CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Mary Jo Trocano would sunbathe in 55-degree weather. The dichotomy: warm body, cool air. It reminds her family of another poignant memory of a woman filled with so much love but trapped in a chemically induced despair.
"She just was a very beautiful person inside and out," her sister Luanne Brown said. "And unfortunately this epidemic, she got wrapped up in it, and she couldn't get herself to shake it."
The "epidemic" is addiction to heroin and its cousins in the opiate family.
After being diagnosed with mental illnesses and a pain disorder more than 20 years ago, Mary Jo Trocano became addicted to painkillers. She turned to heroin and battled an addiction to the drug for more than a decade before her body was found in March 2015 behind an abandoned house in Cleveland.
Trocano was one of 228 people who died last year in Cuyahoga County from drug overdoses. She was swept away in the tidal wave of a public health crisis that has struck a nerve from Cleveland's suburbs to Capitol Hill and beyond.
Cleveland.com will examine the devastation that heroin and other opiates have wreaked on Northeast Ohio in a series of stories - Heroin's human toll: Families shattered by overdose deaths - that will run over the next few months. Reporters will tell the stories of families shattered by addiction and the efforts to calm the storm.
Politicians and public officials - many breaking from past positions - have figured that waging a war on drugs won't solve this epidemic. America's first heroin epidemic of the 1960s and the crack-cocaine wave of the 1980s were considered law enforcement issues.
The approach then was to punish, now it is to save. But finding salvation in the eye of the storm is often difficult. The toll of addiction has left behind hundreds of grieving family members whose stories of hopelessness, desperation and struggle often go untold.
Beginning Monday, and over the coming weeks and months, cleveland.com will tell the stories of those people who are left behind; the parents, children and family members who are now a part of a growing fraternity of real people behind the deadly statistics.