Angela Walker’s last words to her 18-year-old daughter as she left on Thursday morning were: “I love you.” Her daughter, Kylie Walker, told her mom she was going to hang out and sleep over at a friend’s house that night.
Sometime during the evening, Kylie and three of her friends shared some street drugs they had bought at one of the teens’ houses. At about 2 a.m., three of the teens were showing symptoms of a drug overdose and Kylie was unresponsive.
The teens were sent to hospital — they have since been released — but Kylie could not be revived.
“One of her friends tried to wake her up. She even performed CPR, but she was non-responsive by the time paramedics arrived,” said Walker, a single parent. “It happened so fast.”
Walker believes peer pressure contributed to her daughter’s death and she hopes that speaking out about the circumstances may help warn other parents.
“We had an open relationship and I made it a point of telling her that I did not judge her.”
Walker says her daughter had a substance-use problem but had successfully completed a six-month addiction-treatment program in Vancouver about a year and a half ago.
Since then, she had regained weight, returned to school and was just a few courses short of graduating Grade 12 through online courses at the Westshore Centre for Learning and Training.
“She was supposed to be clean. But I suspect now that she had started dabbling [in drugs] again,” said Walker, who also has a nine year-old son.
She said her daughter’s death has had a profound effect on her son, who she said had a strong bond with his older sister.
Walker says she is still in disbelief about her daughter’s death. “I still think that she is going to walk through the door.”
In her grief, she is advising other parents to talk to their children, to be open and to have conversations about drug use and peer pressure.
“I believe Kylie didn’t tell me about her starting to using drugs again because she didn’t want to disappoint other family members. If she had done so — and believed that she was at risk of using again — she could have called me that night. I would have done anything to help. It just eats me up,” she said.
She consoles herself in knowing that she ended the last conversation she had with her daughter with “I love you.”
“I had made her a cream-cheese sandwich and soup and she said to me: ‘You’re the best cook. I love your food. I love you,’ ” said Walker.
A GoFundMe campaign has been set up to help pay for Kylie Walker’s funeral expenses. Any funds left over will benefit Walker’s son.
