Akron’s opiate crisis nearly killed a toddler Thursday.
The call came to 911 at 6:19 p.m.
“I need an ambulance. My baby is not breathing,” a woman said.
When a dispatcher asked the woman for her address, the woman provided a number with no street name before the line went dead.
Dispatchers called back, but no one answered. A minute later, a second call came to 911.
This time, a child’s voice said, “My brother is not breathing.”
It was a 9-year-old boy who told a dispatcher what his mother didn’t: The family’s address on Gale Street in West Hill.
Police say the boy’s 19-month-old brother apparently got into heroin, fentanyl or some other opiate at the house and overdosed before anyone noticed.
On Friday, police said the toddler likely would have died if his brother hadn’t told rescue workers and police where to go.
“That 9-year-old is a hero,” Akron police Lt. Rick Edwards said.
This is the second toddler to overdose on opiates in the city this year. In March, a 2-year-old overdosed across town in Goodyear Heights. Police and rescue workers used Narcan or an equivalent opiate antidote to revive that child, too.
Until recently, most attention has been focused on adults during the deepening opiate crisis, said Dr. Sarah Friebert, director of pediatric palliative care at Akron Children’s Hospital.
“What we’re seeing more and more of now is younger kids being exposed to substances,” Friebert said.
Friebert is spearheading a new office of addiction services in her department that will coordinate efforts across the region to help individual children, their families and employees at the hospital affected by the opiate crisis. Ultimately, she said, Akron Children’s plans to have an outpatient addiction treatment program for adolescents.
Saving young lives
Palliative care — specialized medical care for people with a life-threatening condition — may seem like a strange place to house addiction services.
“But you could argue in 2017 that there’s nothing more life threatening to children than opiates,” Friebert said.
Toddlers are especially vulnerable to accidental overdoses, she said.
“At 18 months, kids are curious,” she said. “They’re crawling around on coffee tables, looking under things and there can be life-threatening consequences for what they find.”
Friebert called the opiate crisis this century’s smallpox.
“It’s like the Black Death and people are dropping like flies,” she said.
And there are painful, dangerous and expensive ripple effects created by the addicts, Friebert said, including infants addicted to opiates in the neonatal intensive care units and about 4,000 Ohio children put into foster care last year specifically because their parents’ or guardians’ opiate use prevented them from caring for their kids.
After the Akron toddler overdosed Thursday, Summit County Children Services took custody of the boy.
The county agency placed his 9-year-old brother and a 5-year-old sibling who wasn’t home at the time of the overdose with relatives.
The children’s mother, who fled while police and emergency medical responders were at her home, was later picked up by police and was being held on an unrelated Portage County warrant.
Police said the woman was convicted of theft there and didn’t show up in court for sentencing.
Akron police didn’t immediately file charges against her involving the overdose, but the investigation continues.
Children Services also took custody of the toddler who overdosed earlier this year in Goodyear Heights. In that case, police said they found heroin in the child’s home and the child’s parents told them they were drug users.
The parents were later charged with felony child endangering.
Lock up drugs
On Friday, Dr. Marguerite Erme of Summit County Public Health urged anyone who uses drugs — whether prescription or illicit — to lock them away and hide the key so children have no access.
“A lot of people don’t think they need to lock drugs up because they think their children wouldn’t do that,” Erme said.
But children, their friends and other visitors will go through medicine cabinets and drawers, either searching for drugs or happening on them.
Akron narcotics detectives, for example, have come across teens who steal pain patches from the skin of their relatives dying of cancer.
The patches are supposed to deliver fentanyl — a powerful opiate aimed at easing pain at end of life — through a patient’s skin. Teens, however, discovered they could get high by sucking on the patches.
Erme encouraged people to stow their drugs in a locked cabinet, a fireproof box or any secure location where they might lock up sensitive papers.
Get rid of expired drugs or drugs you no longer require, but don’t flush them, she said. Go to Summit County’s website and search for the Dispose of Unused Medications Properly program, or DUMP. There are 14 locations at police and fire stations across Summit County where you can drop off drugs with no questions asked.
Amanda Garrett can be reached at 330-996-3725 or agarrett@thebeaconjournal.com.