Police arrested a pregnant mother in Evansville, In. on Dec. 11 after they found her passed out on heroin behind the wheel of a car, with her young child in the backseat. (Vanderburgh County Jail)
A pregnant mother was taken into custody by police on Dec. 11 after they found her passed out on heroin at the wheel while stopped at a red light, with her 10-month-old child in the back seat, Fox59 reports.
There are no reports of injuries and the young child has been remanded to the custody of the Department of Child Services.
The stoplight had cycled a few times from green to red, and the car belonging Natalie Onay, 22, from Evansville, Indiana, didn’t move, alarming the motorist behind her, Miami Herald reports.
The driver behind Onay honked, causing the 22-year-old to move forward slowly, then stop before getting nearly hit by another car.
Onay was in the driver’s seat and had passed out after taking heroin 10 minutes earlier, Fox59 reports. Responding officers told reporters they had to pull the 5-month-pregnant woman from the car, according to Tristatehomepage.com, and they allegedly found a syringe and 0.1 grams of heroin in the vehicle.
The woman admitted to injecting the drug and told the police that she had been clean for two years before the current relapse, states the Herald.
The woman faces a number of charges in connection with the incident, including child neglect, possession of a narcotic, and driving while intoxicated, reports Fox59.
The incident represents yet another entry in the grim ledger of the nation’s opioid crisis.
The president’s Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) estimated that the cost of the opioid crisis in 2015 was $504 billion, or 2.8 percent of GDP.
In 2016, preliminary estimates put the death toll of all drug overdoses at 64,000.
The death toll so far in 2017 is even higher, mostly due to synthetic opioids such as fentanyl and carfentanil. Fentanyl is 50 times more powerful than heroin and 100 times more potent than morphine. Carfentanil, which is even more potent, is considered a chemical weapon.
The incident is also yet another story making headlines of parents getting high while their children are in their car.
Epoch Times recently wrote of a North Carolina couple passed out in their car after injecting heroin with their three-year-old toddler crying in the back seat.
A North Carolina couple accused of injecting heroin while a baby was still in the vehicle.The couple were both charged with drug possession, possession of drug paraphernalia, and child abuse. (Rowan County Sheriff’s Office)
“Both of the parents were in the front seat, one of them had an injection needle still in her arm,” said Capt. Melonie Thompson, reported WBTV. “The child was in the backseat, a young toddler about three years old. The child was sweating profusely because it was so hot outside. The windows were down but the child was crying and trying to kick the back of the seat to wake the parents up, which was very disturbing.”
Charlotte Cuthbertson contributed to this report.
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Tom Ozimek is a senior reporter for The Epoch Times. He has a broad background in journalism, deposit insurance, marketing and communications, and adult education.
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