A 10-year-old Miami boy may be among the youngest victims of Florida’s opioid crisis.
Preliminary toxicology tests show that Alton Banks had the potent painkiller fentanyl in his system when he collapsed at his Overtown home in June, authorities said on Monday.
The death comes against the backdrop of a staggering opioid crisis that has wreaked havoc across the country, with hundreds of South Florida drug users fatally overdosing in recent years. But illegal fentanyl and some of its synthetic cousins can be so powerful that just a speck, breathed in or absorbed through the skin, can fatally affect an unwitting victim.
Investigators believe Alton, a fifth-grader at Frederick Douglass Elementary, may be just such a victim.
On June 23, the boy began vomiting after returning home from an outing at a neighborhood pool. That evening, he was found unconscious. Paramedics rushed to his home on the 100 block of Northwest 13th Street that evening. Doctors pronounced him dead at Jackson Memorial Hospital.
Miami detectives are still trying to piece together his final day.
Read the full story at our news partner, the Miami Herald.
