Answer extracted from the This American Life podcast — listen to the full episode below.
What are the precise call details and timing in the hours before an overdose death?
On July 31, 2015, Sasha made and received seven calls between 4:00 p.m. and 4:40 p.m., with her death confirmed at 6:54 p.m. from a heroin and fentanyl overdose. The calls reveal a compressed pattern of contact with three people—Alan, Gary, and Tim—before a final one-minute call to Jerry at 4:40 p.m., placing the drug use sometime within the next two hours and fourteen minutes.
The exact sequence: minute by minute
On that July afternoon, the phone records show a rapid succession of outgoing and incoming calls concentrated over forty minutes. At 4:00 p.m., Sasha called Alan; Alan called back two minutes later for 54 seconds. By 4:08 p.m., she was calling Gary, a one-minute conversation followed by Gary's callback at 4:20 p.m., lasting 42 seconds. Sasha called Gary again at 4:27 p.m. for 41 seconds.
The pattern shifts with Tim: at 4:39 p.m., Sasha made an outgoing call to him lasting only one second—possibly a missed or dropped connection. One minute later, at 4:40 p.m., she called Jerry for one full minute, and as detailed in this episode of This American Life, this would be her last recorded call.
The window of unknown time
Between the final call to Jerry at 4:40 p.m. and the Connecticut Medical Examiner's time of death at 6:54 p.m., there is a gap of two hours and fourteen minutes when Sasha used the heroin and fentanyl that would kill her. The autopsy provided no additional detail about the exact moment of use within that window.
This timeline, reconstructed through phone records, represents one piece of the larger investigation that her sister Nadia undertook to understand the final hours of her life. The calls themselves offer no insight into what was said or what precipitated the overdose, only the fact of connection itself in those final moments before.
See also
What does a sister discover about her relationship with her sibling through examining text messages after death?
After Sasha died, Nadia found a text her sister sent to a friend the night of a fight about drug use that revealed deeper tensions about acceptance and judgment within the family relationship.
How does losing a family member to overdose lead someone to investigate the circumstances of death?
Nadia Bowers spent years reconstructing her sister Sasha's last days by examining text messages, phone records, and autopsy reports to understand the sequence of events that led to her overdose from heroin and fentanyl.
What happens when a child drops a heavy object from height onto a makeshift seesaw and narrowly escapes death?
A young boy in northern England climbed scaffolding at a construction site and dropped a roughly 25-pound curbing stone from about 15 feet onto a homemade seesaw, launching a brick with enough force that he barely escaped serious injury.