Getty Tammy Bradshaw (L) and TV personality Terry Bradshaw attend LIFEWTR: Art After Dark, including 1893, at Club Nomadic during Super Bowl LI Weekend on February 3, 2017.
Terry Bradshaw married his wife Tammy Bradshaw in 2014, but the two have been together for over 20 years. She brought a daughter, Lacey Luttrull, to the relationship, and all three of them, plus Terry’s two daughters from his third marriage, Rachel and Erin, are the stars of a new reality show on E! called The Bradshaw Bunch.
But tragedy befell the family about a decade ago when Tammy and her ex-husband David Luttrull Sr. lost their son David Jr. (whom they called Cody) to a drug overdose. Since then, the Bradshaws have done a lot of philanthropy work to educate the public about the dangers of opioids. Here’s what you need to know about what happened and the foundation with which the Bradshaws work to raise awareness about the opioid epidemic.
David Jr. Died on Tammy’s Living Room Floor in 2009
NFL star Terry Bradshaw is the keynote speaker for the 525 Foundation’s dinner and discussion tonight.
@MMcFaddenWNDU is emceeing the event, and she got to talk with Bradshaw about the tragic way the opioid crisis impacted his family.
According to his obituary in the Dallas Morning News, David Cody Luttrull died in Dallas, Texas, on July 6, 2009. He would have turned 24 in August of that year. He was David Sr. and Tammy’s oldest child.
“He will be greatly missed and remembered fondly by his family and many friends for his big heart, great sense of humor, and recent excitement over his new job as a train dispatcher with the railroad,” read the obituary.
The police report (via MyDeathSpace) from Denton, Texas (a suburb of Dallas) says that David died on the living floor of Tammy’s house due to heroin intoxication. They believe the overdose was accidental. This has been confirmed by Terry Bradshaw in interviews he has done as part of the family’s charity work.
“My wife, Tammy, she lost a son who was unaware of what he was taking and drinking, and he died on the living room floor,” Bradshaw told WNDU at a 2018 525 Foundation fundraising event, adding, “Kids do some crazy things and have no education about it. … It’s a sad story and one that has to be told.”
The Bradshaw Family Does a Lot of Work With the 525 Foundation
The 525 Foundation was launched by a South Bend, Indiana, family that lost two sons, Jack and Nick Savage, to accidental opioid overdoses after attending a party together. Their mother, Becky Savage, appeared on The Today Show in 2017 to tell her story.
“Nick and Jack died as a result of acute alcohol and oxycodone ingestion. It still takes my breath away to say that. What we now know is that they were participating in underage drinking and at some point, during the course of the evening someone offered them a prescription pill and they made the decision to take it,” wrote Savage on the Today website, recounting the day she went to wake up her sons and they were both lifeless in their beds.
Becky and her husband eventually launched the foundation, of which she is president, in an effort to “prevent another family from having to endure the pain of such a tragedy through outreach, education, and support.” The name of the foundation comes from the boys’ high school hockey numbers, 5 and 25.
Tammy Bradshaw saw the segment on Today and reached out to Becky.
“I remember lying in bed reading emails and saw one from a gal named Tammy,” Savage told WSBT in 2018. “I remember her saying that she had been touched by the story of our boys and then she went into her heartbreak that she had experienced a similar issue with the loss of her son.”
Becky and Tammy met for lunch and that was how the Bradshaw family got involved in the foundation.
“That’s why I’m here,” Terry Bradshaw told WSBT at the 525 fundraising event, “because of a tragedy in the family and a similarity with my wife’s son. And my wife and her bond with Becky. … It’s becoming an epidemic worldwide. So we can definitely get the message out.”
He also said that he and his wife plan to be actively involved with the foundation for many years. In February 2019, the family appeared on Celebrity Family Feud and won $10,000 for the foundation, and David’s younger sister Lacey has hosted Facebook fundraisers for the foundation on her personal profile page.
Additionally, Bradshaw appears as the special guest at the 525 Foundation event held in South Bend every year. The 2020 event was postponed due to COVID-19, but the foundation hopes to reschedule soon.
The Bradshaw Bunch airs Thursdays at 9 p.m. ET/PT on E!.
READ NEXT: How to Watch The Bradshaw Bunch Online Without Cable
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New Reality Star Lost Her Son to a Drug Overdose in 2009