A Louisiana grandmother and mother are in custody on first-degree murder charges after the grandmother allegedly forced her 4-year-old granddaughter to drink from a bottle of whiskey until she died. Cause of death: Acute alcohol poisoning.
The little girl had a blood alcohol level of 0.680% at time of death. That’s more than eight times the legal intoxication level for a healthy adult.
Just to get an idea of how extremely high that is, I looked up the script for the film Death Becomes Her. In the fantasy concocted by Bruce Willis’s lover in which she makes the death of his wife look like a brutal, fiery drunk driving accident in which she drives off a cliff, the coroner reads her blood alcohol content as 0.40% and says “She had it coming”. This little girl’s blood alcohol level was more than 150% of THAT.
These two women need to be locked away FOREVER.
ETA: Actually, you know what? Capital punishment is legal in Louisiana. I think this is one time that it’s justified.
I am willing to leave the final justice to the judge and jury, but from the wording of the article
While investigating, detectives say they learned the victim’s grandmother forced her to drink a bottle of the alcohol while the mother watched.
I’m going to guess that when the child became unresponsive one of the above called 911. And that when the cops got there, that same person told the cops that they told the cops what occurred and that they didn’t MEAN anything bad to happen.
IE they probably accidentally confessed. In situations like this, where I don’t think there’s much debate on the facts of the matter, I feel comfortable in judging the family harshly, for negligence if absolutely nothing else. But again, the consequences I am happy to leave to the court - I don’t need any more bad karma as it were.
How can you force a four year old to drink a whole bottle of whiskey? How can you force anybody to do that? The child would have passed out (or died) long before the bottle was empty, or else probably choked from throwing up.
ETA: an alcohol level of 0.680% would kill almost any grown-up too.
I started reading and then it told me to subscribe, which prevented me from reading the rest of the article.
It doesn’t pass the sniff test for me, either. I suspect there’s more to it than that. According to this you’d be unconscious at .40. I realize there’s a delayed effect between the moment you drink it and the time it hits your blood stream but…
Yes, that’s probably what it was. I’ve heard tales of people who, as teens, would smoke cigarettes in secret but then their parents who caught them (or whoever) would try to reverse-psychology punish them by forcing them to smoke an entire carton at once (or several), the idea being to make them feel so revolting that they’d never smoke again.
So that’s probably what they were doing to this 4-year old girl.
Ironically, the girl probably didn’t even have any concept of what alcohol was, or the significant of drinking alcohol. It’s not like she was some teen.
I don’t doubt the child died of alcohol poisoning but the level doesn’t seem possible. I can’t imagine the taste of it alone would start the child vomiting. And unless the bottle was chugged in one go I would expect vomiting to occur long before such a level was achieved.
I think this might be a case where the child’s small size factors in. The average 4-year-old weighs 40 pounds. I put that in a blood-alcohol calculator, and a single shot was enough for 0.125% BAC. That means the difference between 0.40 and 0.68 is only about three ounces.
Regardless of the exact numbers, it’s a monstrous thing to do.
Interesting. I’ve been clicking all around that site for a while and not gotten cut off yet. I guess they have a weak paywall and I have really good adblockers?