Kelowna mom lied after giving son candy contaminated with meth

A Kelowna mother who gave her son M&M’s from a tube she’d previously stored meth in consistently lied to family and doctors, even after the 6-year-old began hallucinating.

At the Kelowna courthouse April 23, Crown prosecutor Jordan Schroeder said the 32-year-old mom purposely kept her mouth shut despite the fact that the child’s symptoms were becoming more severe.

“At times, he believed there were dragons flying all around him and that one of his doctors was an octopus. At other times, he described spiders and ants coming out of the walls and sometimes that the walls were breathing,” Schroeder said. “He briefly thought he was in a video game.”

The case dates back to the fall of 2024, when the mom was staying at her sister’s house for Thanksgiving. iNFOnews.ca is not using her name to protect the child’s identity, which is covered under a publication ban.

She bought two tubes of M&Ms that day and ate one before heading to a friend’s to smoke a bowl of meth.

With a little of the dope leftover, she put it in the empty M&Ms tube, before getting in her car and transferring it into a plastic bag.

Back at her sisters’ later that day, she split the remaining M&Ms into the two tubes and handed one to her six-year-old son and the other to her nephew.

The six-year-old complained that they tasted yucky. 

“She failed to realize that the red tube was contaminated with the methamphetamines that she had earlier stored in it,” the Crown said.

Later that evening, the child wouldn’t settle. 

“He began to hallucinate, and it was getting progressively worse, despite her efforts to comfort him,” the Crown said. “At that point, she knew that the tube must have been contaminated.”

However, she kept her mouth shut.

The child was up at 5 a.m. Unusually hyperactive, and saying that he was seeing dragons.

The child’s grandmother asked the mom to call the child’s dad, who has full custody, but she didn’t call him.

When the father arrived at the end of the day, the six-year-old was still visibly agitated and hallucinating, and he suspected that the child may have ingested drugs.

The mom denied it, saying instead that the child’s behaviour was due to not having slept the night before.

The dad took his son to the hospital and told the doctors of his suspicions.

Again, the mom kept her mouth shut.

The child spent two nights in hospital.

“He picked at his skin because it looked weird to him. In the more severe stages, he hallucinated that people were watching him and that someone was trying to kill him,” the Crown said. “Overall, (he) was awake for about 40 hours straight.”

The Crown highlights the multiple opportunities the mom had to tell the doctors, but didn’t.

“The lying and deceit, they’re not some one-off anomaly… the deceit is endemic,” Schroeder told the court.

The court heard that the 32-year-old had struggled with addiction for years and had only been allowed into her sister’s house because she said she was clean and sober.

When the tests came back positive for meth, she lied again, saying it could have been residue on her backpack from when she was using drugs.

Three months later, she voluntarily went to the RCMP and made a tearful confession about how she’d put the methamphetamines in the M&M’s tube.

She told police that she realized what was happening but hoped her son’s symptoms would pass. She said she didn’t say anything because she feared the consequences.

The court heard how the meth poisoning would not have any long-term effects on the child, but the short-term effects had been devastating.

The boy had been unable to sleep on his own for months afterwards, and he became very paranoid. The boy’s father said he’d cried in the car on the way to work almost every morning for three months.

He’d confided in a parent he trusted about what happened, but after that felt that his son was excluded from having play dates with other kids.

The father and son later moved provinces, and things have gotten better over time.

The Crown argued she should spend 12 to 18 months in jail. 

“Abuse through neglect and carelessness is as culpable as abuse through violence,” Schroeder said.

The Crown prosecutor stressed that the mom had told multiple lies.

She’d lied about being clean to get access to the home, and then lied when she noticed the first symptoms. When the test results came back, she gave false explanations about what might have happened.

“Even before the deceit, it’s unconscionable that (the mother) was so reckless… that she believed it would be a good idea to give (a child) M&M’s from a tube that had deadly substances (in it) before,” the Crown said.

He compared it to giving a child a drink from a container that had once contained bleach.

Defence Lorna Fadden argued the mom should spend nine months under house arrest.

“She panicked. She wanted it to not be true,” the defence lawyer said.

Fadden stressed that the mom had later voluntarily gone to the police and admitted to everything. She has intense feelings of guilt, fear and shame over what happened.

The court heard that the 32-year-old had struggled with mental health concerns since childhood.

She started drinking as a teenager and later turned to meth. After losing custody of the six-year-old, she turned to fentanyl. She’d already lost custody of her two older children. She’d been in and out of rehab and had been sober since late last year.

The mom told the court she couldn’t describe how horrible she felt about what had happened, calling it a “terrible accident.”

“The remorse I have is endless… the guilt, shame and self-hate I carry on a daily basis is incredibly overwhelming… I wish I could go back and change it, but I simply can’t,” she told the court.

“I wish I could tell him how sorry I am. I am sorry that while I was in my addiction that I was not able to think as I can now and how I could before substances took over me. 

“I’m sorry that you had to experience what you did, and I’m sorry that your whole world got flipped upside down from that day forward.”

She said she was going to do everything she could to get better so she could one day see him again.

“I can’t say I forgive myself for what happened, and I don’t expect anyone else to either,” she said.

She will be sentenced at a later date.