Drug overdose deaths in East Baton Rouge have already surpassed the 2020 record with two months left until the end of the year.
Parish Coroner Dr. Beau Clark unveiled the grim statistics Wednesday during a presentation at his office attended by bereaved family members of overdose victims.
So far this year, he said the parish has recorded 248 drug deaths. His office recorded 242 in all of 2020.
Clark and his chief investigator, Shane Evans, said they expect the 2021 figure to rise to 300 through December.
“I hope for the day I don’t have to report another overdose death,” Clark said. “That will be a good day.”
Clark said the homicide number hit a new record as well, with 140 this year, surpassing the 136 his office recorded in 2020. Last weekend alone, nearly half a dozen people died in two murder-suicides, one domestic violence murder and a fatal stabbing.
The coroner tracks all deaths resulting from the actions of another person, including accidental deaths and those considered justified by law enforcement, while FBI crime reporting rules limit homicide data to intentional and unjustified killings that meet the legal definitions of murder and manslaughter.
“We’re all here because something needs to change,” Clark said. “Law enforcement has to limit the supply chain, and we have to help people with substance abuse problems. If we don’t do both, we’re destined to be unsuccessful.”
Several family members of overdose victims shared their stories — and they all involved fentanyl, a lethal synthetic opioid.
The parish’s first fentanyl overdose death was reported in 2014. From 2014 through 2017, little more than 8% of overdose deaths in the parish involved fentanyl, according to the District Attorney’s Office.
By contrast, Clark said fentanyl was present in 90% of overdose deaths this year. Just 28 of the 248 overdoses were linked to other drugs.
Kathy Desadier said her 28-year-old niece, Kathryn Mayeux, died from fentanyl in late August. The man who gave her niece the fatal dose was arrested for unlawful disposal of a body, she said, but he posted bail.
“Someone who lives around the corner from him died of an overdose three weeks after Katy’s death,” she said. “Police know who this guy is. They know he’s killing people, but nothing is being done about it.”
There was one thing Clark and his audience agreed on: the parish needs a new approach in handling substance abuse and overdose deaths.
“Health care doesn't treat addicts the same as cancer patients,” one speaker said. “We’re looked down upon, like we don’t deserve help.”
Desadier said the Baton Rouge Police Department should develop a narcotics task force with a special focus on overdoses. She said she wishes there was more investigation into where the drugs are coming from.
“I feel like police see an overdose death and they automatically think the victim was a drug addict,” she said. “Katy wasn’t an addict. She was killed.”
Mayeux’s case is under investigation with the East Baton Rouge Sheriff’s Office narcotics team, since BRPD suspended its own drug division amid a corruption probe that implicated virtually the entire unit.
Desadier has been taking care of Mayeux’s 6-year-old daughter since her death. She said she wraps the girl in Mayeux’s shirts so she can sleep at night.
“This needs to stop,” she said, as tears fell onto her lap. “It makes me sick that all of the people in this room have suffered through the grief of an overdose death, that they’ve felt what I feel. We need to do something, anything, to prevent that.”
