Mum and dad ‘shot kids up with sleeping time heroin’
A couple has injected their three young children with heroin, telling them it was “feel-good medicine” to help them sleep, according to US police.
Ashlee Hutt, 24, and Leroy McIver, 25, allegedly drugged their six-year-old son, and daughters, aged four and two.
Child Protective Services (CPS) launched an investigation in November 2015 after reports children were seen with drugs in the home, Kiro7 reported.
Police claimed the couple’s Washington home was “filthy and filled with rat droppings and used needles”.
According to court documents, the six-year-old told investigators his mother and father gave him and his sisters the “feel-good medicine”.
He described it as a “white powder, which was mixed with water”. He said his parents “used a needle to inject it into him and his sisters”.
Pierce County Sheriff’s Department spokesman Detective Ed Troyer told local media: “some of the statements they [the children] made were very disturbing about how they would get sleeping juice to go to sleep and it was injected into them by needle”.
The children were tested and traces of low levels of what was believed to be heroin was found in two of the children.
Hutt and McIver admitted to CPS officers they were heroin addicts, according to The News Tribune.
The three children were placed into foster care in November 2015.
The couple face three counts each of unlawful delivery of a controlled substance to a minor, second-degree criminal mistreatment and second-degree child assault.
Their bail was set at $US100,000 ($A130,706).
