Gus Walters had no way of knowing his conversation with his son on a late afternoon in 2021 would be their last. But Austin Walters’ death from an anxiety pill laced with fentanyl thrust the Walters family into an unimaginable tragedy – and set them on a journey to save other families from Austin’s fate.
Austin Walters, a 30-year-old living in Brunswick, Georgia, grew up in a happy home, where he was often the center.
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“He was the glue to our family,” Gus Walters, his father, told Breitbart News.
Like tens of thousands of other Americans killed by fentanyl, Walters was a respected citizen – the furthest thing from a gang banger. He was a successful salesman for an agricultural company, proud owner of two hunting dogs, and a member of a loving family.
Austin, who dealt with depression and anxiety, stayed home from work the day he suffered a deadly fentanyl dose. He and his father spoke on the phone that afternoon.
“He said he was feeling a lot better, and that he was probably just going to go ahead and lay down because he had not slept well the night before, and that he would call me in the morning,” Gus said.
They ended the call as they always did, telling each other “I love you.”
An hour later, Austin’s roommate found him unresponsive. He called 911 and then Austin’s parents, Gus and Beth, who rushed to the Brunswick hospital.
“Mr. Walters, I’m pretty sure this is fentanyl,” Walters recalls the doctor telling him.
Despite working in the drug industry for a chain of pharmacies at the time, Gus did not know exactly what fentanyl was.
“I had heard fentanyl, but we had not heard about it like it was the problem that it is” he said. “We were completely naive and unaware of the danger of fentanyl being in other drugs, and the copycat pills and capsules and everything that was out there.”
The doctors told his parents that Austin would never recover. They were forced to make the agonizing decision to take him off life support.
After their tragic loss, the family threw themselves into learning what led to Austin’s fatal overdose and about the nationwide fentanyl crisis.
Walters said his son occasionally took Xanax for his anxiety, but purchased it off the street. “I don’t know that he actually abused it,” Walters said. “I think he just actually took it when he needed it, so to speak, not like on a daily basis.”
But they soon discovered just how small a deadly fentanyl dose can be.
“It’s smaller than the pencil lead on the end of a pencil, that’s all it takes,” Gus told Breitbart.
Gus and Beth voted but were never a political family, Gus said. But after Austin’s death, their advocacy powered the passage of Austin’s Law in Georgia to give prosecutors teeth to target drug dealers.
But fentanyl continues flooding into Georgia and other states from across the nation’s border. And the Walters realized there was more work to be done beyond the Peach State.
“Now that we’ve done what we did with the law, we talk to somebody new almost on a weekly basis who loses a loved one, and it’s not necessarily a young person,” he said. “It is the leading cause of death in the United States of Americans between the ages of 18 and 45.”
The more the Walters learned about the national scale of the problem, the more they directed their blame at the current administration.
“This issue has gotten significantly worse over the last four years, and the Biden-Harris administration have done nothing – nothing – to curtail this issue,” Gus Walters said.
The Walters family continued doing their homework. They were shocked at what they learned.
“I did not realize until we started pursuing the law and really digging into the fentanyl thing that they the Chinese and the Mexicans are in coercion together, and they’re putting fentanyl in everything, because fentanyl has an addictive property to it,” Walters told Breitbart.
While the migrant caravans and border jumpers get much of the attention, he and his wife learned fentanyl is entering the country through regular customs. “They don’t have the manpower or the equipment available right now to scan the vehicles and stop enough of the vehicles that are coming into the country,” he said of law enforcement.
Despite the problem’s scale, a solution exists. But the Biden-Harris administration has not acted, making Walters “really angry.”
“They have the AI-enabled equipment already built, sitting in warehouses at the border ready to be installed, but this current administration will not issue an executive order to spend $300 million to have that equipment installed,” he said. “That’s all it would take, $300 million. And I know that sounds like a whole bunch of money, but when you think about the money that would have spent in Israel and in Ukraine, it pales in comparison.”
“I’m all for helping our allies and everything else,” he added, “but we got to start taking care of our own people first.”
Walters takes issue with elected officials for politicizing an issue so personal to him and countless others. He lambasted Democrats and the media for blaming Trump for the defeat of the Senate’s pro-migration border bill early in 2024.
“The truth of the matter is that bill had so much other money in it allocated to other things, like helping the illegal immigrants once they get into the United States, finding housing and supporting [with] food. That’s why they didn’t sign that bill. …It was all of the other fluff that they had in there, it was going to be paying to support the illegal immigrants that are already in the country.”
In January, leaks of the bill’s contents doomed it within hours, with senators in both parties ultimately opposing it. Those leaks, which were later proved accurate, revealed the bill increased legal immigration levels while expediting work permits for migrants released into the United States — despite the bill’s proponents characterizing it as a border security bill.
Most infamously, the bill permitted tens of thousands of migrants to cross the border every week before the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) could implement any type of border controls.
The stark difference between Trump and Harris – who said she would pass the failed Senate pro-migration bill into law – was on display Friday, when Trump and Harris each visited Texas.
Trump held a press event in Austin focused on border security and migrant crime. Harris held a pro-abortion rally in Houston featuring an appearance by pop superstar Beyonce.
Walters’ blood boils at the thought of Harris talking tough on the issue while celebrating just miles from the border with pop stars.
“I’m probably gonna say some things you can’t print, but I think she’s a damn joke,” he told Breitbart. “She does not take seriously the impact of the problems at the border. I don’t think she accepted the responsibility when it was given to her. I don’t think she followed through with her fiduciary responsibility to do what she should have done at the border. I think she’s been almost complicit in what’s going on at the border, by virtue of the fact that she’s done nothing in the position that she’s held in the White House to fix the problem. And I think all of these celebrities and everything, meeting her and being in Texas – you know, up until when just a few months ago, she never even gone to the border.”
Walters feels strongly about Biden and Harris’s callousness on the issue.
“In everything that I’ve ever heard [Harris] or Biden talk about and mentioned fentanyl, they mentioned fentanyl so casually, just like they were talking about what they had for lunch,” he said. “I mean, that is how casual they bring it up, and they discuss it, and it comes out of their mouth, and then they move on to another subject.”
Gus and Beth hope other Americans hear their story and take steps to prevent more tragedies like theirs.
“People need to educate themselves,” Gus said. “People need to understand how dangerous fentanyl is, how prolific fentanyl is in the United States, and then they need to have difficult conversations with their children and adults in their family about how dangerous it is to take a pill from anybody. If you take a pill from anybody, or if you use a pill that came from any other place other than a prescription bottle you got, you’re endangering your life.”
But as important as awareness is, strong policies in Washington must be set in place to prevent more Americans like Austin from meeting a tragic end from fentanyl.
Gus and Beth believe Donald Trump will implement those life-saving policies.
“I believe that Trump actually cares more about the citizens of the United States than the Biden-Harris administration,” Gus said. “I know that the Trump-Vance ticket actually digs in and understands the difficulties that are facing Americans, and I feel like the President Trump, within his first 100 days, will do something about this federal crisis.”
Bradley Jaye is a Capitol Hill Correspondent for Breitbart News. Follow him on X/Twitter at @BradleyAJaye.
