US mum charged for killing baby with meth-laced breast milk

Aug 06, 2011 |

Sydney

Tags:

crime

A Northern California woman has been slapped with murder charges after she fed her newborn son methamphetamine-laced breast milk last year.

Maggie Jean Wortmon, 26, has been facing second-degree murder charges punishable by 15 years to life in prison, along with child abuse and involuntary manslaughter.

The charges emerged after Wortmon’s six-week-old son, Michael, was found dead.

The baby, who as found unresponsive in last November in the town of Loleta, was pronounced dead at a hospital with methamphetamine in his system.

Prosecutors said that Wortmon had shown ‘conscious disregard’.

“I think that her conduct is, or was, so intentionally reckless that it rises to the level of implied malice,''” the Sydney Morning Herald quoted Ben McLaughlin, a deputy district attorney in Humboldt County, as saying.

“And I think that a mother who is breast-feeding using the quantity of methamphetamine she did, I think that rises to a second-degree murder charge,” he added.

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