Fentanyl claimed the lives of many Athenians in 2025

By Joe Johnson

More than a dozen Athens residents had already died from fentanyl poisoning as the final month of 2025 began.

That death toll has climbed even higher during December.

“I have about 14 confirmed Fentanyl cases so far” this year,”’ Athens-Clarke County Coroner Michael Eberhart said on Monday, “I have other cases still pending (lab) results.”

Among those pending cases is that of a 41-year-old woman who died in her home on Vine Street last Friday.

She was found by her boyfriend when he came home from work. After seeing that a grocery order has gone bad from sitting out on the porch all day, the man tried to go into the bedroom but the door was locked.

He went back outside and got in through a window and realized that his girlfriend was not breathing on the bed.

He immediately called 911 and when police arrived they turned the woman over and saw she was clutching a lighter and had been lying on burnt foil and the outer part of a pen for inhaling fumes.

The devastated boyfriend told police that he knew that she had been addicted to pills “but had been clean for a while.”

According to police, residue on the burnt foil appeared to be fentanyl.

A similar tragedy had played out earlier in the month at a home on Grove Street Extension where a 32-year-old man apparently died from using the deadly drug.

He was found by a friend who went into his bedroom after not having seen him all morning.

He was said to have had a history of drug and alcohol abuse, with fentanyl his drug of choice.

He had just moved in with the friend after having separated from his girlfriend. and had just the day before collected his first paycheck from a new job.

Even concrete walls and steel bars weren’t able to keep fentanyl’s scourge from prisoners in the county jail.

Authorities saiy that four inmate died this year from using fentanyl that had been smuggled in by Jasmine T. Wheeler when she was employed as a jail nurse.

As in Athens, preliminary data for 2025 indicates that fentanyl continues to be the dominant driver of drug overdose deaths throughout Georgia, with projections suggesting high fatality counts similar to or slightly exceeding last year’s levels.

While exact, finalized numbers for 2024 are still being tabulated, provisional data indicates that Georgia saw an estimated 2,113 to 2,510 total overdose deaths involving fentanyl last year.