Carrick reacts with resolve to confront opioid crisis

resources, including the neighborhood’s residents. “You can leave this meeting with hope that you have the ability to reduce overdoses and change your community.”

Ms. Rudiak said she expects news soon on a $150,000 grant “to focus specifically on Carrick and it will work to connect individuals who overdosed” with services.

She said money sought from the Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency will fund a team consisting of a “community medic” with social work training, a certified peer recovery specialist, and a neighborhood resource officer who can help to navigate what the councilwoman called “the treatment maze.”

In recent months, the block watch’s meetings have drawn few officials — just police officers and a council staff member. This time Ms. Rudiak was joined by Council President Bruce Kraus, state Rep. Harry Readshaw, D-Carrick, police Cmdr. Karen Dixon, and representatives of the mayor and the governor.

Mr.Readshaw said Mayor Bill Peduto pledged to him on Monday that the city would put its full effort into addressing the heroin and fentanyl problem in Carrick and neighboring communities. “I’ll be damned if I’m moving out of Carrick because of this problem,” he told the crowd, to cheers.

From 2015 through 2016, Carrick saw 22 fatal overdoses, more than any other city neighborhood, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported in “Riding OD Road.” It has recorded at least eight this year.

While a handful of city neighborhoods — led by the Middle Hill and East Allegheny — have had higher per capita overdose rates, no other part of the region has seen higher raw numbers of drug deaths. ZIP code 15210, which includes nearly all of Carrick, plus Knoxville, Allentown, and other “hilltop” areas, topped the region in drug deaths two of the past three years.

The Post-Gazette found that Carrick’s tradition of hard work, with resulting aches and pains, led to the prevalence of prescription narcotics. The neighborhood’s location between well-to-do suburbs to its south and traditional heroin markets to its north, changes in low-income housing and an influx of absentee landlords set the stage for frequent heroin and fentanyl overdoses.

In a conversation before the meeting, Ms. Rudiak said Carrick is not “a hellhole of drug addicted zombies.” She grew up in the neighborhood, lives there, and is approaching the end of eight years as its representative.

“I think the biggest problem Carrick has is perception, and perception is power.”

“Am I saying that things are rosy and perfect? No, I absolutely am not,” she said. But there are good things underway, like improvements to Phillips Park, reconstruction of the Carnegie Library and efforts to revitalize a dilapidated apartment complex called Berg Place — though she added that the third of those may be jeopardized because of the negative coverage.

“It’s never good publicity to be considered the narcotics capital of the city,” said Anthony Coghill, the Democratic nominee in Tuesday’s race to replace Ms. Rudiak. But he said the issue is now “on everybody’s radar screen and everybody’s taking it seriously.”

He said he hopes to work with the district attorney to add surveillance cameras along Brownsville Road to deter drug dealing. He said he’s open to working with the South Pittsburgh Opioid Action Coalition, created by Ms. Rudiak.

District Judge Richard King, who lives and works in Carrick and attended the meeting, said the PG special report “gets the community stirring a bit, and that’s a good thing.”

He added that the justice system could use a sentencing option “that’s not jail, but is similar to jail, in that you don’t have the right to leave” and where a defendant would get at least 90 days of drug treatment.

District Judge Ralph Kaiser, who lives just south of Carrick in Brentwood and hears cases from suburbs south of the city, said in an interview that in recent years about 40 people with cases on his docket have fatally overdosed. The most recent: Isabella Bondi, 16, of Beechview, who was cited in Baldwin Borough on July 5 for marijuana possession, then found dead from a fentanyl overdose July 27.

“It was so sad — 16,” said Judge Kaiser. “I just said, ‘My God in heaven, it is everywhere, and it’s coming rightup Brownsville Road.’”