They said it was meth lab, but ‘they were cooking something much worse and sickening’ in the bedroom!

The officers responded to the mobile home after the 911 caller told the dispatcher that a meth lab was operating inside. But, when they arrived, they found something much worse and sickening cooking in the bedroom. Both defendants, Kathleen and Lucas, had been holed up inside for days, with one room of the ramshackle house transformed into an oven, until it became too hot to ignore. Kathleen, who was pregnant when officers responded to her home, had been up for 38 hours with her man 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. When 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. Kathleen and her partner 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. 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 had been condemned and had fe-es 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 faced up to 20 years to life for abuse or neglect of a child resulting in death, topped off with an additional drug charge.

The then-24-year-old woman was sentenced to 21 years in prison for her role in the death of her 2-year-old son, who was left in a hot room for 38 hours. A spokeswoman for the prosecutor said Kathleen was sentenced for child abuse/neglect and manufacturing methamphetamine. The father of the 2-year-old boy, Lucas, has been sentenced to 21 years in prison as well. Dear readers, we are republishing this story amid recent reports that child abuse has surged in America during the pandemic.