In March of 2025, a 911 dispatcher in Spokane Valley, Washington answered a panicked call.
“My nephew is blue,” a woman reported, crying. “His mom said he might have gotten fentanyl from her purse!”
Another voice joined the call as the woman sobbed. “I Narcanned him twice,” referring to the drug Narcan which reverses the effects of an opioid overdose. The women said the victim was not awake, and his breathing was “rattling.”
“And how old is he?” the dispatcher asked. “He’ll be a year old,” answered the child’s aunt.
The local sheriff’s office said the child recovered, and his mother was arrested.
The 911 recording is one of many the Scripps News team has gathered and reviewed, along with police body-camera recordings and law enforcement interview videos, in an effort to understand how children too young to choose to use drugs end up ingesting them anyway, and how they can be saved.
The reporting process
In 2022, Scripps News began tracking cases of fentanyl poisonings among babies, toddlers, and young children. We wanted to show how the powerful opioid is affecting young children.
The team spent months gathering as many cases as we could, building our own database from scratch from local news stories, state child fatality and near-fatality reports, and medical examiner records. Then, we decided to find out as much information as we could about each case – gathering police reports, court records, and child welfare records.
We revisited the cases over time, tracking whether anyone was arrested for exposing the child to fentanyl, whether anyone was convicted, and re-requesting records that were previously withheld after cases closed or were adjudicated. In some cases, we filed appeals to receive records that were withheld due to the perception of secrecy in cases involving children. Some records are still being withheld. Along the way, we’ve continued to add newly-reported cases to our dataset.
Now, more than two years later, our team has compiled more than 460 cases of reported child opioid poisoning incidents from nearly every state in the U.S. from 2018 to 2025 – a total that is almost certainly an undercount. That tally includes more than 260 deaths. Trends found across the data set include:
- At least 145 cases involved children who survived after receiving Narcan or naloxone. Many of those cases involved children who needed multiple doses or even a constant “drip” of the medication to recover – underscoring the need for children to receive medical attention even after they receive Narcan.
- At least 63 cases involved caregivers who said they fell asleep and awoke to find children unresponsive or exhibiting signs of an overdose.
- There are often warning signs that children are in unsafe situations before a poisoning happens. More than half of the cases involved children from families who had histories with child welfare agencies and/or recent encounters with police involving drugs, child abuse, or child neglect.
Some exposures were reported while children were at daycare or in the care of babysitters, but most of the cases reviewed by Scripps News occurred when children were in their own homes or in the care of their own parents or relatives.
“It is probably the biggest crisis we’ve seen in child welfare in the past 20 years,” said Darcy Olsen, founder of the Center for the Rights of Abused Children.
How children are exposed
Body-worn camera video from the Village of Liberty, New York, shows the chaotic moments in 2023 when police responded to the lobby of a hotel to find an unconscious child clad in a onesie as her panicked parents looked on.
An officer performed CPR for several minutes before a medical team arrived, but the little girl, Akasha Luvert, did not survive.
The baby’s mother told police she found her daughter lying on the floor, lifeless, next to a piece of foil that the parents used to smoke drugs. Police believed Akasha’s father was supposed to be supervising her, but he fell asleep.
Police across the country investigating child fentanyl poisonings often report finding pieces of foil, straws, baggies, and other tools used to consume drugs left within reach of children. Police have reported finding foils that appeared to have been bitten, and pieces of plastic baggies have been found in the mouths of children being resuscitated.
In Florida, police found video evidence showing how 1-year-old James Valiquette was exposed before his death in 2022. A court document describes a father, recorded on surveillance video in his living room, falling asleep, which allowed the victim to roam around the living room unsupervised.” About 20 minutes later, police describe the child picking up “what appears to be a scrap of tin foil” from the floor, and placing it in his mouth.
Police said the video showed the child’s mother entering the room, discovering something in his mouth and removing it, before putting the boy to bed. She found him dead the next morning. (The child’s father pleaded guilty to manslaughter last year. The mother has pleaded not guilty and is awaiting trial.)
In other cases, medical providers said they found pills or pieces of pills in a child’s mouth.
“When you look at these situations where kids are in [a] home where illicit fentanyl is being used, we know that is a very dangerous situation,” said Dr. Natalie Laub, a San Diego child abuse physician. “We also know when caregivers, people responsible for the children, are under the influence, they cannot provide a safe and nurturing environment for that child.”
Lauren Hinton, a southern California mother, told Scripps News she doesn’t know exactly how her five-month-old twins ingested the drugs she and the child’s father had been using in 2024. A police report said both children tested positive for the drug at a local hospital.
“It wouldn’t surprise me if it was residue or maybe a binky laid down on something, or me making a bottle,” Hinton said. “I was at a point of just unmanageability and carelessness. It was just super out of control at that point.”
Both children survived, and their parents spent several months in jail. This past spring, Hinton and her partner, Alexander Santiago, told Scripps News they were in recovery and had regained custody of their twins. They said the incident set their family on a new course.
“One of us probably would’ve ended up dying,” Santiago said. ”It saved our lives, honestly.”
Symptoms of poisoning
When a mother in Florida noticed her child’s breathing was unusual in March of 2022, she pulled out her phone and hit record.
