Nathaniel Jordan was a private man who many hadn’t truly known. Aside from his humor and love for Jamaican music, his daughter Yasmeen Jordan didn’t know much else about him.

But she knew about her father’s drug use all too well.

“I had to grieve the fact that I didn’t have him around,” Yasmeen Jordan said. “He was funny, he stole, but I feel like, if he had the proper help, the proper assistance, I feel like he would have [still] been here.”

Her father died of an overdose on what was supposed to be a momentous day. On April 26, 2023, Yasmeen Jordan was being inducted into her sorority. It was also her mother’s birthday.

Nathaniel Jordan, who was 55 when he died in Baltimore’s Dorchester neighborhood, best exemplifies the tragic cross section of the most common ages, races, ethnicities, genders and neighborhoods of those who died. Of the 988 people who died of overdoses in Baltimore in 2023, two-thirds were Black and 72% were men, a Banner analysis of autopsy data from the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner found. The median age was 53.

No other major American city has seen overdose rates as high as Baltimore now experiences, an investigation by The Baltimore Banner and The New York Times found. Nearly 6,000 people have died over the past six years. The crisis has touched every corner of the city.

Almost every neighborhood has been impacted. A person died in 203 of the city’s 272 residential neighborhoods in 2023. The same majority-Black neighborhoods disproportionately affected by this epidemic have also disproportionately borne the effects of gun violence. Nathaniel Jordan lived in the western half of the Black Butterfly.

People of almost every age, including toddlers, have died of overdoses. Men and women of many races and ethnicities died in 2023, mostly succumbing to fentanyl, a drug as much as 50 times more potent than the heroin that flooded Baltimore streets.

But no group has suffered more than those who look like Nathaniel Jordan. Black men born between 1951 and 1970 have died of overdoses at rates higher than any other generation in Baltimore.

Six months before Nathaniel Jordan died, his girlfriend and best friend were killed in a shooting. As a boy, his father died in a fatal gun accident, leaving his mother Phylis to take care of him and his brother alone.

Nadine Bushrod, his half-sister, hadn’t spent much time with him when they were children or in their adulthood.

She didn’t know the extent of his addiction or even that he’d overdosed. She’d been told that he died from a heart attack because he wasn’t getting the proper medication.

Nathaniel married Yasmeen Jordan’s mother in 1992. She and her brother Kamal were born by 1994, but Nathaniel missed the boy’s birth because he was in jail — he’d been incarcerated multiple times by that point. His addiction led to their divorce in 1996.

Her father’s habit became a threat to his family’s well-being, with stories of tax refunds being spent on drugs and alcohol, Yasmeen Jordan said. These issues informed her mother’s decision to divorce.

“She tried to make sure that we had some kind of relationship with the man,” Yasmeen Jordan said. “But the way that a child sees their parents go through things, and when you can see when somebody’s really in the ‘you’ve got to get your shit together’ and then you see the parent that’s trying.”

His addiction left him incapable of being present for his family, Yasmeen Jordan said. She remembered her mother attempting to send her and her brother to stay with her father, but there was nothing he could do for them.

“He looked me dead in my face and said, ‘I can’t take care of you.’ And that was — that was a heartbreaking moment,” Yasmeen Jordan said. “From then, the relationship between my father and I was kind of strained. My mom did push for us to have our father in our lives, but for me, once I had that one core memory, that was it.”

Two years ago, on Thanksgiving, she was trying to improve her relationship with her father. She was shocked by his appearance — one arm appeared significantly larger than the other. His other arm had atrophied.

“I called my mom,” she said. “I told her that he looked like death, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he didn’t make it. I wouldn’t be surprised If he died within the year coming.”