Suicides and opioid-related deaths are down in Eagle County
But 2021 data shows alcohol-related deaths are still on the rise
Editor’s note: This article discusses death by suicide and suicidal ideation, and some people might find it triggering. If you or someone you know is in crisis, please contact your physician, go to your local emergency room, call Eagle Valley Behavioral Health’s 24/7 crisis line at 970-306-4673 or Colorado Crisis Services at 844-493-8255 or text TALK to 38255.
An analysis of Eagle County deaths from 2021 shows that efforts to reduce preventable deaths like drug overdoses and suicides are making a difference.
It’s a funny thing, working as a coroner, Kara Bettis said. Bettis, who was first elected in 2002, is not a frightening or imposing figure, but she said people often seem fearful or hesitant when they find out about her line of work.
“People sometimes get scared to shake my hand,” Bettis said. “I want to shed light on the Coroner’s Office because we’re not some bad like dark hole … we care about and serve our community, just in a different way.”
Bettis, her deputy coroners and other staff provide a vital public service to the community just like the Eagle County Sheriff’s Office or the Eagle County Board of Commissioners do, she said. If it were not for her team, the community wouldn’t have an understanding of the manners of death that take loved ones — friends, family and colleagues — away.
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“We serve the public in the sense that if someone’s loved one dies, we help them determine what happened and hopefully, we can prevent it from happening to one of their other family members, right?” Bettis said. She gave the example of alerting loved ones of congenital heart disease that may run in the family.
At times, Bettis and her team spend hours, days, or even weeks investigating a deceased person to locate their family members and give them the news. In situations of great pain and loss, they are there investigating, providing closure and tracking crucial data.
Local deaths and data on those deaths are often not something people like to think about, but trends in that data can say a lot about who we are as a community, Bettis said.
The data can also be used to take direct action on anomalies such as a spike in motor vehicle deaths that went away after wildlife fencing was added along Interstate 70 to keep deer and elk from crossing the highway, she said.
Especially when it comes to non-natural deaths, this data can tell us when social services are working to reduce the number of preventable deaths and when more support is needed.
In 2021, Eagle County saw a total of 104 deaths, according to data provided by the Coroner’s Office. This number has held steady year-over-year with 101 deaths in 2020 and 102 in 2019.
Of these 104 deaths, 72 were deemed to be “natural deaths,” 23 were classified as “accidental deaths,” and the remaining nine were ruled as suicides, according to the data.
When it comes to organizing and reporting data, the Eagle County Coroner’s Office uses “manners of death” rather than “causes of death,” Bettis explained. Causes of death are much more specific and, therefore, vary widely. The cause of any one person’s death takes longer to determine as it requires an autopsy by a licensed pathologist.
To monitor data and trends, the Coroner’s Office determines the manner of death, delineated into the broader categories of natural, accidental, homicide, suicide and undetermined.
The Eagle County Coroner’s Office reported no homicides or undetermined deaths in 2021.
So, what do we have to learn?
Well, deaths by suicide are slowly declining with 12 suicides reported in 2020 and nine in 2021. The average age of people who died by suicide was 41 years old in 2020 and 31 years old in 2021.
These numbers represent an improvement over the sharp increase in deaths by suicide that Eagle County saw in 2017 and 2018, Bettis said.
From 2012 to 2016, suicide deaths ranged from 6 to 8 per year. Then, the county reported 16 suicides in 2017 and 17 in 2018.
Alarm bells were ringing in all kinds of data collected around mental health and suicidality in Eagle County during this time. It became clear that the mental health support systems available were not meeting the community’s needs.
Beginning in 2016 and 2017, mental health professionals, law enforcement, schools and local government officials banded together to address this need with the help of a mixture of public and private funding.
It began with a 2017 ballot initiative that dedicated funds generated by a 5% tax on recreational marijuana sales to address the local behavioral health crisis as high rates of suicide and insufficient resources collided. This, combined with a $60 million commitment from Vail Health, opened a lot of doors.
Nearly five years after this terrifying jump in local suicides, Eagle County has its own community-based mental health center founded and operated by Vail Health — Eagle Valley Behavioral Health. Now, those in need of assistance don’t need to travel outside of the county.
Eagle Valley Behavioral Health has undergone an application process and has been approved by the state Office of Behavioral Health to become the county’s designated mental health services provider. That development has emerged as Mind Springs, the county’s longtime designated mental health service provider, has come under criticism recently for being under-resourced, ineffective and, at times, allegedly negligent. Mind Springs is a private nonprofit based in Grand Junction that responsible for providing behavioral health safety-net services in Eagle County and nine other Western Slope counties.
Eagle County Schools and youth-oriented nonprofits placed mental health at the forefront, allocating more resources to peer support groups and innovative partnerships to provide in-school counseling. Beginning with youth, a broader culture of conversation and awareness towards mental health became the norm.
Eagle County law enforcement agencies began requiring crisis intervention training or CIT for personnel and a co-response system was implemented for 911 calls involving individuals in mental health-related distress. This partnership is made possible by crisis clinicians from the Hope Center of the Eagle River Valley, which began operations in 2018.
The Hope Center works with many suicidal or potentially suicidal patients alongside law enforcement and Eagle County Paramedic Services.
