WESTFIELD — A city woman is facing as much as five years in prison after her infant daughter apparently ingested some of the narcotics police later found in several places in her bedroom.
According to city police, officers responded to a call on March 29 from a Fowler Avenue address about an unresponsive infant who was not breathing. Detective Christopher Coach reports in a court document that the officers found “the infant was blue, and not breathing upon their arrival.”
Family members had started CPR and the officers immediately began rescue breathing. They were relieved by Westfield Fire Department EMTs, who took over care of the baby.
The 10-month-old infant is in the custody of her grandparents and lived in the upstairs of the Fowler Avenue house with them. The mother, Stephanie Ramos, 32, lived in a basement bedroom.
Officers who responded to the call were told that the infant had been downstairs in her mother’s bedroom when “Stephanie frantically came upstairs with [the] infant saying there was something wrong with her. Stephanie told her mother that her daughter may have put something in her mouth.”
The child’s grandfather told officers that the baby’s mother “uses heroin, and other drugs,” and, when the EMTs were advised of this, they used naloxone, the overdose-reversing drug also known by the brand name Narcan, to revive the infant. They then took the baby to hospital.
There, Coach reports, “the infant’s urine tested positive for fentanyl, opiates and cocaine.”
Police state the baby was stable upon arrival at the hospital but said that further information about her condition would be available only from the Department of Children and Families. A DCF spokesperson said that no information could be released due to privacy regulations.
According to police, the officers went into the mother’s bedroom and, when asked if she had any heroin on her person, the woman gave them an empty heroin bag she had in her pocket.
Coach secured a search warrant for the woman’s home, which was executed by Coach and city detectives. They found about 25 bags of heroin in the bedroom and bags containing drug residue were found on the floor and on the woman’s bed.
Ramos was arraigned May 13 before Judge Charles Groce in Westfield District Court on charges of reckless endangerment of a child, permitting substantial injury to a child, possession of a class B drug and possession of heroin. She was released on her personal recognizance, with pretrial conditions, pending a July 26 hearing.
Those pretrial conditions include prohibiting Ramos — who now lives at 507 Appleton St., Holyoke, according to court documents — from contacting her baby except as required by a DCF plan.
If convicted of the charge of permitting substantial injury to a child, Ramos could be sentenced to as much as a five-year term in prison.