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steph
fiestynurse
921 Posts
Mom's alleged drug use leads to murder charge
Prosecutors: Methamphetamine in breast milk
By SCOTT GOLD
Los Angeles Times
MEAD VALLEY, Calif. - One winter night last year, 3-month-old Jacob Wesley Smith was bundled up in his yellow sleeper, the one his mother liked, and was lying on his belly, the way he liked to. Around 5 a.m., in this lonely backwater where skinny dogs roam free and the only green grass is at the cemetery, he awoke with a fuss, his mother recalled.
A hard-working, hard-living woman named Amy Prien, she lifted him from his bassinet and fed him, she told investigators, and his blue eyes drooped again. The baby had been a little sick, she said, but it was just a cold. Prien laid him on her bed, and he began breathing more deeply. Maybe he'll feel better tomorrow, she thought.
"I woke up with a corpse," she says today, waving off the memory with a flick of her long cigarette.
At first, the Riverside County coroner labeled it sudden infant death syndrome - a diagnosis used when investigators can't explain why a healthy baby dies. According to agency documents, there was no sign of injury, abuse or trauma. Jacob's body was "unremarkable" - well developed and well-nourished.
Then a month later, on Feb. 19, 2002, the coroner received a toxicology report: Jacob had overdosed on methamphetamine, a cheap, addictive stimulant.
Investigators swarmed back to the case. Jacob had weighed 13 pounds and was too young to feed himself. The level of meth in his blood was too high to have been ingested through second-hand smoke. The only way a lethal dose could have entered Jacob's system, they reasoned, was through his mother's breast milk.
Prien, now a resident of nearby Perris, Calif., has been charged with second-degree murder in a case that prosecutors say could lead to the first conviction of its kind in California. Authorities hope to bring her to trial, possibly in February; no date has been set. The 30-year-old mother of three other children faces the possibility of a life prison term.
Though Prien denies having taken methamphetamine at the time of Jacob's death and insists she had already weaned him, Riverside County Deputy District Attorney Michele Levine will go to trial armed with the results of two tests that found meth in Prien's blood around the time of Jacob's death.
"Amy Prien was using drugs during the time when she was breast-feeding her baby," Levine said. "She knew the drugs were dangerous, but it was more important to her to have the self-gratification. Responsibility for Jacob's death falls at her feet."
One recent morning in Riverside, Prien stomped into a courtroom wearing a thick electronic monitoring anklet. Overzealous prosecutors, she contended, and bumbling social workers entranced by the spotlight of a landmark case, are bent on destroying her life.
Though by all accounts her other children are happy and healthy and she is free on $100,000 bail while awaiting trial, Prien said that she has had to fight to see them because of court restrictions.
A few weeks earlier, outside the Corona, Calif., tax business where she does office work part time, she had said she thought she knew how her baby died.