9 overdoses in 11 hours Tuesday afternoon in Warren

Staff report

WARREN

Lt. Martin Gargas of the Warren Police Department gave cardiopulmonary resuscitation to a 34-year-old who was not breathing at her house on Commerce Avenue Northwest Tuesday evening.

The call came in at 5:59 p.m.

Ambulance personnel also worked on her for about 20 minutes, but she didn’t survive.

The department’s crime-scene technician was summoned, and he processed the scene as a suspicious death.

The Trumbull County Coroner’s Office reported the woman’s death was most likely an overdose death, but it will take another two months before the coroner’s office can rule officially.

At 11:45 a.m. Tuesday, officers were called to a home on Edgewood Street Northeast. There they found a 26-year-old man who was dead. His death is also likely to have been from an overdose, the coroner’s office said.

Four other times on this afternoon shift Tuesday, Gargas responded with other officers to addresses around the city – Perkins Park at 3:45 p.m.; Chestnut Avenue Northeast at 6 p.m.; Perkins Drive Northwest at 7:33 p.m.; and the Sheetz gas station on Elm Road Northeast at 8 p.m.

In all four of those, the call came in as a possible overdose. The individuals involved were a man, 35; a man, 53; a man, 48; and a man, 38. No report was written for three of them. The overdose in Perkins Park got a report because the man had warrants and was taken to jail.

Three other times that day – a total of nine times between 11:45 a.m. and 10:38 p.m. – police responded to calls for overdoses or possible overdoses.

The others were a female, 30, at 4:11 p.m. on Robert Avenue Northwest; a male, 30, at 9:59 p.m. on East Avenue Southeast; and a male and female at 10:38 p.m. at the Sheetz again. All four were treated by ambulance personnel.

“That’s not the norm,” Gargas said of two deaths and seven survivals on a Tuesday afternoon. “I can’t remember that many” drug-related calls in that period of time.

Gargas said responding to those calls can be overwhelming, frustrating and stressful.

Sometimes it makes you feel like you’re “beating your head against a wall,” Gargas said.

But police work has its moments, and that’s why people go into the profession, he said.

“Once in a while, you pull a person out of a burning car or pull a jumper off of a bridge, and that is what allows you to keep going,” he said.