CAUTION

Talk to your kids: A North Carolina woman sounds alarm about the potential dangers of vaping after her 15-year-old stepson's unexpected death.

Solomon Wynn's family took him off a ventilator in mid-June, just months after the teenage football player developed a bad cough, according to Fox,

"We went to the primary care doctor because he had a bad cough. They diagnosed him with what they thought was bronchitis," his stepmother, Charlene Zorn of Wilmington, told Fox News Digital in an interview.

Doctors prescribed Solomon antibiotics, steroids and inhalers, but nothing seemed to help improve his condition, so they referred him to a pulmonologist. The pulmonologist did allergy testing and test X-rays on Solomon, determining in April he had been vaping.

By looking at the test X-rays, she knew," Zorn said.

Prior to his sudden cough, Solomon had been a healthy teenager. He "loved" football, his stepmother said. Once he began going to the gym with his dad, Zorn said, it became a routine. Solomon went to the gym "every morning." "He openly admitted it to the doctor. He didn't try and deny it," Zorn said of the moment Solomon's doctor said he had been vaping. "As parents, we had no clue. We had no indication that he had been vaping. Neither his father nor myself smoke, so there were no products in our house that he could get. It wasn't that it was something accessible to him. It was something he got through his friends."

He also admitted that his friends provided him with vapes and "showed him how to do it," Zorn said.

But once the cough began, Solomon's strength gradually declined to the point he couldn't walk for five minutes, Zorn said.

"After about a minute and a half, he had to stop because his breathing had become labored

"The CAT scan showed that there was fluid in three places on his lungs and surrounding his heart. He was supposed to see the cardiologist that following Monday because, obviously, they had concerns because it was affecting his heart. And then on that Friday, on June 16, he collapsed and then ended up in the hospital on a ventilator," Zorn recalled.

He collapsed on June 16 and died the next day, shocking his family, friends and football team at school. Zorn implored Solomon's teammates at his funeral to give up vaping.

"People think that we're exaggerating or, 'Oh, this can't happen to my kid.' … The death rate among kids vaping is very low, yes, but the rate of kids ending up in the hospital and the kids getting sick is on the increase, not the decrease," Zorn said.

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Zorn has one piece of advice for parents: "Talk to your kids."

She says parents should discuss vaping in the same way they would talk to their children about safe sex, smoking and drinking.