Police: Child Got Drugs From Breast Milk
Mother Remains In Jail

POSTED: 11:24 am CST November 13, 2004
UPDATED: 11:49 am CST November 13, 2004

FORT WORTH, Texas -- A mother of six has been indicted on a charge of
recklessly causing serious bodily injury to a child by passing drug-tainted
breast milk to her 14-month-old daughter.

"I think a Tarrant County jury will probably be outraged by this and will
be glad to have a chance to litigate it," prosecutor Mitch Poe told the
Fort Worth Star-Telegram for its Saturday editions. "Hopefully, this will
send a strong message to nursing mothers to stop doing drugs."

Corrina Annette Richardson, 35, remained in the Tarrant County Jail on
Saturday morning with bail set at $10,000. She was indicted Wednesday.

When the child was taken to the hospital with seizures in July, her mother
initially told officials and relatives that the baby had hit her head on a
dresser.

But police say that when tests revealed that the child, Jasmine Thompson,
had cocaine in her system, Richardson admitted that she breast-fed her baby
after using the drug.

An arrest warrant affidavit said that the drug affected the baby so
severely that, "If medical treatment had not been sought, this could have
resulted in severe brain damage or even death."

Richardson told Detective R.J. Zomper that she used crack cocaine almost
every evening and that she breast-fed the baby and sometimes gave her a
bottle, the affidavit says.

"She stated that she knew the cocaine would be in the breast milk that the
victim was drinking," Zomper wrote in the affidavit.

"She stated that she was told this before when she was in treatment about
three years previously. She stated that she tried to dilute the cocaine by
drinking milk."

In an earlier interview with a CPS investigator, Richardson said that she
had smoked a cigar laced with cocaine and that she didn't realize cocaine
could enter her daughter's system through breast-feeding.

Richardson also told the CPS worker that she was supposed to be taking
Risperdal, a drug used to treat disorganized or psychotic thinking, but
that she had stopped because she was breast-feeding and didn't want to
affect her baby.

Jasmine, who stayed in the hospital more than a week, and four of her
siblings are being cared for by 62-year-old Irma Scott, the paternal
grandmother of Jasmine and one of Richardson's other children. Richardson's
sixth child is in prison, Scott said.

Scott said Jasmine, now 18 months old, and the other children -- ages 3,
11, 12 and 13 -- are doing fine.

"I've got a letter from her that she didn't nurse the baby," Scott said. "I
just don't know. It was in the baby's system. It got there some kind of
way."

She said that Richardson loves her kids. "She is a good mother, but, I
guess, she just has got a problem," Scott said. "She cooks for the kids and
tries to make sure they always had a little something."

Richardson would usually face two to 20 years in prison if convicted of
injury to a child, but because she has a prior conviction for aggravated
assault with a deadly weapon, she could face up to life in prison.

Diane Beckham, senior staff counsel for the Texas District and County
Attorneys Association, said she knows of no similar prosecution in Texas.

Similar prosecutions though have occurred in California and Arizona. Last
year in Riverside, Calif., a woman was convicted of second-degree murder
and sentenced to 15 years in prison because her 3-month-old son died after
drinking methamphetamine-tainted

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