The seven-year-old girl got herself ready for school Monday morning because her parents could not help her.
They were lying dead in the family’s apartment outside of Pittsburgh, victims of an apparent drug overdose.
She had tried to wake them up to no avail. So she got on the bus, sat through a full day of elementary school and said nothing. It wasn’t until the bus ride home, according to the Washington Post, that she told the driver what she was worrying about.
When McKeesport, Pennsylvania, police arrived at the home, they found the bodies of Christopher Dilly, 26, and Jessica Lally, 25, in the living room. They also found three other children inside the house, alive. A nine-month-old girl, three-year-old boy and five-year-old boy were taken to the hospital for evaluation.
“Early indications are they may have been there for a day or two,” Allegheny County police Lt Andrew Schurman told WTAE-TV. Foul play was not suspected, he said, and drug paraphernalia was found in the home.
According to the television station, another man died of an overdose of heroin on the same street earlier in the day. The deaths were not related.
Kristen M Davis, spokeswoman for the McKeesport Area School District, said the district “took immediate action after we were notified of the concerns shared by one of our students on their route home.
“We alerted all appropriate officials and ensured the students’ safety,” she said in the written statement. “Each school in our district offers counseling to any student who needs it. We will be available for the family affected by this tragedy.”
McKeesport is located in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, where public health officials warned in a lengthy July report that the nation’s opioid overdose epidemic is wreaking havoc. In 2015, the report said, “Allegheny County experienced 422 overdose deaths – more than in any prior year – and the upward trend continues.”
What was “particularly concerning”, officials said, “is the fact that a troubling number of overdose victims, who began their addiction using prescribed oral pain killers, transitioned to heroin as their access to pills decreased”.
Heroin deaths in the US have more than tripled nationwide since 2010, and the pattern seen in Pennsylvania is also playing out in places such as Florida, where critics say efforts to contain the opioid epidemic have had limited effect in curbing one crisis while making another worse.
In fact, Lally’s sister, Courtney, had reached out to television station WPXI months earlier to see if there was anything the station could do to get help for her sister. She had attempted to called police and the county children’s services.
Courtney Lally said she and her mother plan to attend a hearing on Wednesday to try for temporary custody of the four children.
“My sister wasn’t the person she became when it came to drugs,” Courtney Lally told WPIX. “She wasn’t the person I knew. It was like the drugs had taken over and at first we didn’t know it was heroin. She loved her kids – she did. She loved her mom, she loved me, she loved us.”
What was heartbreaking, Courtney Lally said, was what her niece had to do on Monday.
“That’s like the hardest thing, because that’s a seven-year-old,” Courtney Lally said. “That’s a seven-year-old that did that.”
