Child dies after mother puts methadone in sippy cup

spini4

spini4

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JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — Photos and memories are all Makisha Gaffney has left of her 2-year-old son, Mesia Wright.

More than a week after the toddler died of a methadone overdose, she is having trouble coping with Mesia's loss.

"It's so hard," Gaffney said. "I haven't been to work. I haven't been to school. I haven't eaten."

Police said the boy died after coming in contact with methadone in a child's plastic drinking cup left on a dresser in Mesia's father's home.

Video: Woman Mourns Son's Death

The father, Ernest Wright, said he came home from school Nov. 15 to find his son unconscious. He took the boy to a hospital, where the boy was pronounced dead on arrival.

The autopsy revealed Masia died from methadone toxicity and the medical examiner ruled the case a homicide.

Wright's 30-year-old girlfriend, Dana Anderson, was arrested Monday and charged with aggravated manslaughter.

According to the arrest report, Anderson admitted to leaving a purple sippy cup with about 80 mg of methadone in it on the dresser in her bedroom.

The drug is often used to curb heroin or other opiate addictions, and experts told Channel 4 it is so powerful that t 5 mg of the liquid would have been enough to kill a small child.

Gaffney said she had primary custody of Masia but allowed her son to stay with his father while she was at work and school.

"It's one thing to put something in a cup, but to put it in a sippy cup -- it looks really attractive to a 2-year-old," Gaffney said. "So I don't understand why it was put in there for my son to get a hold to, and now my son doesn't have a life."

Gaffney said that she will fight for justice for Masia.

continued at http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/40362873
 
According to the arrest report, Anderson admitted to leaving a purple sippy cup with about 80 mg of methadone in it on the dresser in her bedroom.
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Are you kidding?

This is disgusting.

Leaving methadone around children is bad enough, but leaving your methadone (that looks like kool-aid) inside a childrens cup while they are around?

This lady deserves to be prosecuted.
 
"This lady deserves to be prosecuted."

Prosecuted? More like executed.
 
gf was jealous of the kid. Why else would someone put a take-home in a sippy cup?

spini your header is screwy
 
and when one of us does something absent mindedly (read: not thinking...that's what she was thinking) and are in the news,

BLers will be urging our execution as well.

statistically, accidents happen. weird ones. have some sympathy for the mother...
 
^ I cant have sympathy for someone who puts methadone in a sippy cup when they know a toddler is around. And it wasnt the mother it was the fathers jealous girlfriend.
Say what you want. But this women knew what she was doin
 
qwe said:
and when one of us does something absent mindedly (read: not thinking...that's what she was thinking) and are in the news,

BLers will be urging our execution as well.

statistically, accidents happen. weird ones. have some sympathy for the mother...
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Ridiculous.

I will not have sympathy for a mother who puts a fatal dose of drugs in a childs sippy cup.

"Oop, I wasn't paying attention!" is not an adequate excuse.

EDIT: It wasn't the mother who left the methadone out.. I apologize and I definitely sympathize with her plight. However, I have no respect or sympathy for the lady who did put the methadone in the cup..
 
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qwe said:
and when one of us does something absent mindedly (read: not thinking...that's what she was thinking) and are in the news,

BLers will be urging our execution as well.

statistically, accidents happen. weird ones. have some sympathy for the mother...
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This guy is a moron. He's concerned about the mother. The child isn't important, rather, the mother is.


*Oh and don't you just love the cute touch he adds in by saying STATISTICALLY, accidents happen. What a crock of shit.*
 
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fyi, i never said the child isn't important.

how are you guys so certain about everything from this news article anyway?

p.s. i "consent" to leaving Cold's ad hom up, i think it adds to his argument ;)
 
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I guess you can never be positive a news article is correct without a correlating source.

All I'm pointing out is putting a lethal dose of drug in a childs sippy kid when a child is around deplorable and not something that be excused as an accident.
 
Of course, this is a terrible incident for all involved.
But it seems that many people here have already decided that the girlfriend killed the boy on purpose.
I didn't see that anywhere in the article.
The police are not charging her with murder, but manslaughter.

Notice that the article doesn't say that the cup was the boy's cup. It makes it seem that it was NOT his cup. It also says that the girlfriend put it on her dresser, probably on her own dresser in her own bedroom. I doubt very much that she was trying to kill the boy this way. She probably thought that he would not have a chance to get access to it, and/or was not able to reach the top of her dresser.
After all, a kid who drinks from sippy cups is very small. He was 2 years old - not an age where you would expect him to get to the top of your dresser. His world is at and around floor level.

