She had already stopped in to check on two of her client families and was on her way to pick up another client. Everything was going great.
Until suddenly, it wasn’t.
“I had such a good future going for me. I just [expletive] it up.”
You see, Erika was stoned out of her mind on fentanyl, and her addiction was about to bring her life crashing down—yet another casualty of the drug epidemic.
Police in Bucyrus, Ohio, had received a complaint about a swerving driver and went looking for the car. At about 2:20 p.m., they found Funfgeld parked on the side of the road.
“I observed her right thumb and index fingertips appeared to have thermal burns and blackness to the pads, causing me to believe she had frequently used a pipe to smoke illegal drugs,” the arresting officer wrote in his report.
“I observed her skin to be pale and … clammy while her mouth had white saliva built up around her lips.… She appeared very slow and lethargic in her speaking and movements, causing me to believe she was under the influence of a depressant.”
That’s right—fentanyl, up to 50 times stronger than heroin and 100 times stronger than morphine, one of the deadliest substances on the planet, responsible for tens of thousands of overdose fatalities each year.
After a police drug dog alerted to the presence of drugs in Funfgeld’s car, she gave in and told police where to find them.
Police can be seen on body camera videos piling bags of white powder and bottles of pills on the hood of a cruiser—a chilling display, especially when you consider you’re looking at drugs casually being used by a person hired to take care of children.
In body camera footage, police can be heard asking, “With you working for CPS [Child Protective Services], what makes you want to do fentanyl?”
She responded, “I’ve had a problem in the past.”
Police asked, “Do you have an addiction problem, or you just do it every once in a while?”
Funfgeld responded, “Every once in a while. I’ve done it so long on and off, it’s just—I don’t even get high from it anymore.”
“I had such a good future going for me. I just [expletive] it up.”
She admitted to police that she was in the habit of smoking fentanyl while at work.
Funfgeld was charged with three counts of felony drug possession with the possibility of increased charges depending on lab results.
Shockingly, she had gotten her MCCS job despite being fired last year from the Franklin County Children Services agency for violating their drug-free workplace policies. She was at that agency for less than three weeks—still in her probationary period—when she was caught and dismissed.
“She always seemed maybe out of it,” said Lindsay Hempy, a Marion County caregiver who worked with Funfgeld. “Sometimes she just really didn’t look like she was paying attention or she was like loopy.”
So if others noticed that Funfgeld was “loopy,” shouldn’t they have realized that she was in no shape to be driving children around?
By stopping Funfgeld, the police may well have saved the life of the child she was on her way to pick up.
Aron Reinhart, parent of one of Funfgeld’s clients, a boy who has himself had problems with drug abuse, said, “I don’t know whether my son was getting drugs from her. I don’t know if she was falsifying his drug test.”
“Why would CPS be sending somebody like that into my home? That’s unacceptable in every aspect.”
Noting that people are justifiably upset, Elizabeth Moore of MCCS said, “I can totally understand that, you know. We are upset as well.”
MCCS even released a statement that read: “At Marion County Children Services, the safety of the children we serve comes first.
“When we discovered Erika Funfgeld lied on her application and hid her employment history,” the statement continues, “we took action and had her drug tested a second time. We later fired her as soon as we knew she posed a danger to the families we serve.”
“We’ve also strengthened our drug-testing policy to ensure something like this doesn’t happen again.”
Sort of like closing the barn door after the horse already ran away, right?
With children’s lives at stake, we simply must do better than this.
