Veronica Ruiz was pleased to see her daughter Lilac devouring three helpings of her favorite dish, homemade baked ziti.
It was the night of Wednesday, October 18, 2023, three weeks after her 18th birthday, and Lilac seemed to be thriving.
The teen had two jobs, was learning to drive, and was planning to get her GED.
But she was also rapidly losing weight and her mother, then 41, suspected she was might be using drugs.
The signs were there: Lilac was evasive and ‘looked like she was high, but I didn’t smell weed,’ Veronica tells DailyMail.com. She’d been so drowsy one day that she could hardly open the door.
Lilac denied the allegations, and through tears would question why her mother didn’t believe her.
On that Wednesday evening in Rowlett, Texas – after her hearty meal – the teenager went out, insisting she didn’t need to say where she was going because she was now an adult.
But Veronica was tracking the teen’s location on her cell phone just in case and made sure she wasn’t hiding anything in her pockets when she left.
At 12.40am, Veronica woke up in a panic, her skin inexplicably crawling. Realizing Lilac still wasn’t back, she noted her daughter’s location at a house she didn’t recognize in the neighboring town of Garland.
She sent Lilac a text message demanding she return. She still wasn’t home in the morning.
Hours went by and there was still no sign of Lilac. In the early afternoon, knowing Lilac had a 4pm scheduled shift she never missed at a skateboard store, the worried mother went onto the apartment balcony to await her arrival.
Instead, she got a phone call. A detective on the other end asked: ‘Do you know a Lilac Miranda?’
Lilac, he said, was dead – found unresponsive in a home in Garland.
Veronica collapsed. She spent hours crying in the closet, and much of the rest of the day and week was a blur.
The cause of death listed by the coroner would be fentanyl toxicity. Garland police concluded it was an overdose and have closed the case.
But her mother insists she was the victim of a crime.
‘She was poisoned,’ Veronica tells DailyMail.com 15 months later, consumed by grief and desperate to hold someone accountable for Lilac’s death.
A new law had gone into effect in Texas almost seven weeks before Lilac’s death making fentanyl murder a crime – meaning anyone found to have manufactured or supplied fentanyl resulting in death can be charged with murder.
Medical examiners are also now mandated to record fentanyl deaths separately from overdoses to get a better grasp of the scale of the problem.
Veronica believes Lilac ‘didn’t have anything on her … I checked everything before’ she left on the fateful night in question.
‘But let’s just say … she had the pills,’ Veronica says. ‘Who gave them to her?’
‘I want to know who’s responsible for that.’
Lilac’s ashes are in a ‘beautiful’ black marble urn that her mother keeps on the mantle in the home she shares with her husband, Sal.
‘I didn’t want to go to a graveyard or tomb,’ she says. ‘I wanted her home with me.’
She can barely believe she’s talking in the past tense about her firstborn daughter.
It was just the two of them until a little before Lilac’s fourth birthday, when Veronica married her now ex-husband.
‘There was just something so different between our relationship and me with other people. It was … weightless,’ she says of the bond with Lilac, struggling to find the right words.
‘There was no blockage at all. It was connected. Our love was connected … we were very, very close.’
They lived in Hawaii, Georgia and Texas during her ex-husband’s military career, and Veronica also gave birth to a second daughter.
Lilac was thriving during childhood, spending years as a folklorico dancer ,to celebrate her Mexican heritage. She was also a graceful ballerina and enjoyed basketball and cheerleading.
Veronica pulled Lilac out of middle school when she said she was being bullied and sought counseling for her — so spent much of the rest of her education being homeschooled.
Lilac was very affected by the breakup of Veronica’s marriage, after which the mother moved her two girls back to her native North Texas.
Around 14, Lilac began ‘making bad decisions’ such as going out without permission and smoking weed, Veronica says.
‘She was acting out because of everything that was happening with us … so I was really careful with her,’ Veronica tells DailyMail.com.
‘It doesn’t mean I didn’t ground her, but I always tried to figure out: Why was she doing these things?’
She always admired Lilac’s work ethic. The anime-obsessed teen would choose passions such as teaching herself Japanese.
But Veronica also worried Lilac was depressed when she noticed her daughter when she noticed slacking when during her studies.
‘She was in a relationship with somebody that was not good at all’ up until a few months before her death, Veronica tells DailyMail.com. ‘I feel like that kind of distracted her from it.’
The mother also blamed that relationship for likely first introducing Lilac to drugs. In June, four months before she died, ‘it took her forever to open the door,’ she says. ‘I couldn’t get her to talk. She was just ready to go lay down.’
Veronica called her daughter’s boyfriend at the time and demanded to know what he’d given her
She told him: ‘If Lilac dies, it’s on you.’
Veronica also tried pleas with her daughter and would ask: ‘Do you realize that those things will kill you?’
