A Louisiana woman who wanted to teach her 4-year-old granddaughter a lesson about drinking forced her to drink half a bottle of whiskey, police in Baton Rouge said.
The girl, China Record, died Thursday of acute alcohol poisoning.
Investigators said that her grandmother, 53-year-old Roxanne Record, forced her to finish a bottle of whiskey while the girl’s mother, 29-year-old Kadjah Record, watched.
Both women were arrested and booked into the East Baton Rouge Parish prison Friday morning, each on a charge of first-degree murder.
Police say that the young girl consumed more than half a bottle of Canadian Mist, an 80-proof whiskey, after her mother and grandmother became mad at her for taking a sip from a bottle that had been left on the kitchen counter, according to local television station WBRZ-TV.
Roxanne forced the little girl “to consume the remainder of the bottle which was possibly over half full while on her knees in the hallway,” investigators said.
Kadjah, who saw what was happening, didn’t do anything to stop it. She later placed the unresponsive child in a bathtub, detectives said in the arrest papers.
A spokesman for the Baton Rouge Police Department, Sgt. L’Jean McKneely, said that little China had a blood alcohol level of .680% when officers arrived at the family home, according to The Advocate.
In Louisiana, any driver with a blood-alcohol concentration above .08% can be arrested and charged with a DWI. The girl’s level was more than eight times that limit.
The investigation is still ongoing.
