Horrid parents exist in all types of families, big, small, rich, clever, poor, or struggling. Yet talking about living with a nasty parent is a taboo subject. Life with a horrid parent has been a no-go area for far too long. Parents come in all shapes and sizes. None of them is perfect. Nor of course are children. Disagreements are normal. At one end of the scale, a usually caring parent can take their bad mood out on you, but when it passes they will often apologize. They can also be strict. At the other end of the scale, a small percentage of parents are violent and/or sexually abusive toward their children.
Now, a toddler just died after his drug-addicted parents neglected him for up to 38 hours to do meth! According to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Lucas Russell Barnes, 25, and Kathleen Peacock, 38, locked their 2-year-old son Braydon Barnes in a room in the back of their mobile home in St. Charles.
The parents left the room after turning on the space heater to go do meth over the weekend, police said, they had been up for 38 hours on a meth-making and drug-taking bender when police were called to her home, Peacock who happened to be pregnant claimed her drugs were too important to risk being separated from them, She mentioned that she occasionally heard noises coming from the other room of the small house and briefly considered going to investigate them.
In a court document, the toddler wasn’t checked on until Sunday at 11 a.m. and discovered their dead infant. Peacock and Barnes believed that locking the child in the room with a space heater on high for nearly two days would keep him comfortable enough for them to do their drugs.
However, she finally opened the door to the room after the sounds stopped and discovered her 2-year-old son, Braydon Barnes, had been cooked to death by the space heater she had left on for him.
An autopsy revealed that infant Braydon passed away in his crib from hyperthermia.
The absence of a thermostat on the heater caused the room to become an oven as a result of the heater’s inability to turn off when it became too hot. But Paramedics learned that the child had been dead for a while, court records revealed. It was reported that the child was severely malnourished after going without food for days, in addition to the officers discovering that the condemned trailer house of horrors had feces and filth all over it. It said that starvation probably would kill the child if the heat didn’t kill him.
In a report by CBS St. Louis, this is not Peacock’s first run-in with the law; Peacock already faced a child endangerment charge after alleged drunken driving with the boy in the car. Barnes and Peacock are charged with felony child abuse and the manufacture of methamphetamine in a residence with a child present.
If the parents are found guilty, they will spend 10-30 years in prison for each charge and are held on $100,000 bail.