DENVER — It took just over 24 hours this weekend for the Denver Police Department (DPD) to respond to four calls of people who’d died outside. It was a series of overdoses from Union Station to Broadway.
It started Saturday at 4:44pm on North Alcott Street near Empower Field. Police responded to what they call an "outdoor death investigation." Authorities have not provided any names of the people who died or details about what happened.
Over the next 24 hours and 23 minutes, DPD would investigate three more outdoor deaths.
"Preliminary testing suggests that the cause of death for the four people who died outside on Nov. 25 and Nov. 26 is likely drug overdose. Office of the Medical Examiner pathologists noted no definitive signs of hypothermia during autopsy of these cases. However, the cases will not be finalized for several weeks until the final toxicology results are received," a statement from the Denver Department of Public Health and Environment (DDPHE) read.
In front of businesses, in public plazas, and on busy streets, the overdoses came one after another. All outside.
"People are dying, and people are dying publicly in Denver today," said Lisa Raville, executive director of the Harm Reduction Action Center. "Outside, in alleys, in parks and in business bathrooms. It used to be cops coming up on people overdosing. Now it’s 17-year-old baristas who are being retriggered every day because they don’t want to clean the bathroom before they go home."
Four outdoor deaths in one day may seem like a lot, but DDPHE says it’s become normal. They say this weekend was similar to every other weekend this month.
"Sadly, the number of outdoor death cases investigated by our office this weekend are similar to past weekends this month. The outdoor death category includes anyone who is found deceased outside of a building (i.e. a road, inside a car, in a park or natural area, on the sidewalk/alley, in a parking lot, etc.)," DDPHE said.
At homeless camps in Denver today, Amy Beck searched for answers. She still hasn't been told who may have died or if she knew them. Beck is a homeless advocate and runs Together Denver. She knows outdoor overdoses happen often in the homeless community. 260 people living on the streets have died in Denver so far this year. 170 of them have been from overdoses, according to data from the Office of the Medical Examiner.
"Most of the time they are homeless if it’s an outdoor death and it’s not a suspicious death," Beck said.
Authorities have not confirmed that all four people who died this weekend were experiencing homelessness.
"When there are severe weather events, sometimes substance use is the coping mechanism that people use to stay warm," Beck said. "If we were to offer them a warm place to be instead of on the streets, perhaps they wouldn’t overdose."
Denver City Council voted in 2018 to allow a supervised drug use site. The goal was to give people who were going to do drugs regardless a safe space to do them inside. That project never took off, and earlier this year Colorado Democrats killed a bill that would have allowed safe injection sites in the state.
Advocates like Raville argue that approach is the only way to stop people from overdosing in the streets like we saw this weekend.
"Five years ago, Denver tried to do something different with overdose prevention centers, meaning people wouldn’t use publicly and die publicly," Raville said. "They’d be inside and it’s safer inside. That was five years and over 1,900 drug related deaths ago in Denver."
There is still one month left to go in the year, and Denver has already surpassed the number of overdoses in the entirety of last year. That's already more than double the number of overdoses in 2019.
"Overdose is the leading cause of death of our unhoused neighbors in Denver and has been for the last seven years," Raville said. "You can’t talk about homelessness without talking about the overdose crisis."
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