Last February, Megan Garcia was putting her second-youngest son to bed when she heard what sounded like a mirror falling. She rushed down the hallway to the bathroom where her eldest son, Sewell, was taking a shower. Her husband, Alexander, was already standing in front of the locked door.
“Sewell?” he called. “Sewell?”
But there was no answer. From outside the bathroom, they heard the shower still running.
Megan stuck the tip of a comb into the pinhole in the door handle and it opened. Sewell was lying facedown in the bathtub, his feet hanging over the edge. Megan thought, Drugs. She knew that kids would sometimes take inhalants, or fentanyl-laced pills, and she knew they could use Snapchat to connect with dealers. It was one reason she lectured Sewell so harshly about social media.
Bending over the tub, Megan reached down to lift Sewell by his shoulders. When she raised his head, she saw it wasn’t a drug overdose. On the cream-tile floor of the bathroom was a handgun. Nearby was Sewell’s iPhone — the same device Megan had confiscated a few days earlier, after Sewell, who was 14, talked back to a teacher at school. Megan had hidden the phone in a jewelry box in her bedroom. He must have found it earlier that evening. Alexander had seen him going through the house, hunting from room to room, urgently looking for something. Now they knew what.
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