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A Texas mother will likely spend the rest of her life behind bars for poisoning her young daughter with Benadryl and other drugs to fake a seizure disorder.
Jesika Jones, 32, was sentenced on Friday to 60 years in prison after reaching a deal with prosecutors to plead guilty to one count of injury to a child with serious bodily or mental injury and abandoning or endangering a child with reckless criminal negligence.
Jones was first arrested in June 2022, when she took her then four-year-old daughter to the Cook Children’s Hospital in Fort Worth and said she had been having seizures, according to the Tarrant County Sheriff’s Office. She had brought the child to the emergency room multiple times for the same reason.
An investigation revealed that while at the hospital, Jones took her daughter to the restroom several times where she was giving her doses of Benadryl.
Doctors said the child had body tremors, dilated pupils and an elevated heart rate, and could not stand on her own – symptoms of Benadryl poisoning, according to doctors’ statements in the arrest warrant cited by the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.
In an interview with Tarrant County Sheriff’s Office Detective Michael Weber, Jones broke down and admitted to giving her daughter more Benadryl than she should and called herself a “habitual liar.”
“I think I’m a horrible person,” she told police, according to the affidavit. “I don’t love myself. I don’t like who I am. I’m tired of living life like this. I’m tired of hurting people. I don’t know. I really don’t.”
When Jones was confronted with positive urine samples, she admitted to giving her child four to five adult Benadryl pills several times during the hospital stay. Empty and partially used Benadryl packs were subsequently found in Jones’s purse.
She reportedly went through 42 Benadryl pills from June 19 to June 24, 2022.
Investigators also found an empty bottle of the sedative Trazodone and a bottle of Hydroxyzine, an antihistamine, that was missing 64 pills in her purse. The child tested positive for those two drugs. Doctors told authorities that she displayed signs of severe Benadryl poisoning, which can be fatal.
Jones was arrested at the time, but while she was out on bond, authorities say she repeatedly continued to poison children, at least one of which was not one of her own five children.
Detective Weber told KTVT that Jones had been meeting men to get access to their children. The latest incident happened in July when Jones was caught giving medication to a 12-year-old girl who was not her daughter. The girl reportedly testified that Jones claimed to be a nurse and gave her medication that caused her to feel dizzy.
“She was meeting men and basically becoming their girlfriend to get access to their children,” Detective Weber said.
Jones’s husband Derek Jones testified Friday in court on behalf of their children and said the the scars of her betrayal “run deep.”
“What you did was not just an act of cruelty; it was a devastating assault on their innocence. I urge you to see beyond the surface and acknowledge the profound and lasting impact of your actions on innocent lives,” he said.
“Instead of exploring new places, making friends, and engaging in adventures, their lives were dominated by the restraints of fake sickness. Every playdate was replaced with a hospital visit. Every carefree moment is overshadowed by caution and fear.”
In court on Friday, District Court Judge Steve Jumes handed down her sentence.
“Unfortunately, I believe you are a determined recidivist that as recently as a month ago was persisting in the behavior to which you pled guilty in January and are asking for mercy,” Judge Jumes told Jones in court, according to KXAS.
“Because you are a determined recidivist and because I believe that you have a knack for finding situations where you can have access to children, I’m not confident giving you a prison sentence simply to [go] beyond a traditional dating range will protect the public. It is the court’s sentence that you will receive 60 years in prison.”
