I saw a very short blurb in yesterday’s paper about this story, and felt there had to be more to the story than what was reported.
For anyone who doesn’t care to read the link: a 6 yo girl was killed last May when her foster mother put an adult dosage fentanyl patch on her to treat a sore neck. The foster mother involved has managed a plea deal with the prosecution for a five year suspended sentence, in exchange for a guilty plea for criminally negligent homicide. Here’s a link to an article shortly after the incident that discusses some of what happened.
Alas, there seems to be little else to explain the mitigation, other than people are fuckwits when it comes to medications. What I find particularly infuriating is that if one follows the story back a bit, it turns out that the woman worked as a health care aide. While most health aides are not trained even to the standard of LPN, I’d have liked to be able to continue in the blissful state of hoping they’d know that medications taken in improper dosages can be deadly.
The detail that Ms. Alvarez was already under investigation for excessive spanking of the child involved, and the detail that when investigators got to her apartment it was a sty, just leave me feeling even sadder and more upset.
I am perfectly willing to grant that the majority of people involved with foster care programs, both the providers and those who are nominally supposed to be supervising the care, are fine people who want to do the best they can for the children in their care. I’m also of the opinion that there are a lot of people associated with such programs who shouldn’t be given the care of a plant, let alone a child. And that the supervision, often as a consequence of the available funding, can be less than adequate.
I guess to sum up my feelings - this situation is one where there seems to be no mitigation for what any health aide should have considered as a potentially dangerous idea: giving pain medication for a long-term chronic pain treatment to a 6 yo girl, no matter the administration vector. I’d have no problem shielding someone from legal consequences of their mistakes, if I weren’t so convinced that they should have known better. There is damned little that can be done for Taylor Webster, now. I’d still love to have seen Ms. Alvarez go to jail for her lethal idiocy.
Recreational outrage. It means that the thing that makes you outraged really has no impact on you at all, but it outrages you nonetheless. It’s sort of like the IMHO of the Pit.
And by the way I’m not outraged by a suspended sentence in a case like that. Such sentences seems quite common in cases were they was no bad intent (and actually in this case a good intent)
clairobscur, would you give morphine to a child with a sore neck? I am a cynic - I don’t see this as someone trying to treat a child’s pain, so much as someone desperate to make the child shut up, without actually having to treat the complaint. Going from child’s motrin to a powerful, and controlled, synthetic opiate is not what I’d consider evidence of good intent.
Fentanyl is, according to Wikipedia, 80 times as potent as morphine. When one is dealing with a drug that powerful, I’m not willing to grant good intent as being sufficient excuse.
This wasn’t negligent homicide this was intentional homicide. She killed that little girl on purpose. No one that has access to Fentanyl doesn’t know what it is, especially someone that worked in health care services. I can understand giving her a pass if she gave the kid a rash with hot Tiger Balm, but this is ridiculous. That woman was trying to kill that child.
This is completely faulty logic. You kill your own kids if you can’t stand them or take them to that state where you can drop them off if they are under the age of 18. You don’t kill off foster kids because you can’t stand them, cause then you don’t get the check anymore. You lock unwanted foster kids in the closet and starve them within an inch of their lives. Everybody knows this, DUH!
I’ve known health care “aides” who didn’t know the difference between regular and sugar-free Ensure, so I really can’t agree with your assumption. Likely she knew it was a painkiller and that’s probably it. She might have thought as far to think that it was safe for old people, therefore it was safe for a kid.
Ah, I see from the article, that it was prescribed for the foster mother herself, and that the woman was a home health aide. She may not know anything about medications other than to read the label and administer them to her clients. Home health aides generally don’t do medical care, so much as activies of daily living stuff… bathing, feeding, changing sheets, etc.
*Qadgop the Mercotan slithered flatly around the after-bulge of the crashed tranship. One claw dug into the meters-thick armour of pure neutronium, then another. Its terrible xmex-like snout locked on. Its zymolosely polydactile tongue crunched out, crashed down, rasped across. Slurp! Slurp! At each abrasive stroke the groove in the tranship’s plating deepened and Qadgop leered more fiercely. Fools! Did they think that the airlessness of absolute space, the heatlessness of absolute zero, the yieldlessness of absolute neutronium, could stop QADGOP THE MERCOTAN? And the stowaway, that human wench Cait, cowering in helpless terror just beyond this thin and fragile wall…" *
Of course I wouldn’t. It just didn’t occur to me(*) it could have been done just in order to have the child shut up (even though it’s very possible). I assumed it has been a result of stupidity (“Oh! the poor girl is in pain! Let’s try that, it worked for dad!”).
(*) If it was mentioned in the linked to article, sorry, I didn’t read it. Not out of laziness, but because my browser crashes half the time when I try to access a news website. So, when the post explains the situation, I generally don’t follow the link. If anybody has an idea why my browser (Firefox) crashes so often, and particularly often for news services, by the way, you’re welcome to share your wisdom.
It wasn’t mentioned in the article. What the article said was:
As I said before, I’m a cynic. While I agree that it’s not necessary to attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity, I think that when the same sparse news reporting includes reports that the foster mother was being investigated for [del]abuse of the child involved[/del] spanking the child too much, it is not unreasonable to suspect that one reason that escalating home remedies were tried was to prevent a paper trail that could be interpreted as evidence of abuse. I don’t know that there was abuse going on, or even excessive spanking. I do believe that the proper treatment for a child that is suffering a head (or neck) pain that won’t let it sleep is to take the child to the ER.
I don’t agree with mswas, based on what I’ve read, that this was a deliberate murder. lisacurl makes good points about the level of education that some health aides have. But I’m not convinced that it’s as innocent a mistake as you and others have suggested.
I have no idea why your browser is crashing so often.
The Wiki article seems to say that it is 80 times as powerful for an equal amount, so a normal dose would much smaller than a morphine dose. Relevant facts might include why this woman had this drug, which is supposed to be a controlled narcotic. I don’t have enough information to come to any conclusions on murder/negligent homocide, but no jail time at all strikes me as wrong. And foster homes that are dirty and squalid should be taken off the list after quarterly surprise inspections.
From what I understand, Fentanyl is really supposed to be used for people who have built up tolerances to more common painkillers, and one patch is supposed to be good for a few days. So, having a smaller dose to equalize the 80x potency would be counterproductive.
In my opinion, that woman should not have gotten a suspended sentence for killing that child. She gets a slap on the wrist, meanwhile the child is dead. It pisses me off to no end that people who commit petty crimes involving trivial sums of money or drugs actually have to go to jail (oftentimes sentenced longer than 5 years to boot), while this stupid bitch kills someone and doesn’t.
What about misusing controlled narcotics? This is not like she gave the kid naproxen AND ibuprofen to try to double the analgesia – she had to have known that this was some seriously heavy shit ™. Are people not being told that it is illegal to misuse a prescription, let alone a controlled substance?
