Mom Arrested After Allegedly Trying to Shut Her Crying Baby Up With Bourbon
There’s a long tradition of parents rubbing whiskey on their babies’ gums to soothe teething pain. Pediatricians don’t recommend it, but it seems like American adults survived it relatively unscathed. Putting booze in a baby’s bottle, though, is a whole other thing.
An Arkansas mom picked up the old whiskey-on-the-gums trick from her own mother, as you do, but she allegedly went overboard and fed her 10-month-old son some of the bourbon she kept in the freezer.
Lori Sheppard, 28, was charged with child endangerment and aggravated assault after her son Ronald was found “limp and unresponsive,” with a blood alcohol content of .190. Sheppard allegedly confessed to police that she had let the baby drink bourbon after Tylenol and Motrin didn’t seem to help him.
The baby was obviously not okay to drive, so he was airlifted to a hospital in Little Rock, where he stayed for several days. He’s since been released to child welfare workers. He’s fine, relatively speaking.
Sheppard was booked into county jail, photographed wearing a painfully ironic t-shirt, and held on $10,000 bail.
