The Hicks family didn't get a call from Ditizio. They didn't need one. They knew something terrible had happened to their sons when they battered down the bedroom door in their Crescentville rowhouse Dec. 7 and found Jacob, 25, and Randall, 22, blue on the floor.

Jake and Randy had shared the room. Big kids with big beards and big personalities. But their family saw a sensitivity they hid, like most things, from everyone else. Jake was a self-taught guitarist and pianist who scored top grades at Bodine High School for International Affairs but whose talents competed against the undertows of depression and anxiety. Randy was the outgoing one, who idolized his brother but fought the same battles against mental illness.

They were so close people assumed they were twins. They had each other. They had their video games and their YouTube channel and their odd jobs around the neighborhood. No one knew what they had been doing in their room until their brother, Tim, kicked the door in.

Courtesy of the Hicks family Brothers Jacob and Randall Hicks died of fentanyl overdoses on the same day in December. Their family found them unresponsive in their bedroom.

Their mother, Donna, thought she'd already saved her kids: She'd helped Jake kick Percocet dependence in his teenage years. And they left their house on Emerald Street in Kensington 10 years ago, as drugs began to consume the neighborhood.

On the couch six days after their death, she and her husband, Randall Sr., talked about the room upstairs. How she couldn't go in anymore. How she wanted to leave. The Hickses were searching for meaning, and maybe it was there in the fact that their sons had died at home, in the place they loved, together. Their death certificates bore the same time, 8:48 p.m.

But now, Donna could not bear to stay.

“You can't run from your problems. That's what I've always heard.” Randall Hicks Sr.

"Where would we go?" Randall asked from the chair by the window, where the Christmas decorations were already up. "You can't run from your problems. That's what I've always heard."

But certainly Donna had never expected this. People on heroin were supposed to lose weight, she thought. The boys didn't do that. People on heroin were supposed to steal, she thought. The boys didn't do that, either. People on heroin nodded out. But her sons were on Xanax and Ambien, prescribed by a psychiatrist. When they were drowsy, she blamed it on the prescriptions.

The Hickses just didn't know, and now they have to know everything — about what happened to Jake and Randy, about the crisis that killed them. They scour the text messages the brothers had sent to their dealers, hungry to try out the free bag that killed them. They research fentanyl, which was found in their systems, and consider the viability of treatments their sons will never use. Their brother drained his savings for the funerals. The cost of just one was high enough. They are trying to raise money online.

And they wait, at night, in a house that's now too quiet, and listen for the footsteps of someone in the back driveway or on the path in the front yard. For the dealer who showed up in the days after the brothers' death, and asked Tim if he understood how much money they owed.