Many challenges and areas for improvement remain, such as providing easier access to culturally competent mental health care for the county’s large Latino population. Still, the results of Eagle County’s investment in mental health can be seen in this recent decline in suicide deaths.
“Resources like the Hope Center and community paramedics seem to be helping people in crisis,” said Will Dunn, senior manager of clinical services at Eagle County Paramedic Services.
The county must continue striving to facilitate “easier access to mental health treatment so it doesn’t reach crisis levels,” Dunn said.
Substance abuse prevention
Another area where progress is reflected in recent death data is Eagle County deaths due to substance abuse, specifically opioid-related deaths, Bettis said.
Opioid-related deaths are lower than they have been in years with just two such deaths reported for 2021.
Since 2010, opioid-related deaths have hovered between three to five deaths per year but the county has seen some alarming spikes in 2013 (nine deaths) and 2017 (seven deaths).
“In the last two decades, there was a push to treat pain more aggressively within the medical community and legally prescribed (opiates) became more prevalent,” Dunn said in a written statement. “As people become habituated to opiates, it often requires more to feel the effects and so people take more which can lead to overdose.”
On the whole, opioid-related deaths are now trending downwards.
Dunn said this could be a result of a relatively recent push to make Narcan more available to first responders and community members.
Narcan is a form of naloxone — a powerful compound used to prevent narcotic overdoses in emergency situations — that can be administered as a nasal spray and, thus, can be administered by someone without the medical training needed to administer the substance intravenously.
Eagle County paramedics administered naloxone four times for suspected opiate overdoses in 2021, Dunn said, saving twice as many lives as were lost in opioid-related deaths last year.
“It has had a positive impact, however I surmise that we may not know the full effects of it since it is possible for an overdose to be treated by a companion and we might not get called,” Dunn said in his statement.
Most Eagle County Sheriff’s Office deputies now carry naloxone spray as do many local police officers, firefighters and, of course, paramedics.
Eagle County Paramedic Services also offers naloxone spray to the community at large as part of its new “Narcan in the home” program offered in partnership with Vail Health and Eagle Valley Behavioral Health.
“Really, every home first-aid kit should have a tourniquet and naloxone,” Dunn said in the statement. “There has been some controversy around this since historically opiate overdose has been the result of illegal activity and there is concern that by making naloxone immediately available that could encourage more illegal activity. However, I think that’s a minority opinion.”
The improvement in opioid-related death prevention could also be due, in part, to the work of the Gore Range Narcotics Interdiction Team or GRANITE, a multijurisdictional drug task force comprised of officers from the Eagle County Sheriff’s Office and the Vail Police Department.
The task force seeks to intercept drug traffickers who come through Eagle County on I-70, Detective Sgt. Aaron Veldheer of the Eagle County Sheriff’s Office said.
In recent years, officers began to notice that every shipment of drugs they intercepted — no matter what the other drugs being trafficked were — contained at least a small amount of fentanyl pills, Veldheer said.
“The amount of fentanyl out there, to me, is scary,” Veldheer said. “In the majority of those loads that they’re taking off the streets, there’s a few thousand fentanyl pills or carfentanyl pills and that’s pretty scary.”
Fentanyl is a very potent opiate that can cause an overdose with just a very small dose of the drug, Veldheer said, with carfentanyl being the newest and even more dangerous version.
“The goal of GRANITE and the goal of probably the majority of narcotic officers around the country is to save lives,” Veldheer said. “I looked at it as every time we made a bust, every time we arrested somebody, we saved a life by not letting somebody try that drug for the first time and by getting that drug off the streets.”
On another note, Eagle County deaths due to the most commonly abused substance — alcohol — are still trending upwards, Bettis said, with five such deaths in 2020 and nine last year.
There is not the same sense of urgency with alcohol when it comes to the mobilization of local resources, but it ends up killing more people over time, Bettis said. It can be a slower death, she said, a lifestyle.
With alcohol abuse, “I don’t see any easy answers, but a comprehensive system of dealing with acute intoxication, resources for treatment of alcoholism – which would include both inpatient and outpatient components for anyone regardless of their ability to pay – would be a great start,” Dunn said in his written statement.
While alcohol-related deaths remain elevated, Veldheer said today’s data is an improvement over the 1980s and ’90s when drinking and driving was still very much the norm. Since then, law enforcement in Eagle County and across the country has made a concerted effort to crack down on people who drive while intoxicated and this, he said, now dissuades many people from taking the risk.
“Since the ’80s, (law enforcement) has been beating the message, ‘don’t drink and drive, don’t drink and drive’ into everybody’s head,” Veldheer said. “You can’t go anywhere without seeing that.”
“Alcohol abuse and alcoholism is an issue in many ski towns,” Dunn said. “Also true of many mountain towns, we don’t have easy access to resources for treating addiction, and what resources are available are outstripped by demand.”
Also specific to a ski town community like Eagle County are skier deaths caused by things like collisions or avalanches, Bettis said. The Coroner’s Office reported four skier deaths in 2021 and four in 2020.
There are ways to take action on these deaths as well through the promotion of avalanche safety classes and other information about what it takes to enjoy the back country safely, she said.
