A 7-year-old girl in McKeesport, Pennsylvania got on the bus and went to school as normal Monday morning, but on the way home she told her bus driver she hadn’t been able to wake her parents. The bus driver alerted police who responded to the home. From the Washington Post:

Inside the home, authorities found the bodies of Christopher Dilly, 26, and Jessica Lally, 25, dead of suspected drug overdoses, according to police.

Also inside the home were three other children — 5, 3 and nine months old.

Courney Lally, the deceased woman’s sister, had tried to alert authorities to the problem for months, sending police photos from inside the couple’s trash-strewn home and begging authorities to give her custody of the couple’s four children. That had only angered Jessica Lally who moved her family to a new house a few months ago.

This local news report tells the story:

There were 422 drug overdose deaths in Allegheny County (which includes Pittsburgh) in 2015. In fact, police responded to a similar situation on the same block within a day of discovering the 7-year-old’s parents. That’s part of a massive rise in opioid deaths nationwide:

Nationwide, opioids such as heroin and prescription pain relievers killed more than 28,000 people in 2014, more than any year on record, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. At least half of all opioid overdose deaths involved a prescription drug, the CDC said, adding that the number of overdose deaths involving opioids has nearly quadrupled nationwide since 1999.

Incidents like this of parents overdosing in front of small children have made the news several times recently. Last month video was published on You Tube showing a toddler trying to rouse her mother, Mandy McGowen, who had collapsed from a drug overdose in the middle of a Family Dollar store in Lawrence, Massachusetts. Fortunately,  McGowen survived but her 2-year-old was taken from her by Massachusetts Department of Children and Families.