Mom blames trick-or-treating after 5-year-old son tests positive for meth
Shortly after Braylen Carwell got home from trick-or-treating in Galion, Ohio, on Sunday, he says he started to shiver. What the 5-year-old didn’t realize, however, was that he was having a seizure induced by methamphetamines in his system.
The boy says he was putting on his socks when he realized he couldn’t move his arm or fingers, he told local Columbus, Ohio, news station WBNS-TV. Braylen said: “Until I got to the doctor’s and I was sitting for a little bit and then I could move my hand but not my fingers.” That day, Braylen had been staying with his father, Cambray Carwell, who told police officers he had just brought the boy home from a two-hour trick-or-treating session when Braylen fell over and began having a seizure.
His mother, Julia Pence, rushed to the hospital when she got the phone call, and she was shocked at the state her son was in. “The left side of his face was just droopy and then he fell and then he couldn’t move his left arm. And he didn’t know where he was, he didn’t know what he was doing,” she said to local Columbus, Ohio, station WSYX.
Pence said the hospital did a CT scan of her son’s brain and tested his urine — and that’s when they found the meth. “You can tell he is still coming down from it, because one minute he is all hyper and the next minute he is tired,” Pence said.
The boy, however, says he had not eaten any of the candy when he fell sick, but he did put a set of fake vampire teeth that he had gotten trick-or-treating into his mouth, according to WBNS-TV. Police officers confiscated the candy and the fake teeth, and have sent them to a crime lab to be tested.
While the investigation is underway, the Galion Police Department issued a reminder to parents to check their children’s Halloween candy and noncandy items. “If you suspect that anything has been tampered with, please contact our department by phone so that an officer can stop and collect the items,” the department said in a Facebook post.
Pence told WBNS-TV that although she and her husband are recovering drug addicts, they have both been clean for several years, and she is positive that the boy did not come in contact with meth from anything other than trick-or-treating. “I’m not covering up the truth,” she told the station. “I’m just speaking the truth of what happened to my son, yesterday. Nobody in my family or [Braylen’s] dad’s family would drug my children.”
Fortunately, the boy is expected to make a full recovery, according to Fox News, and is already home playing with his Legos. Pence says she is “counting my blessings that I got to bring my son home OK and alive last night.”
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