You apparently followed the wrong link. Here is her booking photo.
Posted on 06/22/2006 9:39:26 AM PDT by WestTexasWend
As many as nine LSD-laced candies disappeared during a gathering at a Northwest Austin apartment and, about an hour later, a 3-year-old boy was hallucinating, crying as he grasped at the air, police said.
The boy spent three days in Children's Hospital, at times in intensive care, before being discharged Wednesday and placed in a foster home. His mother, 22-year-old Ashli Rene Freas, faces a state jail felony charge of abandoning or endangering a child after the incident Sunday.
Police arrested Freas late Sunday outside her Cedar Park apartment on Cypress Creek Road, saying she took her child to an apartment where there were drugs and then failed to get help for him after he ingested the LSD and began hallucinating, said Capt. Jeff Hayes of the Cedar Park police. Police said the boy hallucinated for more than an hour before paramedics were called.
But Freas' lawyer, Robert M. Phillips, said the charges are false and denied that Freas waited to call for help. Freas had no idea there were drugs at the apartment and did everything she could for her son, Phillips said, adding that police should be focusing on the person who had the drugs.
"This young lady, who has never been arrested in her life, is not guilty of this offense and is absolutely morally pure in the way she handled herself," Phillips said.
According to a Cedar Park police affidavit, Freas and her boyfriend had taken the boy to an apartment in the area of Parmer Lane and Duval Road. There, the boy went inside with another adult while Freas and her boyfriend stayed outside with friends.
The man who lived in the apartment, identified in the affidavit only as Stephen, noticed at about 7 p.m. that his SweeTart candies laced with the drug were open and that nine pieces were missing. Stephen told Freas that the candies were missing and that the boy might have eaten them, Hayes said. After taking the boy home, the affidavit said, Freas noticed that he began crying, vomiting and hallucinating. She called two friends, one of whom called 911 after seeing the boy.
Cedar Park police said they will work with Austin police to investigate further, Hayes said, because the apartment where the boy is thought to have ingested the LSD-laced candy is in Austin. Because the case is being investigated as child abuse, APD officials refused to comment on any drug investigations or charges.
Freas, who posted $10,000 bail Tuesday to get out of the Williamson County Jail, could face up to two years in state jail and a $10,000 fine.
Phillips, however, said that the affidavit contains factual errors and denied that an hour had passed before emergency personnel were called.
"She was piecing together the story and doing her best to take care of her baby's medical problems and possibly not thinking as straight as she should have, but certainly not purposefully or neglectfully failing to call emergency personnel," Phillips said.
Child Protective Services has custody of the boy and is investigating, said Chris Van Deusen, a CPS spokesman. In cases of children having access to or being harmed by drugs, the drug involved is usually methamphetamines because people manufacture them at home, he said.
"Where there's a child around, there's a potential for all sorts of accidents, and all sorts of problems arise from simply being in the presence of drugs," Van Deusen said.
CPS will investigate the boy's home environment before determining whether to return him to his mother, place him with another family member or keep him in the foster home where he was taken after being released from the hospital, Van Deusen said.
LSD, or acid, is a potent drug that can cause an adult to become psychotic and hallucinate, said Dr. William Loving, director of the chemical dependency program at Seton Shoal Creek Hospital. It's unclear what effect it would have on a child with a developing brain, he said. The drug wears off with time, depending on how much is ingested, he said.
"You take a little child with a developing brain, and you throw in this turbocharged chemical that's going to stimulate the brain and make them really confused," Loving said. "It's likely to have been a nightmarish state that he would've been in."
I guess we Freepers have become so jaded on child welfare workers because of countless stories of them taking children away because the parents are Christians, want to home school, or the child escaped the house one time without clothing and a nosy neighbor turned them in. We've forgotten that these agencies were created because there are real children who need help.
In my misspent youth, I took LSD many times. When getting liquid acid, the common thing to do was put a drop of it on a SweetTart and let it dissolve into the candy (like with sugar cubes) if you didn't want to take it right away or carry around a vial of liquid. I suppose other candies would work, but for some reason it always done with SweetTarts.
The lack of arrest record does say something in her favor but the comment about *absolutely morally pure* sends up a red flag to me. Our old welfare town was filled with people who did drugs. I just cannot believe she wasn't aware that these people were into drugs. It's too obvious.
"She was piecing together the story and doing her best to take care of her baby's medical problems and possibly not thinking as straight as she should have, but certainly not purposefully or neglectfully failing to call emergency personnel," Phillips said.
And there is some other way of not calling 911 in an emergency? Why did she even begin to think she could handle something like this? I consider her lack of immediate response deplorable. She was told up front what happened. She shouldn't have waited and let a friend do the calling for her.
FWIW, where I lived as a teen, a full hit sold on a chewable vitamin C was tres vogue. It was widely believed that the vitamin made colors even more intensely vibrant than the drug alone would. Probably not true. It did seem to accelerate the onset of tin-can mouth, IIRC.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.