Police arrested a woman after she left a backpack containing thousands of packets of heroin in the parking lot of a middle school in Pennsylvania.
Officials at Cecilia Snyder Middle School in Bucks County discovered the backpack Dec. 20 on campus grounds and spotted a tan vehicle leaving the scene. Police and instructors responded to the suspicious backpack before any students were placed in danger, discovering four bricks of heroin containing 10,000 individually packaged baggies, reports ABC 6.
Authorities tracked a tan Toyota Corolla with a New Jersey registration to the area of the school, eventually leading them to the culprit. Police arrested 26-year-old Natasha Willis, a resident of Bensalem, Pa., Wednesday morning, charging her with possession with intent to deliver narcotics and related offenses. Willis admitted to officers that she accidentally left the bag in the school parking lot while driving away.
The heroin, which police say was packaged for sale, carries a street value of roughly $100,000.
Nationally, drug overdoses are now the leading cause of accidental death for Americans under age 50, killing 63,600 people in 2016. The increase is driven primarily by opioids, which claimed 42,249 lives last year, a 28 percent increase over the roughly 33,000 lives lost to opioids in 2015, according to data released Dec. 21 by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
President Donald Trump declared the opioid epidemic a “public health emergency” Oct. 26, giving states hit hard by opioid addiction flexibility on how they direct federal resources to combat rising drug deaths.
Opioid overdose made up a staggering 66 percent of all drug overdose deaths in 2016, surpassing the annual number of lives lost to breast cancer.
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