Read the original article on the News & Observer website.
Winter brought Nicole Holliday’s mother back into her life, but spring took her just as quickly.
A little over a year ago, Holliday was working from her Wake Forest home when her grandmother called with the news.
“Nicole, they found your mom dead,” she said.
“I remember hanging up the phone and just screaming,” Holliday, 31, told The News & Observer. “I was just screaming, like, ‘God, why? Why now?’”
Victoria Benhoff, 52, wouldn’t get the Easter visit from Holliday and her grandchildren she’d been looking forward to. The animal lover whose smile brought warmth to any room, even as she battled an addiction that began as a teenager, was gone. Her sister discovered her dead from a fentanyl overdose in their Wilmington-area home March 27, 2025.
The substance use that marred Benhoff’s life for decades had taken it, just when Holliday believed her mother was finally sober. The grief was staggering, but Holliday’s pain only compounded as the financial realities of her mother’s unexpected death became clear.
“My mom’s funeral, with cremation and everything, was right at $7,000,” Holliday said.
In a typical homicide case in North Carolina, the victim’s loved ones would be eligible for up to $10,000 in funerary and burial reimbursement through the state’s victims compensation fund. But even though someone had been criminally charged with death by distribution in Benhoff’s death, Benhoff wasn’t considered a victim because she’d chosen to take fentanyl the night she died.
Holliday learned of this rule from the New Hanover County District Attorney’s Office, which was prosecuting Benhoff’s alleged dealer, in the months after her mother’s death.
“[Assistant District Attorney] Sean Spiering’s office, they said in fentanyl deaths — well, really just drug deaths in general — they do not generally ask the court to cover payment for that because apparently, in North Carolina, fentanyl death is not considered murder,” Holliday recounted.
The resulting gray area, where Holliday’s mother is both a victim and not a victim, is something Holliday struggles with.
“I don’t understand how someone can sell someone a drug that inevitably killed them, and that’s not murder,” Holliday said.
