commentary by Patrick H. Moore
We all know intuitively, if not by experience, that motherhood is no easy task. The responsibilities are endless and problems arise for which there are no easy answers. For example, what do you do when you try and put your little one to bed and he or she starts wailing and — try as you might — you can’t get them to stop? You know some of the things you should not do. You just not hit your child or scream at him. One solution, once you’ve exhausted yourself trying to soothe your unsettled charge, would be to simply place your baby in the crib, close the door and go about your business while wearing earplugs. Another solution might be to put on some soothing music and read Dr. Spock while keeping vigil crib-side. But the time-honored strategy, of course, would be to feed your baby in hopes that relaxes him sufficiently to send him off into the land of nod.
That too can backfire, however, as a Hagerstown, Maryland mother, Yadina Indira Morales, age 22, recently found out the hard way. Don Aines of Herald-Mail Media writes:
A woman accused of accidentally smothering her 2-month-old infant daughter after passing out from intoxication while breast-feeding the child posted a $100,000 bond and was released from custody Saturday night, according to Washington County District Court records.
Yadina Indira Morales, 22, of 11224 Scarlet Oak Drive, Hagerstown, was intoxicated to the point that she did not realize that emergency medical personnel had taken away her daughter, Marilyn F. Bryant, according to the statement of probable cause filed by the Washington County Sheriff’s Office.
Morales was charged with manslaughter, second-degree child abuse, neglect of a minor, reckless endangerment and contributing to the condition of a child in the baby’s death, court records said.
Here are the events that led up to the tragedy according to the deceased child’s father, Dwayne Bryant, as set forth in the court documents. As you will see, something about this story doesn’t quite add up:
It was a Friday, November 1st. Ms. Morales put her two older children to bed at about 8:30 p.m. She and Mr. Bryant then “began drinking vodka and Sprite around 9 p.m.” Bryant informed the authorities that Morales had consumed about a glass and a half of the mixed drink when her daughter Marilyn started crying. At about 9:45 pm, Ms. Morales lay down on the couch to breastfeed Marilyn. That was the last time Bryant saw Ms. Morales and Marilyn until the following morning.
Bryant explained to the investigators he spent much of the night hanging out with his friends on the front porch. During the course of the night, he entered the house several times “to get food, drinks and cigarettes.” He didn’t, however, go into the living room where he’d last seen Ms. Morales and her infant until Saturday morning.
When Bryant finally did go into the living room on Saturday morning, he could not see the baby until he rolled Morales over. To his horror, he discovered that the baby, who was “blue and purple,” and had blood coming from her nose, was not breathing.
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Bryant then called 911 immediately at 6:55 a.m. Saturday morning. When Emergency Services arrived, they rushed the child to the hospital. When a deputy arrived at the home, he reportedly found Bryant screaming in frustration (and probably grief) in the parking lot (in front of?) the home. According to the affidavit, the deputy then entered the house and found Morales still unconscious on a couch. He eventually managed to wake her up.
“She had no idea what was going on. She didn’t even know EMS had been there and took her child to the hospital,” a deputy said in the documents.
Then, when she stood up, “She had a strong odor of an alcoholic beverage coming from her breath and person.”
A blood test that was later conducted at Meritus Medical Center showed that Morales’ blood-alcohol level was 0.256 percent, more than three times Maryland’s legal intoxication limit of 0.08 percent.
The infant Marilyn, who was born in August, was pronounced dead at the hospital on Saturday morning. The court documents did not give an approximate time of death.
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Morales was taken into custody and interviewed by investigators after being discharged from the hospital Saturday afternoon. “She remembered drinking a glass of beer and had difficulty remembering exactly how much liquor she consumed,” the documents said. She recalled lying down on the couch to breast-feed, but “couldn’t remember anything else until waking up at the hospital.”
Morales’ bond was posted by a Hagerstown bail-bonds company, and she was released shortly before midnight Saturday.
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It seems unlikely that a glass-and-a-half of vodka and Sprite would cause Ms. Morales to remain passed out for the entire night. Her high blood alcohol content when tested the following morning could suggest that both Bryant and Ms. Morales are being disingenuous and that she had actually drank quite a bit more.
More to the point, however, is the fact that based on the speed with which alcohol leaves the system, it would be nearly impossible for Ms. Morales to have blood alcohol content of 0.256 on Saturday morning at — say — 8:00 am, unless she had consumed far more vodka than Bryant admitted or, alternatively, she had consumed a great deal of alcohol after midnight or in the early morning hours because the rate at which alcohol is metabolized is the same for virtually everyone regardless of their height, weight, sex, race or other such characteristics.
Alcohol is metabolized at the rate of .015 of blood alcohol concentration (BAC) every hour. Thus a person with a very high BAC of 0.15 will have no measurable alcohol in the bloodstream after ten hours (.15 divided by .015 = 10). Thus, Ms. Morales would have had to have had BAC of approximately 0.406 at 10:00 pm on Friday night for it to still measure 0.256 on Saturday morning at 8:00 am.
Whatever the truth is, this is an incredibly sad case. Ms. Morales faces a heavy prison sentence after having inadvertently killed her baby daughter. It doesn’t get much worse than this.