Police in Missouri rushed to the scene of a residence after there were several reports of a home operating a meth lab. However, once they arrive to the scene, they discovered that it was something more worse than they ever imagined. However, now these parents are now going to jail for a very long time.
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The state of Missouri is known to have people who produce or smoke methamphetamine products, however this shocking call to this trailer park in St. Charles ended up exposing more than just a tweeker’s stash. Kathleen Peacock and Lucas Barnes had been holed up inside for days, with one room of the ramshackle house transformed into an oven, until it became too hot to ignore.
Peacock, who happens to be pregnant, had been up for 38 hours with her man on a meth making and taking bender. She mentioned hearing noise from the other room of the small home and thought at one point about checking on it, but her drugs were too important to take a few steps away from them.
After the sounds stopped, she finally opened the door to the room and found her 2-year-old son Braydon Barnes, having died of extreme heat in a room with a space heater. Peacock and Barnes thought that locking the child in the room with a space heater on high for almost two days was enough to keep him comfortable so they could do their drugs.
The heater didn’t have a thermostat on it that would allow it to shut off when it got too hot, ultimately making an oven out of the room. To make matters worse, when Peacock called police about her dead child, they not only found that the trailer house of horrors had been condemned and had feces and filth everywhere, but the child was severely malnourished after not being fed for days. If the heat didn’t kill him, the starvation probably would have.
According to CBS St. Louis, this isn’t the pregnant mom’s first run-in with the law. She hadn’t even fully resolved her child endangerment charge from when she was pulled over for driving under the influence with a kid in tow. Now, she and Barnes are looking at 20 years to life for abuse or neglect of a child resulting in death, topped off with additional drug charge.
The state has such a problem with inept parents that they’ve had to put “crisis nurseries” in place, where people can drop off their children if they can’t handle them, feel overwhelmed, or would rather do drugs than do their job as a parent. Although this was available to Peacock and Barnes, the centers also rely on people exuding an ounce of responsibility to take them up on the offer.
“I’d love to tell you this is the worst case we’ve ever seen, but it’s not,” St. Charles Co. Prosecutor Tim Lohmar says. “We see things like this with some degree of regularity, unfortunately, and it typically follows a similar pattern, so this is as sad as any of those.”
