Crazy Mom Accused of Filling Baby's Bottle with Fentanyl

In a raw police interrogation, a woman explains how she gave birth on a recliner in her living room with only her partner present, because she was terrified that going to a hospital would mean losing this baby the way she’d already lost her other two children to the state. She had been using heroin and fentanyl throughout the pregnancy. Now officers are trying to determine whether the newborn is in immediate danger—and whether the mother understands what is at stake.

The home birth and the fear behind it

The woman, who appears to be in her late twenties or early thirties, tells officers she started having contractions around one in the morning. By 7:20 PM that evening, her partner Ronald delivered the baby on the recliner next to the kitchen stove. She says the delivery was quick and went "all good." She did not call an ambulance or go to a hospital. When an officer asks why, she says she was afraid: "I was hoping you don't need tomorrow." She believed that if she showed up at a hospital with a newborn and drugs in her system, child protective services would immediately take the infant away—the same way they had taken her four-year-old daughter and her older son four years earlier.