Two Staffers at Addiction Recovery Home Die of Overdoses

Emergency responders were called to an all-too-familiar scene in Pennsylvania on Sunday: They found empty packets of heroin, spoons and half-full syringes, and two men dead from overdoses. But in a sad twist, the victims were actually staffers at an unlicensed addiction facility.

Residents of Freedom Ridge Recovery Lodge, a group home and halfway house for people recovering from addiction in West Brandywine, Pennsylvania, found the unresponsive men in two separate bedrooms. An attempt to revive one of the men with the overdose drug Narcan was unsuccessful and both were pronounced dead at the scene.

Some news reports have referred to the unidentified men, ages 33 and 24, as counselors, but the facility is unlicensed and the men were not clinicians but rather staffers who gave medication to residents. The Washington Post reports that Freedom Ridge's website is offline, but a cached version said one of its missions was to "give you a solid foundation to help free you from the bondage of addictions." A spokesperson for the Pennsylvania Department of Drug and Alcohol Programs told NBC News that Governor Tom Wolf has been pushing for legislation that would require such facilities to be regulated and staffed with licensed counselors. The owners of the facility were not present at the time of the incident.

"If anybody is wondering how bad the opioid epidemic has become, this case is a frightening example," Chester County district attorney Tom Hogan said in a news release. "The staff members in charge of supervising recovering addicts succumbed to their own addiction and died of opioid overdoses. Opioids are a monster that is slowly consuming our population."

More than 33,000 people in the US died of opioid overdoses in 2015, the highest number ever, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And Pennsylvania's rates, along with other neighboring Rust Belt states, are statistically higher than the national average; in 2015, Pennsylvania coroners reported more than 3,500 overdose deaths, giving the state the sixth-highest overdose rate in the nation.

Those high rates are largely attributed to an uptick in fentanyl, a synthetic opioid that is increasingly showing up in heroin and is even more potent and deadly, according to authorities tracking the rise in Pennsylvania's heroin deaths.

Preliminary toxicology reports of the deceased men at Freedom Ridge were positive for both heroin and fentanyl, and Pennsylvania police are warning people about heroin baggies stamped with "Superman" and "Danger/Skull & Crossbones" logos—both of which were found near their bodies.

"They appear to be heroin laced with fentanyl and are likely to kill anybody who uses them," Hogan said, adding that law enforcement isn't even allowed to handle the marked baggies without special precautions, due to the risk of overdosing from skin contact.

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