Community Owned. Local News. Burke County, NC.
There’s no sugar-coating what it feels like to be a fentanyl addict. It’s a horror movie. Just ask Savannah Collins. For a full quarter of her life, Collins, 20, has endured the living hell of …
A routine arrest turned into a nightmare for Sam Crump. Last winter, Warrant Sgt. Crump, a 24-year veteran of the Burke County Sheriff’s Office, was assisting the Drexel Police Department and …
By some accounts, fentanyl users know exactly what they’re doing when they partake of the highly addictive, synthetic opioid. The first time Savanna Hall did fentanyl, she had no idea. Hall was a …
Taylor Setzer-Calvert clearly remembers when the fentanyl epidemic hit Burke County, and she’s still amazed at how quickly the deadly synthetic opioid began wrecking lives here. Since then, things …
Drexel Police Sergeant Travis Butler was only trying to save a man’s life. In the process, he could have lost his own. In early May, he responded to an overdose call just outside the city limits of …
One of the great things about being a weekly newspaper is the extra time it gives our news staff to go beyond surface reporting and take a closer look at issues that are having a great impact on our community.
This series is about the fentanyl epidemic in Burke County.
Opioid overdoses are the leading cause of accidental death in North Carolina. In 2021, over 4,000 North Carolinians died from using this most dangerous class of drugs.Particularly distressing is that …
Medical personnel and law enforcement agencies admit they have only a tenuous grasp on the devastating fentanyl epidemic. Now, another drug threatens to make the situation much worse. Xylazine, an …
Congratulations to Burke County Commissioner Johnnie Carswell on two counts. First, Carswell was sworn in last weekend as the new president of the North Carolina Association of County Commissioners, …