with some of his fraternity brothers that was between campus and the square and right in the mindset of everything. It became the party house for his group of friends and didn’t create the best living environment for Thomas. By the end of that year, he had developed an issue with Xanax.
“In the spring of his sophomore year, he comes to us and tells us that he has a Xanax problem,” Cal said. “He went off to Cumberland Heights Treatment Center outside of Nashville in May of 2021, and he came back and had taken care of whatever the Xanax problem was. To our knowledge, he never went back to the Xanax. There was no evidence from any of his friends or his roommates that he ever got back in that world again.”
His life was back on track. He began dating the girl he had been after for years as she felt comfortable he was in a good place. She would have nothing to do with him until he got his life together. He was living in a different house a bit off the beaten path which was a better living environment and everything seemed to be moving along. However, the usual drinking and smoking weed many college students participate in continued.
“Everything seemed to be just moving along,” Cal said. “He was drinking and smoking weed and we knew that, and it concerned us but we had no evidence of any other recreational drug use – neither did his roommates or girlfriend who would’ve broken up with him had she found out about it. We were trying to keep a handle on it as much as we could as parents but, at the same time, realizing he is maturing and making his own choices.”
On Wednesday, April 13, Cal had just arrived home from Florida the day before after a weekend of celebrating their son’s marriage and was working with Thomas on his resumé. He had finished his job that day delivering flowers for a local floral shop. That night, Thomas’ fraternity was having a party. This was the last time Cal would ever see his son again.
“Two of the guys at the party bought two Percocet off the street and Thomas and one of the guys who had bought the Percocet took a razor and divided it into little pieces to share and take over the next hour to two,” Cal said. “They pregame at a bar and then they go to the party.”
At the party around 9:30, Thomas contacts the seller through social media. The seller comes onto campus and sells them two more pills. They divide up the pills between the three of them.
“He starts not feeling good and goes back to the condo he is living in and sits around with one of his roommates and girlfriend,” Cal said. “They order pizza and somewhere around 2 or 2:30 in the morning Thomas goes to bed claiming he didn’t feel good.”
Around 6 or 7 the next morning, Thomas dies. He was found late the next morning. Cal received the call that his son had passed shortly after noon on the 14th. He had been dead for five or so hours.
“He just went to sleep and never woke up,” Cal said.
The Percocet Thomas had taken turned out to not be Percocet but a concoction containing fentanyl made with a pill press to look like Percocet.
“When the pills are made, they don’t mix the contents well enough, so you can take a pill, split it in half and one side will have a lot of fentanyl in it and the other will have none,” Cal said. “The other two guys didn’t hit the pieces of the pill with fentanyl. Thomas ended up with a megadose and died of a fentanyl overdose.”
From what his family learned after Thomas’s death, he had taken a Percocet pill one other time a few weeks before his death. He wasn’t unaware of the dangers of fentanyl as his father had sent him an article only a few months earlier about men in the Naval Academy who would have died if someone hadn’t come along with Narcan. However, Thomas didn’t think it would happen to him.
“He was certainly not ignorant of the dangers of fentanyl, but I think he had that typical young male mindset of ‘that will never happen to me – that happens to other people,” Cal said. “He made a stupid mistake, and it cost him his life.”
Cal said the answer to solving the current fentanyl issue in the United States is not easy because, as long as there is a demand, people in this world will fill it. He said the Just Say No and D.A.R.E. campaigns were largely unsuccessful and it will take more than a one-day conversation in high school to stop this from happening.
“I think we are going to have to start talking about it more and at a much younger age,” Cal said. “Not just about drugs and misuse and addiction but do it in the context of a broader discussion about mental health issues generally. Certainly, not all people who misuse recreational drugs are people in dire need of mental health counseling, but most of those people are. Thomas certainly benefited through what he went through in rehab for 30 days. It helped him a lot. I think there is a stigma issue here that has to be addressed where people just don’t want to talk about it.”
Cal said nobody wants their child to have an issue with drug abuse, addiction, or mental health, but the truth is there is not a single person who is immune from it.
“All of us have mental health issues and no one is perfect,” Cal said. “We have anxieties and inferiority complexes and anger management issues. Some of us have family members who are much more likely to suffer from them than maybe we are individually, and I just think we have to talk about those things early on.”
David Magee lost his son, William, less than two years after he graduated from Ole Miss. He has a second son who nearly died of an overdose and was saved and has now been sober for ten years. David now spends his life working in this crisis professionally having created the William Magee Institute for Student Well-Being on Ole Miss’s campus to help prevent and break the cycle of addiction in students’ lives. David agrees with Cal that the answer to this problem isn’t to start education in college about the dangers of fentanyl.
