OWN Host Dr. Laura Berman’s Son Dead at 16 After Apparent Overdose
Dr. Laura Berman is opening about the loss of her 16-year-old son.
On Feb. 9, the New York Times best-selling author and relationship therapist spoke with Today‘s Katie Snow about the day she found her son, Samuel Berman Chapman, unconscious from an apparent overdose of fentanyl-laced Xanax pills that were purchased through Snapchat.
“I didn’t intend for us to be on the news,” she said while sitting next to her husband Samuel Chapman. “I just felt helpless. All I was thinking about is this couldn’t happen again. And I was so furious and helpless.”
She recalled the day she found her son unconscious in his room, after the teen “asked his dad for a cheeseburger.”
“An hour later I went into his room,” Berman remembered, “because we’d been talking about an internship for the summer that he wanted to do, and he was on the floor and gone.”
Her husband further explained how they discovered Samuel used Snapchat to purchase the drugs. “This colorful menu came up with some man with a Twitter handle who was promising to bring it by your house. Each different drug had a different color, the way a kid would love to see it,” he said. “And Snapchat is for the kids.”
