12-Year-Old Girl Calls 911 After Mother Overdoses Behind The Wheel
On Thursday, Florida 911 dispatchers got a particularly unsettling call from a 12-year-old girl. The child informed them that her mother had fallen asleep behind the wheel while on the highway. Along with the 12-year-old girl, there were two little boys in the vehicle, who were 7-years-old and 1-year-old, according to Today. The source of their mother’s unconsciousness was drug overdose.
The child’s 911 call was publicly released by law enforcement and it is nothing short of haunting. The fear is evident in the little girl’s voice as she explains to dispatchers her dire situation and helps them to locate her and her family.
“My mom won’t wake up and we’re on the I-4 in the car. We’re in the grass and we’re close to a ditch. I don’t know how to put it in park,” the child said.
Luckily, police were able to locate the family’s vehicle before any of the three children were injured. When they arrived on the scene, they found 28-year-old Tiffany Smith passed out behind the wheel. She was not asleep but had overdosed on heroin in front of her children. A statement from the Volusia Sheriff’s Office in DeLand, Florida, revealed that Smith was in the midst of traveling and chose to alleviate her back pain with drugs.
VIDEO: The synthetic drug #fentanyl has surpassed heroin as the deadliest drug in the United States, taking more than 18,000 lives in 2016, federal health officials say pic.twitter.com/wxHszcZKUF
— AFP News Agency (@AFP) December 13, 2018
“She told deputies she was on her way to South Carolina with the children when she started to experience back pain. She said she stopped to take some heroin for the pain,” the statement read.
Paramedics were able to revive Smith using naloxone, a nasal spray that reverses the effects of opioid drugs on the body.
As horrific and heartbreaking as this story is, it’s certainly not the only one of its kind. As The Inquisitr previously reported, drug overdose remains one of the leading causes of death in the United States. Heroin is second only to fentanyl as being responsible for the most drug-related deaths. In fact, it’s becoming increasingly common that addicts are mixing fentanyl with other drugs, such as heroin or even cocaine. Fentanyl is an extremely strong opioid that was originally intended to treat cancer patients.
“A lot of the deaths that mention fentanyl also mention heroin, and a lot of the deaths that mention cocaine also mention fentanyl,” said medical epidemiologist Dr. Holly Hedegaard, who was a lead researcher for a study that examined the surge of unintentional overdose deaths in recent years.
