Two women and a man were found unconscious and not breathing inside a St. Cloud home Thursday afternoon, and first responders administered Narcan as part of efforts to revive all three before transporting them to the hospital. Police say it was a suspected fentanyl overdose in the 100 block of 5th Avenue Southeast.
According to KNSI, officers, St. Cloud firefighters and Mayo Ambulance paramedics responded to the medical emergency Thursday afternoon. People inside the house told officers that two women and a man had stopped breathing due to suspected fentanyl overdoses, per police. Responders administered Narcan as part of their life-saving efforts, and as kdhlradio.com reported, all three regained consciousness and were transported to CentraCare-St. Cloud Hospital for further treatment.
Narcan, also known as naloxone, is a medication used to reverse opioid overdoses by restoring a person's breathing. Police used Thursday's incident to remind the public about the extreme danger of fentanyl and other street opioids, a warning that comes as St. Cloud grapples with one of its deadliest years on record for overdoses.
A City Already Reeling From Overdose Deaths
St. Cloud Police Chief Jeff Oxton said 21 people had died of drug overdoses in the city so far in 2025, a count that ties the previous high set in 2023, according to MPR News. Oxton tied the local surge to a broader statewide rise in fatal overdoses, mainly involving fentanyl and also methamphetamine. Overdose deaths in the city had decreased slightly to 14 in 2024, the same report noted, before climbing again this year.
The station's report adds that St. Cloud overdose deaths had risen from two in 2019 to 21 in 2023, a sharp escalation documented by the St. Cloud Times. St. Cloud Police Department officers used 19 naloxone doses in 2018 compared with 83 in 2023, a sign of how often Narcan has become a routine tool for responders in the city. Police had also documented eight overdose fatalities from January through March of 2025 alone, with two cases still pending final autopsy results at the time.
Xylazine Complicates the Danger
The Central Minnesota Violent Offender Task Force has warned that xylazine, a sedative increasingly mixed with fentanyl, does not respond to Narcan, according to the St. Cloud Times. That means an overdose involving the combination can be far harder for first responders to reverse, even when naloxone is administered quickly. It is unknown whether fentanyl was confirmed by toxicology in Thursday's incident, which remains described by police as a suspected fentanyl overdose.
The danger is not confined to St. Cloud. Stearns County was selected as a high intensity drug trafficking area by the Office of National Drug Control Policy, and U.S. Rep. Tom Emmer cited 131 non-fatal and 23 fatal overdoses in the county in 2023 alone.
Statewide Numbers Show a Mixed Picture
Minnesota opioid-involved overdose deaths have fallen for three consecutive years, dropping from a high of 1,039 in 2022 to 671 in 2025, according to the Minnesota Department of Health. Fentanyl-involved deaths specifically decreased 6%, from 602 in 2024 to 564 in 2025. But the state saw a 3% increase in all-drug overdose deaths over the same period, from 994 to 1,025, driven by a rise in stimulant-involved deaths.
To help track these shifting patterns, the health department and the Minnesota Office of Emergency Medical Services launched a statewide overdose alert system on Oct. 1 designed to detect spikes, clusters and novel drug threats in near real time. The agency has also cautioned that its county-level trendlines are not a recommended tool for year-over-year comparisons, since resident deaths occurring out of state stopped being counted beginning in 2023.
For now, St. Cloud police are pointing to Thursday's close call as a stark reminder of what is at stake every time someone uses fentanyl or other street opioids. Three people regained consciousness after Narcan was administered at a home on 5th Avenue Southeast and were transported to the hospital.
