MINNEAPOLIS _ The apparent overdose death of a 10-year-old girl on Minneapolis' South Side last month has put new focus on the city's growing opioid epidemic.
And now, the case could lead to criminal charges against whomever supplied her with the drugs, whether intentionally or not.
The Nov. 21 episode was another annotation to the city's grim tally of overdoses from opioids and other drugs _ as of Monday, Minneapolis had logged a decade-high 1,416 overdoses, 78 of which were fatal, according to police records.
On the day of the incident, emergency personnel were dispatched about 2:30 a.m. to a home in the 3900 block of S. 46th Avenue for a report of a young girl who was choking.
The girl was found not breathing and without a pulse in a second-story bedroom, according to a fire department report. She had "an (excessive) amount of vomit in the airway," the report said. Firefighters and paramedics tried to revive her using CPR and an automated external defibrillator, but she was pronounced dead after being rushed by ambulance to HCMC.
The report didn't say whether the girl lived at the residence or whether anyone else was home at the time of the incident. While no cause of death has been officially released by the Hennepin County Medical Examiner's office, a police report says that she died of an overdose. Whether or not she intentionally ingested the drugs is unclear.
The case was later assigned to a homicide detective, as many fatal overdoses now are, but police officials have otherwise declined to release details about the incident. On Thursday, a department spokesman said that he couldn't comment on the matter since the case has been turned over to the county attorney's office.
A spokeswoman for the office confirmed Thursday that the case was being reviewed for possible criminal charges.
While rates of methamphetamine and cocaine abuse are soaring, heroin and prescription opioids are still the No. 1 killer on city streets, city officials say. In particular, they have noticed a rise in fentanyl-laced fake oxycodone pills being sold in recent months.
Data from the medical examiner's office show that 253 people died of drug or alcohol abuse in the county through the first 10 months of the year. The presence of fentanyl, the highly addictive synthetic opioid that is many times more potent than heroin, was detected in at least 113 of the cases, the data show.
The average age of victim was 43, but officials say that younger users are increasingly in the mix. The death of the south Minneapolis girl, whose identity has not been released, was at least the 13th fatal overdose so far this year involving victims 21 and younger.
In another case, a 13-year-old boy died at Children's Hospital this year after overdosing on a combination of drugs _ in what medical examiners later ruled was a suicide.
The number of overdoses in Minneapolis this year have easily surpassed the 954 overdoses reported in all of 2018, leaving city and public health officials scrambling to respond to the opioid crisis.
While the number of nonfatal overdoses is up significantly in Minneapolis this year, drug deaths have decreased. Minneapolis totaled 97 fatal overdoses last year, almost triple the 34 it had in 1999, according to Health Department data. Drug deaths peaked with 117 in 2017.
This mirrored a national trend that saw overall drug deaths fall 5% from 2017 to 2018, the first significant decline since the 1990s. There were 331 opioid overdose deaths statewide last year.
