Bradley Staude and Sherrie Charlton-Wesley jailed for criminal neglect of overdosing child
Two parents who “miserably failed” to protect their three-year-old from ingesting enough fantasy to kill 10 adults, and delayed calling an ambulance for hours, have been jailed.
Police & Courts
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Two drug-addicted parents who took almost four hours to call emergency services after their toddler took a potentially fatal dose of fantasy have been jailed.
Bradley Staude, 29, and Sherrie Charlton-Wesley, 27, both pleaded guilty to criminal neglect over the incident in March 2020.
On Tuesday, District Court Judge Joana Fuller had scathing words for the pair.
She said both parents had methamphetamine and other drugs in their system at the time the child took the drugs and hair samples showed they were daily drug users.
Sometime before 10.52pm on March 20, 2021, the nearly three-year-old child swallowed a large amount of fantasy.
Her parents became aware and instead of calling an ambulance they started looking up online what to do in the case of a child overdosing.
Just after 2am the following day, when the child was in clear distress, the parents called emergency services but lied about what had happened to the child.
During the call the child could be heard breathing with difficulty in the background as Charlton-Wesley said that she had seen the child place a bottle to her lips, but was not sure what was inside the container.
She told the operator that “druggies” had lived in the house previously and she had no idea what might have been left behind.
When paramedics arrived the child was unconscious. Later tests would later show she had enough fantasy in her system to be fatal to an adult drug user.
Judge Fuller said the child had “miraculously” made a complete recovery, despite the court earlier hearing that she had ingested 10 times the lethal dose for an adult.
“This was an egregious departure of a duty of care, you both made a conscious decision to take drugs while there were children present,” Judge Fuller said.
“There is a very heavy responsibility on you to keep your children safe, and you both miserably failed to discharge that responsibility.”
Charlton-Wesley has been in custody since she failed to appear in court October 2022.
Judge Fuller said the woman had failed on dozens of occasions to obey the conditions of her bail. She pleaded guilty to three counts of breaching bail which covered more than 40 separate breaches.
Staude was in the community since being released on bail and had a long period of abstaining from drug use.
But in the last six months before sentence he fell off the rails and returned to using cannabis.
Judge Fuller said she had no faith in Staude’s ability to obey his home detention conditions if allowed to serve his sentence in the community.
Judge Fuller set the sentence starting point at four years in jail for each accused.
With time in custody and reductions of guilty pleas Staude was sentenced to two years, 10 months and 23 days in custody with a non-parole period of 19 months.
The sentence was set to start on Tuesday.
Charlton-Wesley was sentenced to three years, nine months and 22 days with a 22-month non-parole period. Her sentence was back dated to November 2, 2022.
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