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 her parents, Christopher Dilly, 26, and Jessica Lally, 25, dead of suspected drug overdoses, according to police.
Also inside the home were three other children — 5, 3 and nine months old.
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.”
The report noted that Allegheny County, which includes McKeesport and the city of Pittsburgh, “has experienced fatal overdose rates higher than those seen throughout Pennsylvania and many other states” during the past decade.
Illustrating their point, authorities told NBC affiliate WPXI that the double-overdose at the 7-year-old’s home was the second they had responded to on that block in less than a day.
Nationwide in the US, opioids such as heroin and prescription pain relievers killed more than 28,000 people in 2014, more than any year on record, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. At least half of all opioid overdose deaths involved a prescription drug, the CDC said, adding that the number of overdose deaths involving opioids has nearly quadrupled nationwide since 1999.