What if the girlfriend put her drugs in a sippy cup just once, because she was afraid that she might get busted and though it was a good hiding place?
What if she used a pink sippy cup, because she knew the boy only liked blue cups, and she had been given the cup by her sister the day before her sister was killed in a car crash?
What if she got the drugs in that container, and had spend most of the night talking people out of suicide on the phone, and was too tired in the morning to change the container, believing that it would be all right for one day?
What if she just wasn't thinking that morning, and hid her drugs quickly before going to work, in a place where she thought the toddler could never reach?

A lot of anger has been declared against this woman without more than a partial, slanted understanding of what happened.
I believe in the idea of "innocent until proven guilty", but it appears that many people do not share this belief.

My guess is that the girlfriend is sick with grief over this, which now looks very different to her in the rearview mirror than it did while it was actually occurring. She can't believe that she did such a thing. We all feel that way sometimes. We all do "stupid" things relatively often, actually, but most of the time no one ends up getting hurt, so what we did doesn't appear to be stupid.

Anyone out there ever driven while tipsy?
Lucky you didn't kill anyone, or else others would be saying "what a stupid thing to do. S/he deserves to be executed!". Meanwhile, ten thousand others drove home while tipsy that night, and nobody complained or called anything that anyone did "stupid".

A little patience, forgiveness, and love would go a long way.

Just to be clear: I am not condoning driving while tipsy, or putting drugs in a children's cup. But to claim that the girlfriend MUST have been trying to kill the boy is outrageous to me, as is the claim that we have no right to feel sorry for her.

As a side point:
I wonder what would have happened if she had put crushed tylenol, or benadryl, or some other over OTC "medicine" for her own use, in a sippy cup, and the boy had taken it and died. Would that have changed people's reactions? If so (and I suspect that some people would have a very different reaction), that shows that part of their reaction is based on the fact that methadone is associated with illegality, getting high, the black market, etc.
 
Cold said:
This guy is a moron. He's concerned about the mother. The child isn't important, rather, the mother is. Fuck you Moderator.


*Oh and don't you just love the cute touch he adds in by saying STATISTICALLY, accidents happen. What a crock of shit.*
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Interesting attitude from someone claiming the high moral ground.
To come out with profane insults like that is a clear sign of anger.
And yet, the post s/he is complaining about merely expressed sympathy for the girlfriend, but did not say anything bad about the boy.

Anger at sympathy is hardly a loving exchange, if you ask me.

We are not allowed to feel sympathy for the girlfriend, because Cold will threaten us with scary language. 8)
S/he does not permit us this feeling. We are only allowed to feel sympathy for the boy.
Accidents do not happen, or if they do, then someone is always responsible, and we should never feel sympathy for that person. Cold has determined that this is the way it is, and if we disagree, we are monsters.

Such strong opinions and language coming from someone who is not involved in the affair and knows no more than the rest of us who read the article is actually quite laughable.
 
slim-v, a sippy cup is one of these things:

NSFW:
sam%20with%20sippy%20cup.jpg


The scenarios in which someone would accidentally pour or dissolve methadone into one of those and then blithely leave it within the reach of a 2-year old are quite absurd. On the other hand, it's perfectly common for stepchildren to be victimized by step-parents, especially when both original parents are still around.

All over Florida you've got domestic killings going on. They're almost a daily occurrence.
 
a third scenario is that the child was given methadone in order to make it sleepy. This happens very often too, with any sedative.
 
seep said:
The scenarios in which someone would accidentally pour or dissolve methadone into one of those and then blithely leave it within the reach of a 2-year old are quite absurd.
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I disagree with your assumptions. Leaving a container with drugs in it on the top of one's dresser seems pretty safe in general when the child is small enough to use a sippy cup. 2-year olds can't reach the top of the dresser, even with the help of a chair (which they are only slightly likely to be able to utilize to extend their reach in the first place). Let's face it: 2-year olds are closer to pigs than to adult humans in terms of intelligence. The really weird factor may be that the kid managed to reach the top of the dresser in the first place.

Notice I am saying "may be"... If I saw that the dresser was in easy reach of the kid, I would be more likely to want to blame the girlfriend.
 
villian said:
EDIT: It wasn't the mother who left the methadone out.. I apologize and I definitely sympathize with her plight. However, I have no respect or sympathy for the lady who did put the methadone in the cup..
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If the mother didn't do it, why does it say she did in the title of the thread?

TripppAR said:
sorry...to soon?
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No, not at all. I just contend that life tends to be horrific in nature, and that tragedies and unpleasant experiences don't disprove the existence of a higher power.

I'm not saying this because I am trying to push the idea of religion or god on anyone, but rather because I can fathom a higher power being OK with the horrific things that go on in our daily lives. Not because this higher power would be sadistic, but because it would create depth and meaning to people's lives due to the contrast of positive and negative experiences.
 
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