After receiving a tip from a 911 caller that a meth lab was operating inside a mobile home, officers responded to the location and discovered something even more sickening. The responding officers discovered something far worse cooking in the bedroom. Now, both parents are going away for a very long time. During an investigation, authorities discovered that both parents, Kathleen and Lucas had been locked up inside the mobile home for days, with one room of the ramshackle house transformed into an oven, until it became too hot to ignore.
The woman was pregnant when officers responded to her home. She and Lucas had been up for 38 hours on a meth-making and taking bender. She mentioned that she heard a noise from the other room of the small home and thought, at one point, about checking on it, but her drugs were too important to take a few steps away from them. After the sounds stopped, she finally opened the door to the room and found her 2-year-old son, Braydon, had been cooked to death from the space heater that she left on for him.
The parents thought that locking the child in the room with a space heater on high for almost two days was enough to keep him comfortable so they could do their drugs. Police officials also said that the heater didn’t have a thermostat on it that would allow it to shut off when it got too hot, ultimately making an oven out of the room. To make matters worse, officers not only found that the trailer house of horrors had been condemned and had feces and filth everywhere, but also that the child was severely malnourished after not being fed for days.
Disturbingly, if the heat didn’t kill him, the starvation probably would have. According to reports, this isn’t the pregnant mom’s first run-in with the law. In fact, she hadn’t even fully resolved her child endangerment charge from when she was pulled over for driving under the influence with a kid in tow when she caused the death of her son. She and her partner are looking at 20 years to life for abuse or neglect of a child resulting in death, topped off with an additional drug charge. Dear readers, we are republishing this story amid recent reports that child abuse has surged in America during the pandemic.
