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Good Samaritan finds mom overdosed on heroin with a kid in the car

Jabberwocky

Jabberwocky

Frumious Bandersnatch
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Nov 3, 1999
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A man in Cincinnati is being hailed as a hero after he stepped in to prevent a sad situation from turning into a tragic one. Edwin Gates was leaving an AutoZone Saturday afternoon when he got stuck behind a car that wasn't pulling into traffic. After a few honks he got out of his car to investigate. That's when he found Rebecca Cooper slumped away from the steering wheel.

Cooper had overdosed on heroin while celebrating her 27th birthday. Her 3-year-old son was strapped in the back seat. The only thing keeping the van from rolling into traffic was a pothole stopping the passenger side wheel. Gates told WCPO that the boy was half dressed and had no coat on.

"By the grace of God that van didn't roll out into traffic. She could've been dead and the kid could've been dead too," Gates told WCPO. He put the car in park and turned it off. He then put a coat on Cooper's son, who was freezing in the back seat. First responders arrived shortly afterwards to revive Cooper with Narcan. Cooper's father told WCPO that she had been clean for a year and a half before a friend recently drew her back into the cycle of addiction. The boy is now staying with his grandfather as Cooper heads to jail on child endangerment and drug possession charges. She was also ordered to stay away from her son.

Cooper's story is becoming all too common. Between 2012 and 2015 there was a 39 percent increase in heroin deaths in America, according to the New York Times. Lt. Bruce Hoffbauer, commander of the Cincinnati Police Traffic Section, told WCPO that there have been 148 operating while intoxicated tickets due to heroin just this year.

Source and video: http://www.autoblog.com/2015/11/24/good-samaritan-finds-mom-overdosed-on-heroin-with-a-kid-in-the-c/
 
Captain.Heroin said:
There's no grace of God. I am glad the child is ok.
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Right there with you on that. This situation is made even worse that the punishment for her actions is so severe. I wonder if she gets clean again if they will let her see her son?
 
Nothing's positive about joining the infamous 27 club. I'm happy she didn't die, as I've been in similar situations before and was just a little luckier than her. Nothing is cool about shooting up then driving, despite how often it's done. That doesn't come close to justifying what will happen to this woman and child as a result of this incident though.

A good samaritan is someone who is with someone while they're using who risks incarceration to get them lifesaving help, not just because they're a god fearing douche.
 
True, although I don't feel good about the "good sam" either.
 
I do feel sorry for her. Addiction to opiates is an insidious thing that will make normal people with a good moral compass do things that endanger themselves and others they care about. Serious emotional help, and serious relapse prevention coupled with the possibility of being placed on methadone or bupe is what is needed for this mother...not jail. That will make her feel worse about what happened and made lead her relapse to being protracted and possibly ending in death.

Yes what she did was wrong, but how many of us opiate addicts can say we didn't risk the lives of others while we were driving in order to obtain or use our drug of choice? Her person she risked was unfortunately her child which is going to make the stigma attached to her even harder to overcome. My good vibes go out to her in hopes she uses this as a turning point in her life.
 
Even in addiction we all have choices to make. Of course when you become involved in drugs, we all do things that we're not particularly proud of. But involving "civilians" (i.e. people who are not involved in illegal drugs or the drug trade in any way) in your fucked up behavior is never something I've taken a particularly positive view of. Sure you can say that addiction helped someone make the decision to, say, shoot up a pharmacy or go driving while black-out drunk & plow into a pedestrian, but there are a lot of people who use drugs and DON'T make those fucked up decisions, so that kind of undercuts the argument that someone had the diminished capacity to tell right from wrong.

This is a kid, someone who's life she is sabotaging before the boy has a chance to even grow up and make his own decisions as an adult. I don't care what anyone says, that's fucked up. Once you say "oh the drugs made the person do [insert fucked up behavior here], they didn't really have a choice in the matter" you're basically saying that the individual had no will power and could no longer exercise any amount of conscious choice/decision making, at which point the individual in question may as well just become a ward of the state or medical profession...
 
Oh I was only talking about her behaviors. I am glad that child was taken from her. There really should be some steep punishment on that end. I mean no coat in cold temperatures? WTF! My dad was an addict and it lead me into some really dangerous spots growing up. Got scar on my cheek because I didn't stack the woodpile correctly and he threw a log at me. Parents do fucked up shit on drugs and that is where oversight needs to be a bit stronger.
 
It just needs to be the right oversight. Fascist zero tolerance policies where the children are taken away from mothers who test positive for cannabis derivatives because they opted to take a low dose edible/CBD supplement instead of a painkiller during pregnancy isn't right. Where was than, Tennessee, Alabama?
 
manboychef said:
Right there with you on that. This situation is made even worse that the punishment for her actions is so severe. I wonder if she gets clean again if they will let her see her son?
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I know it's a touchy thing with some people here to expect drug users to be held responsible for their actions but based on the article that child's life was most definitely in danger due to his own mother's actions. She should be held responsible. I agree, if this is where you're going, that the possession charge sucks. I feel all possession charges suck.

However child endangerment is a very fitting charge for this because that's what it was.
 
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