A rash of fatal overdoses in Hartford has blindsided police, city health officials and drug users, leaving seven dead since Monday.
A man found dead in an Asylum Hill home Wednesday morning is suspected of overdosing from crack cocaine laced with fentanyl, a deadly drug combination that’s claimed five lives in Hartford in the past two days, police say.
Two more people have died of suspected heroin overdoses, including a man who was found outside of an abandoned building at 15 Grand St. on Wednesday, according to Hartford Police Lt. Paul Cicero. Forty-two people have died of drug overdoses in Hartford so far in 2019, up from 22 this time last year.
The overdoses started on Saturday, when nine people in the city were saved by naloxone, the opioid antidote, police say. Then, between Monday night and Wednesday afternoon, police recorded six drug deaths in the Asylum Hill, Clay Arsenal and Upper Albany neighborhoods — all of them black males between ages 50 and 61 — and one drug death in Frog Hollow.
But it’s the sudden surge in overdoses from crack laced with fentanyl that’s raising concern. Typically, police say Fentanyl is mixed with heroin, or sometimes pressed into pills.
“I haven’t seen crack overdoses in God knows how long,” Cicero said.
Non-opioid users haven’t needed to take overdose precautions, like testing drugs for fentanyl or carrying naloxone — and they lack any tolerance to fentanyl, which is 50 to 100 times more potent than morphine, or heroin.
Some service providers say they still don’t understand how fentanyl can be smoked.
“This is so beyond what we were thinking before. We weren’t just naturally handing out test strips to people using crack,” said Tani Cooper, a programs manager at Greater Hartford Harm Reduction Coalition. “It’s changing everything.”
She added that fentanyl contamination is a public health issue that should concern everyone, not just those living in urban centers.
Two double overdoses also occurred in West Hartford and Granby this week, according to Peter Canning, an EMS coordinator at UConn Health’s John Dempsey Hospital. In each case, a pair of individuals overdosed together and were revived by naloxone — they told first responders that they had only used cocaine or crack, Canning said.
In South Windsor, one person also overdosed this week after claiming to have only smoked marijuana.
“If it’s Hartford, it’s gonna be Simsbury, it’s gonna be Brooklyn, Connecticut,” Cooper said. “It’s everywhere now.”
Outside the coalition’s Albany Avenue walk-in center, staff and passerby talked solemnly about one of this week’s victims, a 55-year-old man who was found on the floor of his Collins Street apartment that morning.
There was a crack pipe in his hand, police say, and he’d likely been dead for two days.
“He was just a good person, he really was, and he had a really big heart,” said one of his friends, Carmen, who called 911 after she couldn’t reach the victim on the phone or at his apartment. “It’s bad enough people are dying sniffing and shooting up, and now they’re putting it in the crack. And whoever’s selling it knows what they’ve got. It’s a shame.”
Carmen, who declined to reveal her last name, held onto her young granddaughter as she stood outside the Albany Avenue walk-in center. The little girl had flamingos and pom-poms on her pink shirt and a thumb in her mouth.
“For someone to know they had that and sell it or give it away, to me it’s premeditated,” Carmen said.
In reaction to this week’s deaths, the coalition and AIDS Connecticut spent Wednesday educating their clients about the new danger to Hartford’s drug supply.
They handed out fentanyl test strips and naloxone, and urged people not to use alone. Many of those clients said they would spread the word to others on the street.
“We’re telling each other, ‘Don’t use without somebody being there,’ ” said one crack user. “We’re gonna make sure we call each other every day to make sure we’re OK. I know I don’t want to die and I usually use along, so that’s not gonna happen anymore.”
Carmen’s friend died in 132 Collins St., just six buildings down from where two other men, ages 59 and 56, overdosed Monday night, and around the corner from where a 50-year-old man died at 175 Sigourney St., on Tuesday.
Anticipating that there could be more fatalities that haven’t been reported, police checked areas where people are known to live and use drugs outside, but found no one.
Investigators are urging people to turn in any drug packaging or evidence tied to an overdose so they can track down the source and prevent more deaths.
On Monday, police seized what they briefly hoped was the source of Saturday’s non-fatal crack overdoses. The narcotics team executed a search warrant at a home on Huntington Street and found 70 grams of crack cocaine, but tests revealed no fentanyl, Cicero said.
However, heroin seized from the same home did test positive for fentanyl, he said.
So far this year, the narcotics team has seized more that 32,000 bags of heroin in Hartford. That doesn’t include “many thousands more” found by patrol officers, or pounds of drugs that weren’t yet packaged for street sale.
“That’s a very hefty number this early in the year,” Cicero said.
But police are still looking for the batch of crack that’s killed five people this week.
Late Wednesday, the narcotics team executed another search warrant in the area of the Collins and Sigourney street fatalities. At 7 May St., they seized 41 grams of crack cocaine, 28 grams of MDMA, and 11 grams of raw heroin, police said.
They will test for the presence of fentanyl.
“I never expected (fentanyl) to be in crack because I didn’t think they’d find a way to do it,” said Alex Diaz, of the harm reduction coalition. “But I was wrong. It’s double the problem now. We used to worry about heroin, but now we’ve got to worry about crack.”
One of his clients, Abdur-Raheem Wakil, was less surprised. After after using heroin for 33 of his 47 years, Wakil says he’s seen fentanyl mixed with just about every recreational and designer drug.
“The only thing they ain’t putting fentanyl in is alcohol — yet,” he said. “It’s how they make the profit. They don’t care if you die, they don’t care about none of that. It’s how they put a dollar in their pockets.”
Rebecca Lurye can be reached at rlurye@courant.com.
