On October 24, 2016, on her Facebook page, Jamie Allison wrote “Death is only a shot away…” Less than two weeks later she died from an overdose of heroin and fentanyl. Allison, 26, was one of a record number of people who died of a drug overdose in Milwaukee County in 2016. She’s a statistic, […]

In the last 15 years, Milwaukee has seen drug overdose deaths more than triple. This is the tragic story of how the lives of two individuals and their families were changed by opioid addiction.

Just 15 years ago, the notion of young children dying of drug overdoses in Milwaukee County was all but unheard of. Medical Examiner’s records from 2002 indicate that no such deaths occurred that year among those younger than 15. But in 2016, three one-year-old’s died of drug overdoses in the county. A two-year-old and a […]

Before they tore down the abandoned house at 1217 W. Madison St., it brought together two people living on the edge of society. One was a homeless man. He had spruced up the place and invited a pretty, but emotionally troubled 26-year-woman to stay there. She was Francheska Hernandez. Raised in Puerto Rico, she came […]

Arthur Bleksley called his girlfriend one night in 2013 crying and drunk. He told Amanda Warm, whom he had been seeing for three years, that his friend had died of a heroin overdose. He said he didn’t understand why the friend would do that. He wondered if there was something he could have done to […]

As the Milwaukee opioid epidemic continues, paramedics are stocking their units with narcan, a drug used to prevent the high. They go out on overdose calls so often, that using narcan on patients has become part of their daily routine.