Scripps News’ Post

Transcript

Open the side door. 2 year old heroin overdose. For more than a year, Scripts News Investigates has been examining the exploding cases of babies, toddlers and young children who've been poisoned by fentanyl. And we've been sharing these stories with people in power who can do something about it. Let me first thank you. And your colleagues are doing your work on exposing federal debts, especially among children. We see the scope of it by the numbers that have been pulled together, and that's really important information that should motivate all of us. I've spoken directly to the president about the issue of addiction and overdose. I will be determined to share what you're finding around this set of tragedies. 2192 I wanted to look into this story because I kept hearing about fentanyl poisonings and I wanted to know how this affected kids. So you know I'm going to tell DCS that kids here, right? Yes. So stay here. If I was you, I thought, could we do this on a national level? Could we look at how often? Is this impacting children 911 Where's your emergency? I have a almost a 2 year old daughter. She's not freezing. We made our own spreadsheet. We started tracking names and dates and locations. But we ended up with more than 350 cases. We submitted hundreds of public records requests, and we got back thousands of pages of documents and crime scene photos. We found out about a case where we contacted the courthouse. We contact the Police Department and file these records requests. And then, like, it was hard, we had to fight for some of these sometimes. We're still fighting more than a year later. Why did you stop investigating? Can you breathe for me? Hey. Hey. You can it's it's fentanyl. We ended up looking through at least 78 hours of footage and listening to audio that includes 911 tapes, interrogation reports, body camera footage. Is anybody inside apartment A announce yourself. And we were able to hear and a lot of these cases and sometimes see what was going on with these kids when they first were poisoned. Press, press, press, press. My purse is open. Oh my God, wow. We got a bunch of police photographs of this that we sorted through and we saw in some of these cases parents left their drugs in purses. On a counter and one of the cases, there was drug residue on a stuffed animal. This needs to be brought to light when you need to tell this story. This is important for people to know. Other parents have gone through something very similar. Because we gathered all these records and made this data set, we were able to determine that at least half of these cases involved families who had previous interactions with police or Child Protective Services. In some cases both there were red flags and at least half of these cases. We've gone from coast to coast for the story. We've gone from Maine to California. We've gone to five different states talking to families about what they've gone through. You know, they're devastated. Nobody expected that this was going to happen. I remember. Bargaining with God sitting here, take my life, give him his life back. We took our findings to five members of Congress and local legislators from both sides of the aisle. Talk about what we found and possible solutions. So if we want to save the lives of the young, we're going to have to bring awareness and that's going to mean an all out war on fentanyl. There is no easy solution to this. You can't just snap your fingers and make it stop. But I think the answer for us. Is as journalists, is to shine light on this area. If we can bring attention to this, if we can raise awareness, if we can get the attention of health leaders, if we can talk to people in power, if you can share this with the people that you know, more people who know about this can help make a change and maybe we can make a dent in this crisis. I just don't want anybody else. I feel the pain that I feel.