A mother and father have been charged with crimes associated with injecting their children with heroin to ‘help them sleep’. They told their children that the drug was ‘sleeping juice’, and ‘feel good medicine’.
According to Mirror, a person in the home of Ashlee Hutt and boyfriend Leroy McIver reported them to Child Protective Services after seeing Hutt inject her children with the drug.
Investigators found that the children had puncture marks and bruising which looked like marks from needle injections. Two of their three children (a six-year-old boy, a four-year-old girl and a two-year-old girl) were found to have low levels of heroin in their system. The third child was later found to test positive after one of her hairs was tested.
The six-year-old boy gave a statement to investigators, and a probable cause affidavit states that he said “his mum and dad give him and his sisters the ‘feel-good medicine’”, and he described it as “a white powder which was mixed with water”. He added that his parents “used a needle to inject the ‘feel-good medicine’ into him and his sisters.”
Hutt and McIver both face three counts of criminal mistreatment in the second degree, three counts of assault of a child, and three counts of unlawful delivery of a controlled substance to a person under 18.
The News Tribune reports that the parents were heroin addicts and said that other people in their house used heroin.
Their children are now in the protection of foster care, and the parents are being held in custody until a sentence is handed down.
