Shocking North Bay toddler death latest reminder of fentanyl crisis
SANTA ROSA (KPIX 5) -- On Monday, tragedy struck in Santa Rosa as a young girl died, possibly from exposure to the drug fentanyl. The parents are in custody and police are warning about the extreme toxic danger of having the drug inside a home.
"Fentanyl's everywhere right now ... literally everywhere," said neighbor Johnie Costa.
That was proven Monday morning when police got a call of an unresponsive toddler at an apartment on Sonoma Avenue, just a few hundred yards from police headquarters.
"When officers arrived on scene, they found a toddler in the primary bedroom that was not breathing," said police spokesman Sgt. Christopher Mahurin.
The child, identified by police as 15-month-old Charlotte Frostick, was pronounced dead at a local hospital. Police said there was packaged and unpackaged fentanyl and paraphernalia in various rooms in the house, including in the bed she shared with her parents.
Evan Frostick, 26, and Madison Bernard, 23, were arrested on "suspicion of cruelty to a child likely to produce great bodily injury or harm." If an autopsy confirms the child died from fentanyl exposure, manslaughter could be added to the charges.
"You look at toddlers and little babies, the first thing they're doing is touching whatever's around them and touching their face, touching their mouth, their nose, their eyes," said Sgt. Mahurin. "And those are easy ingestion points for a child."
Fentanyl is a highly addictive synthetic opiate, 100 times more powerful than morphine. It can be absorbed into the skin or inhaled when in powder form, and just two milligrams can be deadly to an adult. It would take much less than that to kill a small child.
Costa's house looks across at the apartment, where police were swarming in hazmat suits on Monday.
"I couldn't imagine that would happen right across the street from my house because I always see kids playing," she said. "I never thought it would happen right across the street."
Because it's cheap, fentanyl is being mixed into other street drugs, causing overdoses to people who didn't even mean to take it. Data shows that Sonoma County alone is averaging about two fentanyl overdoses per day. Costa said that danger is starting to sink in with young people her age.
"Yeah, now I think it is," she said. "I think now more people are realizing, like, we need to start being more careful of what we're doing. It's way stronger than anyone thinks."
The child's parents are both in custody in lieu of $100,000 bail and could face a court hearing as soon as Wednesday.
