Jun 25, 2015 2 min read

Washington police responded Wednesday to the city’s fifth heroin overdose within the past week.

A WPXI cameraman preparing for a live broadcast segment noticed the latest overdose victim slumped over the wheel of his vehicle about 6:30 p.m. Wednesday in a parking lot off West Beau Street and he then began attempts to revive him, city police said.

The man was eventually revived by emergency workers with Narcan, the drug approved to revive heroin overdose victims, police said.

“It wakes them right up,” Washington County District Attorney Eugene Vittone said.

There were three overdoses in the city last Friday and a fourth the following day, with all of the heroin users being revived in similar fashion, police said.

Vittone said the overdoses don’t necessarily mean there is a fatal batch of heroin circulating in the area.

“It’s all bad,” he said.

Some of the heroin bags were stamped with the name Oliver Queen, police said.

“There hasn’t been a specific stamp on them to link them to anything,” Washington police Chief Chris Luppino said.

Canonsburg police Chief Al Coghill said stamp bag names tend to exist for a short period of time.

“Police get wise to it and they change the stamp,” Coghill said.

Vittone said most of the heroin overdose deaths in the county have been taking place in Washington, Charleroi and Canonsburg and the state continues to experience a drug overdose epidemic.

There were at least 36 drug overdose deaths last year in Washington County, a number that dropped by 22 from the previous year, coroner reports suggest. Vittone said the drop in those deaths is probably attributed to luck more than anything else.

Coghill said many of the overdose deaths involved addicts who recovered and then slipped back into addiction, believing they could handle the large doses of the drug they were accustomed to using before rehabilitation.

Staff writer Emily Petsko contributed to this report.