Spiked Drugs Lead To Record Number Of Overdoses In Luzerne County
The deadly scourge of the opioid fentanyl fueled a major surge in drug overdoses that resulted in a record number of fatalities in Luzerne County in 2021, according to the Luzerne County Coroner’s Office.
The 205 people who lost their lives to drugs in the county last year represent a nearly 15% increase over the 179 fatal overdoses recorded in 2020 and a 60% increase from the 128 who died in 2019, which had the fewest overdoses in the past five years.
Coroner Frank Hacken said roughly 75% of the people who died had fentanyl in their systems.
“That’s an all-time record,” Hacken said of the 205 overdoses. “The main concern is the availability of fentanyl. It’s so cheap and it’s so potent, it’s being mixed with a lot of other drugs.”
According to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, fentanyl is roughly 100 times more potent than morphine, while a similar drug, carfentanil, is about 10,000 times more potent than morphine.
“You have to have quite a tolerance to be able to withstand something like that, which is why it’s so dangerous to people who are not addicts,” Luzerne County District Attorney Sam Sanguedolce said.
Fentanyl has become ubiquitous in the drug market because there is a demand for it — hardcore heroin addicts are always chasing stronger drugs that produce more intense highs. Rather than turning away potential users, authorities said fentanyl’s notorious lethality can actually be part of its appeal.
“We’ve actually seen that, when we have an overdose, addicts will oftentimes scramble to try to locate the substance that caused an overdose death because they believe that’s the best stuff around if it killed someone,” Sanguedolce said.
The county’s top prosecutor said he suspects dealers have taken to adding it not only to heroin but to other drugs such as cocaine and even marijuana in an attempt to hook new customers.
Evidence photos of drugs Kingston police seized during arrests last year show the varying forms of the deadly drug fentanyl. Clockwise, from top left, are powdered fentanyl; its even more powerful relative carfentanil; pressed Xanax bars that police say could contain fentanyl; and counterfeit oxycodone pills that are actually made of pressed fentanyl.
Courtesy of the Kingston Police Department
“This is a new kind of spiking that is deadly to almost any individual except your really heavy-duty heroin addict,” Sanguedolce said.
Hacken, who retired as a Pennsylvania State Police captain prior to becoming coroner, said the addiction problem needs to be handled not only in the courts, but by addressing a variety of contributing factors ranging from poverty to mental health to addiction treatment.
“We cannot arrest and incarcerate our way out of this problem,” Hacken said. “This is not a criminal justice problem. This is a social problem, and we need to deal with it from a society perspective.”
According to data provided by the coroner’s, the problem has touched people from all walks of life, ranging in age from unborn fetuses who died in the womb to senior citizens in their 70s. They were white, Black and Hispanic men and women, people who lived in the county’s biggest cities and most rural hamlets.
‘Stop selling fake Percs’
One of the year’s youngest overdose victims was 17-year-old Freeland resident Liam Kent Inman.
The Hazleton Area School District student was, in many ways, a typical teenager who enjoyed basketball, playing video games and had an interest in the paranormal. His mother, Nicole Lynn Fenkner, described him as a loving son and a loyal friend.
“He just shined in a way that people were very attracted to him,” she said.
Inman also grappled with depression, and Fenkner said she’d caught him coming home smelling of marijuana in the past. She urged him to make good choices and told him to avoid taking anything from people he didn’t know, she said.
Fenkner didn’t know it at the time, but her son had also been taking the occasional Percocet pill to self-medicate his anxiety.
“It wasn’t an all the time thing,” she said. “My kid never had any money. He had a job, but he never had money because it all went to online gaming, it all went to shoes.”
The day before he died, everything seemed normal — Inman mowed the lawn and joked around with his mother while she baked cookies. That night, she kissed him goodbye before leaving for an overnight shift at Geisinger Wyoming Valley Medical Center in Plains Twp., where she worked as a registered respiratory therapist.
Liam Kent Inman, a 17-year-old Hazleton Area High School student died at his home in 2021 from a fentanyl overdose.
Mark Moran / Staff Photographer
When she got home the morning of June 18, 2021, she noticed her son’s bedroom door was still open. Fenkner found Inman lying in a strange position, and initially assumed he’d fallen asleep playing video games.
But he didn’t move when she shook him.
“It’s not clicking in my head that his legs are blue,” Fenkner recalled. “It’s not clicking in my head that he’s not breathing. I got scared because I’m shaking him and he’s not responding to me. I pushed him over and there was blood coming out of his mouth. There was vomit on the bed.”
Fenkner called 911 and pulled her son to the floor to begin CPR. Medics rushed to the scene, but soon realized Inman was too far gone.
“The paramedic comes out and looks at me. He said, ‘Everything that could have been done has been done. There’s nothing more that we can do. I want you to come out to the living room.’ And I’m, like, in complete shock. I’m thinking actually in my head that there’s still somebody in there working on him and we’re going to go to the hospital,” Fenkner said. “I’m like, ‘No, he’s 17. You don’t understand. He’s 17. You have to bring him back. He’s 17!”
