A grieving Georgia mother said she feels like she lost her son twice — first to a tragic drug overdose and then to the negligence of a mail courier company that lost his ashes during a recent shipping.
Tangenika Lee’s son, Deontray, was only 15 years old when he overdosed from a fentanyl cocktail in 2020. After memorializing his life, the family had the teen’s body cremated and then placed his ashes in a box until a custom urn could be made.
However, the ashes were never transferred into a personalized urn.
Years after his death, Lee, who lives in the Atlanta suburb of Hiram, shipped the ashes via UPS to a sister in Connecticut who was making the urn. The shipment was sent at the start of January 2024 with a promised delivery date of Jan. 10, but it never arrived.
Despite all tracking efforts, it became evident that Deontray’s remains were lost in transit, and the mother is heartbroken.
“If you ask me, it’s just like a repeating nightmare,” Lee said, according to KFVS 12.
While Lee was upset, she attempted to figure out what happened to the ashes, calling the police to try to open an investigation and then filing a missing package report with UPS, returning to the facility where she mailed the package.
“I went inside of the store and pulled cameras from January the 8th, and they came back out to tell me that that package actually had left their facility, and it was nothing that they could do about it,” Lee said.
A customer service rep told the mother that her parcel was last tracked to a UPS distribution center in Connecticut. The mother said in an interview with WSB-TV that she was going to travel to the state and look for herself.
Lee has taken to her Facebook to garner support from families and friends, replacing her profile picture with the UPS logo. She also posted receipts and the tracking slip, which showed something was wrong in the delivery process.
“I don’t want no $135 check. I want my son’s…
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