In New York, there is a mother?who’slow?gave poison to?her son to spice up her mommy blog this month.
Lacey Spears, 26, of Scottsdale, Kentucky, has her own mommy blog and one of the issues she discussed was her sick son. From the time that he was just five days old until he died, he was in and out of hospitals and stayed sickly. Due to an age of technological advancement, obsessive parenting, and an abundance of oversharing information on social media, Spears found a wide audience.
However, while this would be a time for compassion and understanding, it turns out that this mom was the cause of her son’s illness and medical problems.
On Tuesday, she was arrested for causing her son’s death in January with a sodium overdose.
Feeding Toxic Doses Of Sodium.
At five days old, her son was rushed to the hospital for an ear infection. He was also bleeding from his nose at this time. By his ninth month of life, Garnett needed a feeding tube. Spears blamed it on multiple illnesses, fevers, and just a failure to thrive.
While this did indeed seem to be the case, a search on her computer found that Spears had researched the effects of toxic levels of sodium that a child could experience.
The reason that this is believed is when Garnett was in the hospital on January 19, his sodium levels rose to dangerous levels, without any medical explanation. Spears was sharing her son’s room and investigators believed she was administering sodium to him via his stomach tube.
Upon being transferred to Westchester Medical Center, healthcare professionals there began to suspect that Spears was harming her son. Child services were called and an investigation was launched. ?Before he even passed, hospitals administrators told police his sodium levels were suspiciously high.
Police obtained a search warrant for Spears’s home and questioned friends and family. They also gained access to Garnett’s medical records and it was found that, in the five years of his life, Garnett had been hospitalized 23 times.
Why Would Someone Do This?
Spears shows all of the symptoms of having a rare mental illness called Munchausen Syndrome by proxy.
First, Munchausen Syndrome is a bit different than Munchausen Syndrome by proxy.
With Munchausen Syndrome, a person acts as if they are ill or that they have a mental illness when they are truly in perfect health. It is often a synonym for factitious disorder. With Munchausen Syndrome by proxy, a parent induces real or apparent symptoms of disease in a child. This is a form of child abuse, and it almost always involves a mother abusing her child. It is a rare and poorly understood mental illness. The cause is unknown.
While this very well may be the case for Spears, she is charged with second degree murder because she acted with a depraved indifference about her child’s death but it is not believed she intentionally killed him by poisoning him with sodium.
Let us know your thoughts at the Liberal America Facebook page.
