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By Lyndsey's mom, Connie
Lyndsey Koch
I write in loving memory of my beloved firstborn daughter, Lyndsey Koch (21 years old). I share my family’s story to help raise awareness and prevention of substance misuse. My precious daughter died May 6, 2019, of a tragic and horrific overdose.
Lyndsey was a young, beautiful, funny, talented, bright, and very LOVED young mom. She grew up surrounded by family, extended family, and friends who loved her and supported her! She grew up playing tennis, piano, guitar, and ukulele. When she was young she was involved in church, vacation bible school, community service, and missions clubs. She attended private Christian preschool and a Christian homeschool program through the fourth grade. Lyndsey always loved the beach and to be in or around the water whether it be in the pool, the lake, or the ocean whenever she could. She was a very outgoing and social girl growing up and adored being surrounded by her friends.
Lyndsey was a long-awaited in-vitro child and was living a happy and sheltered homeschool life until the real estate market crashed in 2008 and that’s when everything in her young life changed. I had to return to work after being a homeschool mom for seven years, and we had to move from our home to a new neighborhood and a new school.
Unfortunately, this was a very difficult transition for Lyndsey. She was severely and publicly mistreated by a boy she liked at the new middle school (he put her in a school dumpster and told her she was trash and she could not climb out without help from school staff!), and around that time she began hanging around new friends who were drinking, trying drugs of various kinds and making dangerous choices.
Another young teen boy convinced Lyndsey to try huffing from a home air-conditioner tube and she woke up wet at the edge of a pond, with her clothes no longer on the right way and was afraid she’d been molested or worse and, looking back, that was the beginning of our long and horrible nightmare of our dear child misusing drugs, alcohol and (to my shock) other people’s prescription medicines like Xanax. I remember being shocked when Lyndsey said she didn’t want to have a big 13th birthday party that we’d been planning. I would later learn the hard way how she was trying to numb emotional pain with all kinds of substances.