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Howland woman, revived on Thursday in Niles, overdosed again Saturday in Warren
By Ed Runyan
WARREN
One of the two people who overdosed in a Niles store parking lot Thursday afternoon overdosed again Saturday night at the Riverview Motel on Parkman Road.
Police were called at 7:15 p.m. Saturday to the motel, where they found an unresponsive Sonya R. Frantz, 31, who listed her address as the Capri Motel on East Market Street in Howland.
She was in the shower, wet from the water and was blue and barely breathing, police said.
An officer administered two doses of the opiate-reversal drug naloxone, and ambulance personnel administered five more, police said. Frantz was taken by ambulance to ValleyCare Trumbull Memorial Hospital. It is not known whether she recovered.
Also at the scene was Jon D. Baritell, 44, also with a Capri Motel address, who was arrested on warrants issued through Warren Municipal Court. He was released from the jail a few hours later.
Police learned that Frantz and Baritell were the same couple found unconscious Thursday outside the Dollar General Market in the Niles Plaza Shopping Center on Youngstown Road, an officer wrote in a report.
It involved a child entering the store and telling workers her parents were in their car and would not wake up.
Charges of child endangerment and possessing controlled substances were filed Monday in Niles Municipal Court against Frantz and Baritell in the Thursday incident.
Mel Brown of Niles, who was visiting the Niles Plaza Shopping Center on Thursday, videotaped the work of ambulance personnel to revive Frantz and Baritell and posted the video on her Facebook page to increase people’s awareness of the seriousness of the overdose problem.
It in unknown how many shots of naloxone were used to revive Frantz in the Niles incident.
Also raising awareness was a photo posted on the East Liverpool Police Department website of a couple that overdosed in that city with a small child in their car.
Randall Pugh, vice president and chief operations officer for Lane LifeTrans ambulance company and Weathersfield fire chief, said the number of overdose calls they get has costs associated with them, both monetary and emotional.
Financially, ambulance drug-overdose calls cost the company money, Pugh said. Naloxone is provided to the ambulance companies at no cost by the hospitals, but such calls require the use of an “Ambu-bag,” which is the bag and mask used to help victims breathe.
Also typically used are IV tubes and fluids and a needle. And a supervisor in a sport utility vehicle typically accompanies an ambulance on such calls, Pugh said. Medicaid, which pays for health care for the poor, reimburses overdose calls at $128 each.
“It doesn’t take any time to run up a bill for $128,” Pugh said. “There’s no profit.”
Pugh said he believes there will be an emotional cost borne by ambulance workers in the years to come for having to cope with the overdose deaths and trying multiple times to save addicts. “There is a real mental strain,” he said.
Some people have adopted the mindset that naloxone can save everyone, but ambulance workers frequently tell the loved ones of addicts who are revived: “This is a good outcome this time, but it may not be as good the next time.”
In some cases, family members and friends unload on ambulance workers, Pugh said.
“People get very angry when you don’t save them and ... place the blame on the medic,” he said.
Jeff Orr, commander of the Trumbull Ashtabula Group Law Enforcement Task Force, one of the Trumbull County’s primary drug-investigative agencies, said a few counties, including Lucas and Franklin, have begun to attack the overdose problem in a coordinated fashion – law-enforcement agencies providing information to a centralized agency to better identify the drug dealers and the drug-treatment community responding with law enforcement shortly after overdoses.
Addicts may listen to recovering addicts, but they won’t listen to law enforcement, Orr said.