By CNN
“Everything just kind of seemed like a blur that day,” Becky Savage said. “Your mind is not really meant to process something that extreme.”
The day Savage is describing is June 14, 2015.
Her two oldest sons, Nick and Jack, were celebrating at high school graduation parties the night before. The boys came home about 12:30 a.m. and checked in with their mom, who had been waiting up.
The next morning, as Savage was picking up laundry in Jack’s room, she noticed that he wasn’t stirring as she tried to wake him.
“He was unresponsive. I called 911, and I remember hollering for Nick, for him to come up, and how he never came.”
Nick, her eldest son, was downstairs sleeping in the basement with friends.
The first responders arrived and tried to resuscitate Jack, and then Savage noticed one of them going downstairs to the basement.
“I had no idea at that point what they were doing in our basement. And then I remember one of them coming up and asking for a coroner. That’s the last thing that I remember that day.”
The Savage family: Justin, Nick, Mike, Matthew, Becky and Jack.
A tragic consequence
The boys were pronounced dead. Both had accidentally overdosed on hydrocodone and alcohol. Someone at one of the graduation parties had passed around the prescription pills.
Savage says the boys had never been in trouble with drinking or drugs. They just happened to make “a bad choice that unfortunately cost them their lives.”
For the next year, the Savage family — Becky, husband Mike and two younger sons, Justin and Matthew — worked on healing and picking up the pieces. They did not discuss their loss publicly until Becky was asked to speak at a local town hall about underage drinking.
“I had never spoken publicly before, and I was assured there would be maybe between 15 and 20 people there. So, I agreed to do it, and over 200 people showed up. It was just overwhelming.”
That’s when the family realized the impact their story could have on others.
Jack and Nick Savage pictured with their mom, Becky.
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