“I just crawled to this effort not because I wanted to but because I was called to it because our family suffered so much from substance use disorder and we were just on our knees,” David said. “My son, who nearly died, has just as much to do with me launching this work. We humans don’t do death very well. We hear deaths are happening, and we immediately want to get to the cause and that is great because death is awful and we need to stop it. But I see masses of young people and adults walking around as the walking dead who people don’t understand what they are suffering with is substance use disorder.”
This substance use disorder begins before students arrive on college campuses. This generation has had a big push of using Xanax and Adderall and drugs that are fine when prescribed to them by a doctor. However, there is always a danger when taking substances that have not been prescribed to you.
“Over the last two decades, we have become a prescription pill nation and that is pushed down into our high schools,” David said. “They aren’t just showing up on a college campus and suddenly trying this for the first time. Studies show these young people got trained that if it is a prescription pill, it is not as bad as cocaine, which they equate with an illegal dangerous drug. We essentially have a perfect storm of that and the mobile phone, which is where most of your dialogue and drug deals go on. Young children have been desensitized to prescription pills.”
As the demand increased, drug dealers figured out how to make counterfeit versions of these pills to benefit from the demand.
“I had a high school student say to me, ‘I was taking Percocet but it wasn’t Percocet if you bought it on the street,” David said. “It is counterfeit with fentanyl in it. They are making synthetic fentanyl over and if they dust some of that into the pills, then they are much more addictive.”
David said that scaring kids about fentanyl doesn’t work because they are well aware fentanyl will kill them – they suffer from substance use disorders that developed after years of misusing prescription pills.
“It has got to start upstream because it is an education issue,” David said. “If they arrive on any college campus in America, and they have been misusing Adderall for three to five years, which is common in high school and college, they will say they know fentanyl will kill them. But the thing is they have developed a substance misuse pattern around counterfeit Xanax or Adderall.”
Their substance abuse disorder compels them to continue to use.
“A lot of them are hooked on so-called Percocet or Adderall that is fake, and they keep buying that and now it has fentanyl dusted in it,” David said. “It is their substance misuse that is leading them accidentally there. I know a lot of people that have died with likely fentanyl in their system and every single one of them I know suffered from substance use disorder.”
They have years of a relationship with a drug dealer that is difficult to break.
“If they are full-fledged with marijuana use in early high school, which is very common, they have a relationship with a drug dealer all through high school and that drug dealer does not let that relationship sit dormant for long before they are starting to push their messages about the pills they have that is cool,” David said. “By the time they are in college, they have years of formed and shaped brain behavior around this.”
The Magee Institute is addressing how to solve this problem and part of that is through peer-to-peer education teams, which have been named after Thomas. The Thomas Hayes Mayo Lab has created a happiness team to promote good mental health and cultivate joy in students’ lives.
“There is some proof that having college students counsel college students or high school students counsel high school students, is effective for the reason your family member may not listen to you, they might listen to a classmate,” Cal said.
These students have been properly trained for the discussion to take place in a way that is not accusatory or confrontational but to bring happiness back into the student’s life.
“Counseling and treatment work,” David said. “They have to get in and figure out what is going on before their brain just takes them over. Society tells them when they are young that it is fun and it is cool, but I have yet to meet a single one that has told me they are having fun when they are strung out on substances.”
David said he has learned that scaring them doesn’t work but talking to them about finding their joy does.
“Substances steal your joy and take every bit of it – maybe not the first time you use it but the fifth time,” David said. “They don’t understand how the marijuana they are using three times a day all day is stealing their joy and opens them up to more fentanyl risk because they have a drug dealer relationship. I won’t give them a drug talk. I will ask them if they are happy. 100 percent of the time, they say not really. None of them say they are happy. They say they are struggling.”
David will talk to them about finding their joy and get them signed up for counseling,
“You can find your joy again and it will be amazing,” David said. “Let me just get you someone to talk to. My rate of being able to convert students into counseling with that line is really high.”
“Let’s focus on things that make you happy,” Cal said. “That is what the Magee Institute is trying to do. We just have to start early. It can’t start in high school with a one-day program. It has to be a consistent thing talked about regularly so that the problems are recognized. We can do a better job of engaging the problem.”
Cal said while Thomas wouldn’t have liked the attention of having his name on the lab, he would’ve liked that his name will be associated with a cause to change things.
“If Thomas knew he could help other people and make them find joy and contentment, he would be very pleased with that knowing that will be his legacy,” Cal said. “People will be able to get the help they need and find a better, happier life at the lab.”
Cal said it can be the first time they use a drug, it doesn’t matter. It can happen to anyone and, hopefully, the lab in Thomas’s honor will save lives.
“He made a very stupid mistake and had it actually been Percocet, he would have had a false high and woke up the next morning and gone to class but it was not,” Cal said. “It needs to be talked about.”
