Saturday marked one year since Dr. Deirdre Cronin called Day Staff Writer Judy Benson with an urgent message.

The Lawrence + Memorial emergency room, Cronin said, had treated eight people for suspected overdoses that day. It usually treated no more than one.

Thanks to Chief Medical Examiner Dr. James Gill, who took it upon himself to implement careful recording of all drugs involved in fatal overdoses, residents of Connecticut have a good idea of which ones are killing people.

We know there were more than twice as many fatal drug overdoses in 2015 as in 2012. We know the majority of those resulted from heroin or fentanyl use. We know data from the first six months of 2016 suggest the overall increase in overdose deaths is leveling off, even as fentanyl is increasingly present.

But, though we know it’s rare in the newsroom to go more than a day or two without hearing of a possible overdose on the scanner, we didn’t have a good idea of how many overdose calls our emergency responders deal with.

[naviga:img class="img-responsive" src="http://projects.theday.com/images/od-age.png" alt="Overdoses by gender"/]

So we asked.

Some municipalities didn’t participate for various reasons. In Norwich, for example, where five fire departments cover different parts of the city, private company American Ambulance would have the most comprehensive data. Though they wouldn’t have to by law, ambulance officials didn’t seem reluctant to provide us with numbers in the future. The issue is they only started keeping track in April. 

But the data The Day did acquire show the region's emergency personnel responded to at least 101 opioid-related overdose calls — fatal and nonfatal — in the first six months of 2016. Sixty of those calls were in New London. The people overdosing there came from all over the state.

A review of the data found at least 70 percent of those who overdosed were men.

[naviga:img class="img-responsive" src="http://projects.theday.com/images/od-gender.png" alt="Overdoses by gender"/]

Those between the ages of 25 and 29 made up about one-fifth of the calls — by far the most common group. Twenty-eight percent of the calls came in April. Emergency personnel used naloxone at least 67 percent of the time. At least 13 of the overdoses were fatal.

Some of those who overdosed had just gotten out of treatment. Others were waiting to get in. Still more died in “sober” houses.

Boyfriends found girlfriends who had overdosed and vice versa. People shot up or snorted in cars, coffee shops, hotels, friends’ houses and even the bathrooms at New London Waterfront Park.

[naviga:img class="img-responsive" src="http://projects.theday.com/images/od-month.png" alt="Overdoses by gender"/]

Some told police they would never use again. One 22-year-old man, upset because the Narcan had killed his buzz, told police he had been using since age 13 and had no plans to stop.

Today, we explore the story of Jeanne Clark, a 63-year-old Noank resident who, last April, lost her youngest son to an overdose. Just more than eight years earlier, she lost her oldest son to the same thing.

On Monday, we talk to relatives of Christopher Brunner, who died last March after a lengthy battle with addiction. Medical examiners found a combination of heroin, fentanyl and hydromorphone in his system. He was 48.

And we hear from the mother of Baltic resident Gage Andrew, a former Norwich Technical High School football player who kept his addiction hidden from family members. He died two weeks ago, at age 23.