PONCHATOULA - One Baton Rouge family is telling others about the dangers of fentanyl, the drug that changed their family's lives forever.

While speaking with a documentary crew, Christopher Guillot's family said their son thought he had taken a sleeping pill when it was actually fentanyl.

"He hadn't been sleeping. He had been very stressed and anxious. Obviously, he had a new job, he wasn't sleeping. He just got married, and he just found out he was going to have a baby. He was worried about finances," Lynn Guillot, Christopher's mother, said.

In October 2020, Christopher married his wife Desirae, whom he met while pursuing a degree in music ministry at Valor Christian College in Ohio. The two had been living in Maryland, close to Desirae's family. Lynn Guillot told WBRZ that it was the son of the couple's premarital counselor who noticed Christopher's lack of sleep.

"[The man] told him and said, 'I just have something, you can take it and go to sleep. You have to sleep.'" Lynn Guillot said. "[Christopher] died instantly. It was fentanyl."

Christopher Guillot's death came just days before the couple planned to visit Baton Rouge, his hometown.

"He died on the 22nd. They were coming home. They had plans to come home for Christmas. They had the tickets and everything. They were coming," Lynn Guillot said.

The Guillots said the man who gave their son the pill received immunity in exchange for giving law enforcement the name of the main drug distributor, adding the main distributor only served two years of his sentence. The family says it is because of the differences in the laws between Maryland and Louisiana and what is considered "Crimes of Violence."

"For us, it's second-degree homicide, but in Maryland, it's not. So, they let him go, said no violent crime," Dr. Thomas Guillot, Christopher's father, said.

Less than a year after Christopher Guillot's death, his wife, Desirae Guillot, took her life.

"The baby was three months old. [Desirae] got in a car, drove to Ohio, where they met, where he proposed to her, went into a motel room, and didn't come out," Lynn Guillot said. "They found carfentanil drugs in her arm. She had not been a person that did drugs."

The Guillots now spend their days helping to raise the baby of Christopher and Desirae and warning of the dangers of fentanyl.

"One pill will kill. You cannot trust anything that somebody gives you. You just can't trust them," Dr. Thomas Guillot said.

The documentary group Texas Pictures Documentaries plans to release episodes filmed in southeast Louisiana in the coming weeks. Their YouTube page can be found here.