Mom charged in 2-year-old son’s death from fentanyl poisoning
A Pompano Beach mother was charged with aggravated manslaughter of a child in the October 2019 death of her 2-year-old son from fentanyl poisoning, according to court records.
Gertrude Desir, 27, was arrested Thursday by Fort Lauderdale Police, who were serving a warrant for the Broward Sheriff’s Office, according to a Fort Lauderdale Police spokesperson.
The 2-year-old had about seven times the lethal fentanyl dosage for an adult in his system, according to the Broward County Medical Examiner. Fentanyl is up 50 times more powerful than heroin and 100 times more than powerful than morphine.
The incident that led to the child’s death happened late at night more than two years ago.
About 10 p.m. Oct. 7, 2019, deputies and Pompano Beach Fire Rescue responded to an apartment in the 300 block of Southwest Second Court regarding an unresponsive child.
The boy was taken to Broward Health Imperial Point in Fort Lauderdale, where he was pronounced dead about an hour later.
In an open bedroom closet, deputies found a plastic bag containing numerous empty pill capsules along with two plastic bags containing a white powdery substance, a plastic bag containing brown rocks, and more white powder on the bottom of a Louis Vuitton box, court records say.
A mini-scale, a plastic baggie containing several white pills and a plastic baggie containing several blue pills also were found in the apartment, court records say.
Desir, who lived in the apartment with her grandmother, admitted to deputies there were drugs in the house, including heroin capsules and white powder.
But Desir, who said she’d lived there for about a year, said she’d sometimes randomly find drugs and would collect them and store them in a bedroom closet. She said the drugs didn’t belong to her.
Court records show Desir agreed to a field urine test that determined she was positive for opiates and cannabis. She allowed deputies to take the drugs from the apartment, and the confiscated drugs were eventually matched to the drugs in the 2-year-old’s system.
Desir, who faced a judge Friday morning, is charged with aggravated manslaughter of a child, possession of fentanyl, possession of cocaine and possession of drug paraphernalia. She’s being held without bond at the North Broward Bureau jail.