“This can’t possibly be a normal sleeping sound,” she wrote while sending the video to family members, according to a court document. Police said the mother called 911 hours later, but help did not arrive in time to save her baby.
Unusual breathing sounds, snoring, gasping, gurgling, and gagging are symptoms frequently described by witnesses in records linked to child fentanyl poisonings reviewed by Scripps News.
“People have coined it the 'death rattle,'” said Dr. Roneet Lev, a former Chief Medical Officer at the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, who highlighted the Scripps News reporting on her podcast. “That often happens before they stop breathing and that's the time to intervene.”
Witnesses also describe children turning blue or purple due to lack of oxygen, seeming lethargic, acting drowsy, and dozing off.
“If a kid is found not breathing, pinpoint pupils, blue, unconscious… the number one, two, and three most likely things that it is, is a drug overdose,” Dr. Laub said. “That kid should get Narcan immediately in the field. You should treat them as if they're an adult who's overdosed on fentanyl.”
Scripps News interviewed a child who was old enough to remember how it felt when she inadvertently ingested fentanyl when she said she swallowed a pill she found in her kindergarten classroom.
“I wanted to go to sleep so bad,” Addison Mott said. “I was dizzy. When I would walk, I would start wobbling.”
Call 911 and give Narcan
When police arrived at a home in Wisconsin’s Columbia County in November 2023, a father quickly insisted he knew the source of his 1-year-old’s distress.
“He needs Narcan! He needs Narcan!” the father told an officer and an emergency responder on video. “He got into a pill!” The officer quickly administered a dose of the overdose-reversing medication, and the child survived.
Scripps News reviewed numerous cases in which caregivers quickly disclosed children may have ingested drugs, but also reviewed cases in which caregivers either said they did not know or withheld that information, potentially delaying a child’s treatment.
One report in Arizona from 2022 said a child did not receive Narcan from paramedics because the parents denied drug use, until a hospital screening revealed fentanyl in the child’s system. The child received Narcan after the test results came in and survived.
“The best thing is just [to] be truthful with the medical staff, and give them the ability to use their resources to properly treat [the child],” said Lt. Thomas Parker, a police lieutenant at the Apache Junction, Arizona police department whose office oversaw the investigation of a child’s 2023 death. “The likelihood of survival is much greater.”
In several cases, caregivers were accused of waiting for hours to seek medical treatment for children, attempting instead to reverse the child’s symptoms with Narcan on their own.
In June, a couple in Illinois were indicted on charges of first-degree murder after prosecutors said they ordered Narcan from Uber for their toddler before seeking professional help. By the time they called 911, police said, the child could not be saved.
Many reports said children needed multiple doses of the medication in the hospital, often a constant drip, and other medical interventions to recover from their overdose symptoms. That’s why health officials emphasize that professional medical care is needed in the event of a poisoning incident.
Search for solutions
Child protection agencies across the country have been searching for solutions for years to protect children at risk of fentanyl ingestion.
“I remember telling my husband, ‘We've had like three or four in one week of these kids that were exposed to fentanyl and either died or nearly died,’ and feeling like this is something that we're gonna have to start talking about,” said Kathryn Ptak, the director of the Department of Child Safety in Arizona.
Some child welfare agencies have implemented interventions like distributing lockboxes, fentanyl test strips, and Narcan to families with histories of substance use. In Colorado, child welfare officials said caseworkers in some counties instruct families how to use Narcan and more children are surviving these incidents.
Some states have launched public awareness campaigns about keeping drugs out of the reach of children and messaging that it is safe to administer Narcan to children. Communities like Pennsylvania’s Allegheny County have used opioid settlement funds to expand access to treatment for substance use disorders.
Some deaths have prompted reckonings in child protective agencies, as grieving families and child safety advocates have argued the government is not doing enough to remove children from homes where they are exposed to substance use.
In Louisiana, the death of 3-year-old Mitchell Robinson after repeated poisonings in his mother’s care prompted legislation to “study the needs of child welfare in this state.” In New York, the death of Akasha Luvert in a Liberty hotel room where her family had been placed for housing by social workers led to a grand jury investigation and spurred efforts to improve the county’s protective services.
“I would say the system at large failed this child,” Liberty’s police chief, Steven D’Agata, told Scripps News. “The protection of children [should be] first and foremost in all of our minds when we're dealing with families that are struggling with substance use. The government must take an active role in taking steps to ensure that the children are safe.”
Drug overdose deaths overall declined by close to 27% nationwide in 2024, according to the CDC, and experts told Scripps News it’s important to maintain that momentum to protect children.
“This is the time to keep the pressure on, keep pushing on the right interventions to reduce overdose,” said Dr. Joshua Black, a Denver-based researcher who studied the increase in non-fatal pediatric fentanyl exposures. “Reducing access, finding treatments, having reversal agents like naloxone available, will keep the trend downward.”
“We know how to solve this problem,” Dr. Rahul Gupta, the former White House drug czar under President Biden, told Scripps News. “It’s critical we embrace the policies without regard to politics, those that work, like making sure that life-saving medications are available [and] people have access to treatment and recovery services.”
