Mary Locke, 24, faces sentencing after a jury convicted her Friday of first-degree injury to a child in the 2023 fentanyl poisoning death of her 8-month-old daughter, Elizabeth, marking Collin County’s first known case of an infant dying from fentanyl exposure.
The jury’s decision, expected as early as Tuesday, could result in a sentence ranging from probation to 99 years in prison.
Testifying during the trial’s punishment phase, Locke admitted to panhandling at retail stores to fund a drug addiction she shared with the child’s father in an Allen apartment. According to a police report, on the night Elizabeth died, the couple “smoked 30 mg tablets of OXY with the goal of becoming intoxicated.”
Locke confessed that a bottle given to her daughter may have been contaminated with fentanyl.
“I watched her drink it for a couple of minutes. I went to wake her up, and that’s when I realized something was wrong,” Locke told jurors, per CBS News. The next day, the couple found Elizabeth in a pool of blood and took her to a hospital, where medical personnel determined she had been deceased for over 12 hours.
Locke acknowledged being high during her daughter’s death, but claimed she has remained sober since.
“She immediately was remorseful at the hospital, and she was told that her baby had died,” said her defense attorney, Ryan Kreck. “She’s scared because she doesn’t know how the jury is going to perceive her.”
The jury must now weigh whether Locke’s drug addiction and neglect merit leniency in this case, which highlights fentanyl’s deadly impact on children who are exposed to drug users.
“The drug is so powerful that only a few grains can kill an adult. It can even be absorbed through the skin and has killed many adults that way. So, it’s no surprise that it doesn’t take much for a child to be lethally exposed,” according to Marcel Gemme of Drug Rehab Services.
In 2021, a 19-month-old girl from France died of acute fentanyl toxicity while sleeping in an Airbnb rental in Florida with her family. According to a lawsuit filed by the child’s family, she was exposed to fentanyl residue that was left in the rental property after a previous tenant threw a party at the house where drugs were consumed.
Fentanyl poisonings among children under 13 increased by 924% between 2015 and 2023, according to a report in the American Journal of Drug and Alcohol Abuse.
“Parents and others need to be careful to not leave fentanyl, whether licit or illicit, out in the open around unsupervised children,” said Joseph Palamar, an associate professor at NYU and the author of the report, per Health Day.
“Even second-hand exposure to paraphernalia or baggies can contain small amounts of fentanyl [that] can be lethal to youngsters.”