‘And she kind of walked away, like, “Okay, mom.”’
As Veronica’s worries continued, she called ‘every single person I could think of.
‘I called all of the hospitals, anybody that she had [done] therapy [with], counselling … anybody that ever had any contact with her,’ she says. ‘I was trying to figure out what I was supposed to do … then I started crying.
‘I just felt defeated,’ she says, though ‘it was pretty much left at that — but I kind of knew that things were going to happen. I just wasn’t able to stop them.
Veronica remembers having a dream about Lilac’s death very close to her passing
‘In the dream, I saw her face on a billboard, and then I saw a banner that said: Fentanyl Kills.’
‘I woke up and I was like, what? Not my baby. That’s weird. That doesn’t make any sense.’
Still, she says, she didn’t think her daughter was using fentanyl specifically.
She breaks down crying as she remembers dropping Lilac off at work in the weeks before she died.
‘I could kind of tell she was doing something; she looked like she was high, but I didn’t smell weed,’ Veronica says. She got frustrated as Lilac continued to deny using any substances as she got out of the car.
‘She turned around as she was crossing the street and she was like, “Mommy, I’m sorry. Do you believe me, Mom, do you believe me?’ Veronica sobs. ‘And I didn’t want her to go to work sad … and I said, “Yes, baby, I believe you, it’s okay.”’
She felt Lilac was still thriving at her jobs, never calling in sick or missing shifts while working at a restaurant and fashion and skateboard shop Zumiez.
The artistic teen was learning ‘how to put [skateboards] together,’ even with her elegantly painted long nails.
‘She was just so dedicated to it,’ she says, a flicker of a smile shining through her voice as she recalls how Lilac told her someone compared her to a Ninja Turtle – because ‘I make pizzas during the day and I make skateboards at night.’
Lilac was also a devoted cat mom, rescuing any cat she found – including a hardscrabble feral cat named Marvin.
Others she doted on were named Wilderness and Oasis.
Lilac had a doctor’s appointment scheduled for the week after she died. Veronica was going to make her daughter go through every kind of test, so she could find out what was in her system and finally confront her.
Lilac, tragically, didn’t live that long.
After eating her baked ziti on October 18, she left the Rowlett apartment with a favorite houndstooth blanket, wearing a new pair of black Vans hi-tops, and headed to home where a 17-year-old boy she’d met two weeks previously was staying.
Her mother says they weren’t dating, though he’s listed as her boyfriend on the death certificate.
‘I think she was trying to help him, not have a relationship with him,’ Veronica says. ‘She did not seem like she liked him [romantically] at all; she just kept saying he needs something, let me help.’
Veronica went to the site of her daughter’s death to learn more in the weeks after her passing.
The woman who lived there, a family friend of the 17-year-old he called ‘aunt,’ told Veronica that Lilac had arrived around 11pm or so and played video games.
‘When he woke up in the morning, he went to go wake up Lilac, and she was on the other couch,’ Veronica says.
‘And I guess when he pulled her blanket back he saw that she was dead.’
Though a different time is listed on the death certificate, Veronica fully believes that her daughter died at 12.40am, exactly when she woke up to the feeling of her skin crawling.
She wants someone held accountable – speaking again this week to the detective assigned to the case. The last time they’d spoken, in October — around the one-year anniversary of Lilac’s death — Veronica says she was told police were trying to unlock the teen’s phone.
Garland police told DailyMail.com this week that the case remains classed as an overdose and is currently closed.
In any case where there’s a fentanyl death in Texas, the PIO said, ‘we look for evidence of a suspect … otherwise there’s no crime to charge somebody; if, for some reason, the person came across fentanyl in a bedroom, and they took it, then there’s no dealer for that.
‘If there was no evidence showing that somebody delivered the fentanyl to them, the fentanyl that they took that caused the death, then we cannot file or start a murder investigation.’
He said that, while police ‘are trying to unlock the daughter’s phone … every effort that we know how to unlock it and utilize the technology and other resources, those have come up unsuccessful’ a Garland police spokesman told DailyMail.com.
Lilac’s case, he said, is ‘closed, but if all of a sudden we get the phone unlocked, and we’re able to access it, and we find text messages in there between her and anybody, then the case would be opened back up again … we would further investigate.
‘As of right now, our leads are dry.’
That’s not good enough for Veronica.
‘It’s been more than a year,’ she says. ‘Nothing is being done on her case. I would call them any time I heard about any person that had seen Lilac around that time … I would give [the detective] names.
‘If I had a picture, I would send him the picture … [they] never told me anything about those friends.’
She also wants to ensure that the fentanyl crisis remains at the forefront of America’s minds.
‘It’s hard to see other families lose their kids’ she tells DailyMail.com. ‘It’s kind of out of the media now, but we need to bring it back, because it’s still going on.