BATON ROUGE - Whitney Ard will be serving an automatic life sentence for the death of her 2-year-old son."I can't remember a mother being convicted of the death of a child with regard to fentanyl, but certainly not the first murder charge for someone who distributed fentanyl and somebody died," said EBR District Attorney Hillar Moore. While the defense tried to blame drug addiction, it took the jury less than an hour to convict her on murder charges."People have had enough of overdoses, particularly with fentanyl and those that are using in intentionally, but in this case, having a three year old child overdose three times is beyond comprehension."Moore says Ard's conviction could be a lesson to other parents involved in drugs."You always hope that some people in the community take something from a jury's verdict -- that, look at the facts of this case and if you are caught doing this behavior, that we are going to prosecute you and the idea would be don't do this."Ard's conviction may set a precedent for parental negligence, but it still doesn't answer why the Department of Child and Family Services didn't take action before hand."I don't think DCFS has any blame on this child being dead by the actions of the mother. I think they're completely separate. Whether they should have taken the child away from her, I don't know those facts."Before his death, the Investigative Unit uncovered police reports showing the toddler was brought to the emergency room and given NARCAN on two different occasions.The reports say both incidents were reported to DCFS.After his death, EBR coroner Beau Clark placed blame on the state for not stepping in to remove the child."It seems that their inaction has lead to the death of a child," he told the Investigative Unit. Following that report, a legislative committee grilled DCFS over this and other recent failures which DCFS blamed a staffing shortage.A couple of months later, DCFS secretary Marketa Walters resigned.Since then, the agency has been completely re-staffed under Governor Jeff Landry.Permalink| Comments