'Who does that?' Nassau sheriff says teen gave baby enough fentanyl to kill 10 people

Ignorance and fentanyl don’t mix, and giving even the smallest dose of the potent drug to a baby most certainly will end badly.

A young woman is now paying the price, and her baby will never have the chance to try to make something of himself.

Nassau County Sheriff Bill Leeper said the mother, “a child herself” at 17, told detectives she was tired and wanted to take a nap. So she put what she thought was a small amount of cocaine in her baby’s bottle to help him get to sleep, she eventually told investigators. The nearly 10-month-old never woke up.

“Our deputies respond to many situations every day. They see a lot,” Leeper said during a news conference Wednesday to announce the teen’s arrest on charges of aggravated manslaughter of a child and possession of a controlled substance. “It sometimes seems over the years nothing surprises us anymore. Every now and then something does happen that you really can’t explain, you can’t make up. You say to yourself, ‘What in the world were they thinking.’”

On June 26 he said they were called to a home on Deerfield Country Club Road in the Callahan area for a baby boy who wasn’t breathing and had no pulse. A deputy started CPR, but the child died.

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Originally the mother, whose name was not released due to her age and Marsy’s Law, said she didn’t know what happened. She had put the baby to sleep and later couldn’t wake him up, she told deputies.

On July 10 the medical examiner’s report ruled the death a fentanyl overdose, the sheriff said. The child had 29 nanograms per milliliter of blood in his system. Three nanograms would kill a normal person.

“The child had about 10 times the amount that would kill a person,” Leeper said.

Detectives contacted the young lady again Tuesday and said she continued to change her story. She finally said she filled the baby’s bottle with formula and added the substance she thought was cocaine from a pill bottle, according to the sheriff.

“Now who does that? What mother would do that? That’s not normal,” Leeper said in disgust. “That is sick. It’s beyond my imagination why a mother would do that to a child.”

He noted fentanyl is by far the deadliest drug circulating today — 50 times more potent than heroin, a hundred times more than morphine.

Then he held up a pill bottle with about 29 nanograms and showed how it’s difficult to even see and reiterated how that small amount could kill 10 people, and this child had it all in his system. He also displayed a poster board that showed an enlarged pencil with a lethal dose on its tip.

That boy “should have been crawling, he should have been laughing and most importantly kept safe,” Leeper said.

“Babies are our most vulnerable among us,” he continued. “They’re solely dependent upon someone else for all of their needs, for everything. … They have no control of who they are born to, who their parents are or what type of environment they live in.”

Although it’s an extremely sad case, it won’t be the last, Leeper said. Children and young people need to be educated about the dangers of drugs and reinforced as adults.

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“Obviously it starts in the home. It didn’t here,” he poignantly said, later noting that adults were in the residence where she was staying.

“These people that are addicted, that buy these drugs on the streets, have no clue what they are getting. None,” he said. “They’re taking a substance that can kill them just like that. And it does, every day.”

He said law enforcement understands they need help and emphasized there are a number of resources for parents struggling, like Better Together, Family Support Services of North Florida, Episcopal Children’s Services and victims advocates.

The Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office also has recently begun a fentanyl task force that has led to multiple arrests.

Leeper ended his news conference adding that while the 17-year-old was being booked, she said she thinks she might be pregnant again.

Her attorney was unable to be reached for comment.

This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: Florida baby dies after teen mom adds fentanyl to bottle