Tarrant County officials to conduct Texas’ first-ever review of overdose deaths
Tarrant County officials are set to begin conducting reviews of overdose deaths at a meeting this Friday, said Dr. Brian Byrd, the county’s public health director.
More than 2,000 Tarrant County residents have died from drug overdoses in the past five years, with many of those deaths involving fentanyl and a mixture of other drugs, according to county records. While fentanyl death numbers are decreasing, overdoses from meth and other stimulants are skyrocketing in Texas.
By reviewing overdose deaths on a case-by-case basis, the group hopes to identify common factors between cases and figure out what to do about them, Byrd said.
“We would look into all the stuff,” Byrd said. “Where were they? Who showed up? Did the EMS who showed up have Narcan or not? What part of the city was it?”
Officials with Byrd’s office, as well as the sheriff’s and medical examiner’s office, sit on the council, Byrd said. So do representatives from the Recovery Resource Council, a Dallas-Fort Worth nonprofit that provides behavioral, mental and addiction recovery healthcare.
Dr. Casey Green, an addiction psychiatrist, approached the nonprofit three years ago with the idea for the review, said Becky Devine, the Recovery Resource Council’s director of special projects.
Green had heard about similar initiatives while attending a conference and thought a review board would be good to implement locally, Devine said. But Green didn’t have the capacity to take on the project alone, so he approached the nonprofit for help.
Weeks later, Devine attended a conference on overdose response strategies hosted by the Centers for Disease Control Foundation, she said. At that conference, review boards like the one Green suggested were discussed as the “latest and greatest” strategy.
Given her organization’s nearly 80-year history in North Texas and its strong relationships with area stakeholders, Devine said she felt it would be right to try implementing the technique in Tarrant County.
“We felt like we were well-positioned to try to get it off the ground,” Devine said. “So that’s what we’ve been chipping away at ever since.”
When the initial meeting happens on Friday, Tarrant County will be home to the only overdose review board in the state of Texas, Devine said.
While the board’s primary goal is to reduce overdose deaths in the county, there are important “secondary endpoints” they hope to achieve as well, Byrd said.
Those secondary endpoints include improved training for first responders on how to handle overdoses, improving the ability of acute care facilities to deal with the incidents, and innovation in the ways the public health department educates the community, Byrd said.
“At a very high level, I would say that our goal is to save lives,” Devine said. “And the way that I envision a project like this being able to do that, is really looking at these individuals who have unfortunately lost their life to an overdose, identifying points in which they interacted with the system and identifying opportunities to strengthen those interactions.”
This story was originally published October 8, 2025 at 12:18 PM.