At first, she wondered whether her son died of a seizure or perhaps an aneurysm. Only later did she begin to suspect drugs.
“In my head I’m like, no that can’t happen,” Fenkner said. “That can’t happen to him. He’s too smart. We talked about this. It can’t happen.”
Then the coroner’s office ruled the death a fentanyl overdose. Inman had only fentanyl in his blood — and it was at a level 10 times higher than a lethal dose.
“That was probably the worst thing that you could have said to me, and I dropped to my knees,” Fenkner said. “I was inconsolable for like four hours, because how does a 17-year-old die from a fentanyl overdose? How does this happen? What did he have? What did he get? Who gave it to him?”
Police had searched Inman’s room but did not find any drugs or paraphernalia. After speaking with her son’s friends, Fenkner now suspects he got a counterfeit Percocet that was actually composed of pressed fentanyl.
No one was ever charged in the case, but messages Inman’s friends began sharing on social media — “stop selling fake Percs” — lead Fenkner to believe someone knows where he got the drugs that killed him.
Fenkner still listens to music recordings her son made so she can hear his voice. She decided to share his story in an effort to spare other parents the same grief she now feels every day.
“I just don’t want my son to be remembered as the kid who overdosed,” Fenkner said. “That was, I think, my biggest fear when the word came that it was an accidental fentanyl overdose. My kid’s going to be the kid who is known for that instead of being known for the smart, funny kid who would do ridiculous things to get a laugh out of you when you’re having a bad day, that had the greatest smile ever, that would do anything for a friend. Instead of all those things, he’s going to be remembered as the kid who overdosed. And it’s not because it was a purposeful thing. It wasn’t that he knew what he was taking. He doesn’t deserve that. He was so much more than that. So much more than that.”
‘It’s like Russian roulette’
Nanticoke resident Mark Gregory, a 38-year-old father of three, had been sober for years before a mixture of fentanyl and other drugs claimed his life on New Year’s Day.
He developed a taste for cough medicine during his high school years — a habit that very much worried his mother, Cathleen Jenkins.
“The drug issue started while he was still a teen, but it was over-the-counter drugs,” Jenkins said. “That was very hard.”
Gregory moved on to using heroin and found himself in a vicious cycle of getting clean and then relapsing.
But for nearly four years at the end of his life, Gregory achieved sobriety with the help of a Salvation Army program, his family said. He even found steady work driving people from across the East Coast to get help at the Banyan Treatment Center in Laurel Run.
“This last time, I wasn’t even worried anymore. He was so focused on his sobriety,” Jenkins said. “That was his passion at that point, helping other addicts come to find being clean and starting their life again. He was doing so well.”
Then the COVID-19 pandemic struck, and one of Gregory’s children became sick. The children’s mother, Jane Davison, said Gregory had been with the kids around Christmastime, and he had to go into quarantine.
Jenkins said her son’s work had kept him busy, and that she believes the inactivity during quarantine caused him to give in to temptation.
“All of a sudden he’s under quarantine and the opportunity to do something came up,” Jenkins said. “One of his friends had helped him get it, and that time it killed him.”
New Year’s Eve was Gregory’s daughter’s birthday, but she never heard from him.
“We were messaging that night because we were all in quarantine and it was our daughter’s birthday,” Davison said. “I was sending pictures of my daughter sitting at a table by herself with a birthday cake, you know?”
Jenkins said she also texted her son that night to wish him a happy new year. When she woke up the next morning, the message had gone unanswered. She went to work and finished her shift, but still there was no reply.
Jenkins said she began to worry that Gregory had caught COVID.
“I was panicking, and I was trying to find someone to check on him,” she said.
Davison sent her son over to check on Gregory. She assumed he had gotten sick and was asleep, she said.
“Then my son Facetimed me and I remember him standing at the top of the stairs by his dad’s room just bawling his eyes out,” Davison said.
Since Gregory’s death, five of his friends have also died of overdoses — highlighting the extent of a problem that has gripped not only Northeast Pennsylvania but the entire country.
“I don’t think anybody is unaffected at this point,” Jenkins said. “I don’t think there’s anybody that doesn’t know somebody who has lost someone to drugs in this area.”
As a resident of Ashley, she said she’s encountered the distain people in the community can show to patients at the Miners Medical methadone clinic. She urged people to show compassion to those who are trying to reclaim their lives from a drug that has taken a relentless grip that non-addicts struggle to understand.
“The people that are trying to get off of drugs made a mistake the first time they took it,” she said. “After that, it’s not a mistake anymore. It’s a disease.”
She also said the nefarious impact fentanyl has had in the community, and how it has changed the landscape of drug abuse — not only for heroin users but for anyone who experiments with drugs.
“It’s like Russian roulette. You don’t know when you take it,” Jenkins said. “It’s sad that what would have been an experiment in drugs in my era is a death sentence in theirs.”
