SIOUX FALLS, SD. (THECOUNT) — South Dakota news anchor, Angela Kennecke, announced on-air that the drug crisis hit home after she lost her 21-year-old daughter Emily Kennecke, to a fentanyl overdose in May.
After taking a leave of absence to cope with her and her family’s loss, the KELOLAND News anchor is telling the story of what happened to Emily publicly for the very first time Wednesday night.
Angela Kennecke: I thought she was the most amazing kid in the world. I was so proud of her. First of all she was intellectually gifted. She was artistically gifted. She was athletically gifted. And I used to always tell her with so many gifts comes great responsibility to the world, to bring those gifts to the world.
Perhaps it’ no surprise since her birth was such a public thing because I’m in the public eye that her death is now such a public thing too. I have to embrace that. I really can’t hide from that. So I think it’s best if I just tell my story and let everyone out there know what happened to my daughter. Because I really believe it could happen to anyone’s daughter. It can happen in anyone’s family. And it starts with addiction.
It was soon pretty evident that the whole drug culture was pretty attractive to her and I was really concerned as a mom. It’s hard to know what to do. I really feel for everyone out there who has a child that has an addiction problem, because you don’t know where to turn. And there’s so much stigma surrounding this, it’s hard to even talk to other people about it.
Everything in my instincts told me something is seriously wrong here. And we would see Emily quite a lot. She wasn’t living with us. She was 21 years old. But the more time I spent around her before her death, the more alarm bells went off in my head. And so we hired an interventionist to get her into treatment.
Emily’s Hope is a fund set up through the Avera McKennan Foundation to help offset the cost of addiction treatment when Avera’s new treatment center opens next fall.
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