A 17-year-old teen mother has reportedly killed her 9-month-old baby with fentanyl overdose in Nassau County, Florida. The unnamed mother confessed to police that she taught she could put her baby to sleep with cocaine in his bottle, but did not know that the substance she put in the baby’s food was fentanyl.
Nassau County Sheriff Bill Leeper said the authorities were called to a home in the Callahan area about a baby who was not breathing and had no pulse. After attempts to revive him failed, fire officers took him to a hospital where he was declared dead. The medical examiner’s office found he died of fentanyl overdose.
Little Elijah had enough fentanyl that could kill 10 adults in his bloodstream.
Leeper said the suspect did not initially confess to overdosing her baby on fentanyl, claiming she left him to sleep and couldn’t get him to wake up again. But after pressures were applied on her, she confessed to filling the baby’s bottle with cocaine to put him to sleep – it turned out to be fentanyl.
“The suspect consciously did an act she must have known, or reasonably should have known, was likely to cause the death, or great bodily injury, of her child,” Leeper said.
The teenage mother has been arrested and charged with aggravated manslaughter and possession of a controlled substance. Baby Elijah’s father, 17-year-old Phillip Word, expressed shock at his son’s death. He said he didn’t get to spend much time with his late son and had great plans on how to raise him into adulthood.
He said he learned of his son’s death when a friend texted the news to him. He lamented that his family never met his son.
“I just wish I would’ve actually got to be able to get to know him and raise him,” Word said. “He had a whole other family that he never got to meet. They loved him. They never got to meet him and had the most love that they could for him.”