We’ve shared a great deal here about the heroin epidemic that’s sweeping the United States and is especially intense in Ohio. Today we’re sharing an excerpt from a piece we found in The Washington Post about a seven-year-old who found both of her parents dead from heroin overdoses. Our purpose in sharing this is to reinforce that heroin addiction affects more than just the addict– it affects families and communities. If you’re in the greater Cleveland area and using heroin or addicted to opiates, we hope you will reach out for treatment. We are here.
For more than a day, the 7-year-old girl had been trying to wake her parents.
Dutifully, she got dressed in their apartment outside Pittsburgh on Monday morning and went to school, keeping her worries to herself. But on the bus ride home, McKeesport, Pa., police say, she told the driver she’d been unable to rouse the adults in her house.
Inside the home, authorities found the bodies of Christopher Dilly, 26, and Jessica Lally, 25, dead of suspected drug overdoses, according to police.
Also inside the home were three other children — ages 5 years, 3 years and 9 months.
The children were unharmed but still taken to a hospital to be checked out, then placed with the county’s department of children, youth and families.
The case cast a light on Allegheny County’s epidemic of drug overdoses — and their impact on families.
“There is an opioid overdose epidemic in the U.S., and Allegheny County is not immune,” county health officials said in a recent report.
There were 422 opioid-overdose deaths in Allegheny County last year, according to the report — the largest death toll in county history. “And the upward trend continues.”