A nine-month-old boy is dead in Florida after his teenage mother allegedly fed him baby formula laced with deadly fentanyl which she mistook for cocaine, believing that it would put the infant to sleep so she could take a nap.
The heartbreaking tragedy took place last month in Calahan, Fla., a town in the northeast corner of the state in Nassau County where first responders found the young child unresponsive and without a pulse in the living room where they tried in vain to revive him by administering CPR. He was later pronounced dead at a Jacksonville-area hospital.
Police later arrested the 17-year-old mother who was charged with aggravated manslaughter and possession of a controlled substance after she initially told officers a series of lies after first saying that she had no idea of what happened but broke down under questioning by investigators who caught her in a number of inconsistencies and confessed to feeding her dead baby enough of fentanyl to kill 10 people.
“Unfortunately, some babies are born to individuals who have no business being parents,” Nassau County Sheriff Bill Leeper told reporters at a press conference earlier this week.
(Video: YouTube/News4JAX The Local Station)
Sheriff Leeper said that the mother was tired and needed to get some rest, which isn’t uncommon for new parents.
“What’s not normal is what the mother put in the baby’s bottle to go to sleep,” Leeper said, explaining that the teen mom had filled the bottle with baby formula and then took an orange pill container from the bathroom and added what she though was cocaine, but instead was fentanyl, he displayed evidence from the scene including a Mickey Mouse bottle.
“She laid him down in his crib to go to sleep, and he never woke up,” he said. “Now who does that? What mother would do that? That’s not normal. That’s sick … Babies are the most vulnerable among us. They’re dependent on us for everything.”
“It’s beyond my imagination why a mother would do that to her child,” he added. “No one should lose their life to this terrible deadly drug, especially an innocent baby.”
“The amount he had in his system would kill approximately 10 people,” the sheriff said.
The child’s young father told a local news outlet that he “didn’t see his son much but said if his son’s mother was tired that day, he would have taken him — no questions asked.”
“It was amazing. It’s just really the best feeling, just to meet your first kid for the first time and hold them,” Phillip Word told News4JAX. “I just wish I would’ve actually got to be able to get to know him and raise him.”
He said that he learned that his infant son had died at the hospital from a friend who texted him with the terrible news.
“I didn’t think it was real,” he said.
“He had a whole other family that he never got to meet,” he added. “They loved him. They never got to meet him and had the most love that they could for him.”
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