Carole De Nola, a Gold Star mother whose son had died of a fentanyl overdose, stood at the elegant San Francisco War Memorial for a Christmas party in 2022 with a rolled-up scroll festooned with long holiday ribbons in her hand.
Inside the bundle of documents was De Nola's appeal for congressional attention to the accumulating toll on service members of the drug that had killed her son, a dangerous synthetic opioid.
De Nola spotted the target of her appeal, then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, and made a beeline for her, only to be swarmed by aides who took the scroll and swept De Nola aside.
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Ari McGuire, De Nola's only child, had been a 23-year-old reconnaissance scout with Fort Bragg's storied 82nd Airborne Division. He'd wanted to go to Ranger School and had already received an Army Commendation Medal in 2018 for a deployment to Afghanistan.
But on a Friday night in August 2019, De Nola got a call from an Army officer: Her son was on life support in a Fayetteville, North Carolina, hospital. Ari's heart had stopped beating while riding in an Uber, coming through the gate at Fort Bragg. An ambulance had managed to revive him, and Ari was induced into a coma upon arriving at the hospital.
De Nola, her husband Joseph, and the cantor from their synagogue had made the daylong trek from California to North Carolina…
