3 days Ago
The 19th Judicial District Courthouse in Baton Rouge. The trial of a Baton Rouge woman accused of causing her 2-year-old son’s fentanyl death opened last week with questions of accountability. The state contends Whitney Adriel Ard’s neglect led to her toddler son, Mitchell Robinson III, overdosing three times in little more than two months.
The third time Robinson was rushed to the hospital after ingesting opiates he found in his Merrydale home, doctors were unable to revive him. He was less than a month from his third birthday when he died of a fentanyl overdose on June 26, 2022. His death thrust Louisiana’s Department of Children and Family Services into the spotlight, prompting an investigation that exposed cracks in the state’s child welfare system.
The agency was warned at least three times that Robinson was living in instability, but according to the state inspector general , case workers and DCFS managers took no action to ensure his safety before he died. Now a Baton Rouge jury must decide the severity of the consequences for his 31-year-old mother. Ard was indicted on a charge of second-degree murder and faces an automatic life sentence if she is found guilty.
Prosecutors allege her unrelenting neglect in the weeks leading up to Robinson’s death amounted to juvenile cruelty and laid the foundation for her murder indictment. But Ard’s attorneys argue the charge is too harsh for a woman who was in the throes of addiction and not dealing the fentanyl that Robinson fatally ingested. They will argue that negligent homicide, an underlying felony punishable by up to five years behind bars, is more suited for the case.
“They’re just trying to hammer her because basically they’re trying to make an example out of her,” said Sandra James Page, who is part of Ard’s trial defense team. Facts alleged by state Mitchell George “Du” Robinson III woke up his mother early in the morning of June 26, 2022, and asked for breakfast. Ard fixed him a bowl of cereal and went back to sleep, she told investigators.
When she woke back up around 7 a.m., she found Robinson passed out on the floor next to his overturned cereal bowl, according to arrest records.
Detectives later recovered a baggie of fentanyl next to the bowl. The toddler was blue in the face and cold to the touch when Ard rushed him to Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center to be treated for cardiac arrest. Emergency room doctors gave the child six doses of epinephrine and administered Narcan, an overdose-reversing agent, but were unable to resuscitate him.
A toxicology report showed Robinson had 14 nanograms of fentanyl per milliliter in his blood, an amount authorities said is more than enough to kill an adult. It was the third time in 21⁄2 months that the toddler had overdosed after ingesting fentanyl-laced drugs while in Ard’s care. Robinson’s parents carried him unresponsive into the emergency room shortly after midnight April 12, 2022.
Jennifer Meyer, an ER physician at Our Lady of the Lake, testified Friday that doctors had to give Robinson four doses of Narcan to stabilize him before transferring him to OLOL’s children’s hospital for further treatment. She told jurors it was indicative that Robinson had overdosed after consuming a considerable amount of opioids. But when the doctor shared the news with Ard that night, she said the mother denied having any opiates or prescription drugs in their home and attributed his reaction to Fun Dip candies he ate at an Easter party at school.
Meyer indicated she reported her suspicions to DCFS and said she was concerned about Robinson being released back to his mother’s care. Those concerns only intensified June 4, when Ard brought Robinson to the hospital again with the same symptoms. Again, Ard denied any drug activity, and again ER doctors gave Robinson multiple doses of Narcan to revive him, Meyer said.
This time, however, Dr. Karen George, an emergency room physician who treated Robinson at the children’s hospital, ordered an outside lab to test his blood for synthetic opiates. She testified the move was not standard practice for drug overdoses at the time, but OLOL’s in-house drug screenings then couldn’t detect the presence of fentanyl and other synthetic opioids.
George said she made three calls to notify DCFS after the results came back 10 days later and showed that the toddler tested positive. She stressed that Robinson had been through two near-death experiences and was not in a safe environment. A report released by the Office of the State Inspector General in March showed that DCFS assigned a caseworker who was overloaded with other urgent cases of abuse and child endangerment.
The child welfare worker scheduled a time to talk with Ard 10 days prior to Robinson’s death, but became preoccupied with other cases and then took sick leave. The conversation never happened. “It was so frustrating,” George testified Friday.
“Work is really hard and not much upsets me. But to this day, it still kind of brings tears. I was very upset because I felt like this kid was failed on multiple levels.
This was a very preventable death. It shouldn’t have happened.” Murder or negligent homicide? Robinson became a poster child for DCFS’ dire staffing shortages and funding woes , and the high-profile case sparked public outrage.
When Ard was initially arrested for the overdose in August 2022, she was booked on a count of negligent homicide. A grand jury handed down the murder indictment about two months later. Trial prosecutors intend to present evidence from a separate criminal case in which Ard faces several drug and weapon-related indictments.
East Baton Rouge narcotics detectives investigated suspicions that Ard and Mitchell Robinson Jr., her son’s father and live-in boyfriend at the time, were using Amazon and the mail to sell heroin. Deputies alleged the pair mailed the drugs to multiple locations from their home along Denova Street and several other residences.
Narcotics agents raided the Denova Street house May 11, 2022, and found about 4 ounces of fentanyl and crystal methamphetamine, nearly $26,000 in cash, a fully automatic Glock 9 mm pistol and an illegal, untraceable “ghost gun,” according to arrest warrants in that ongoing case. Louisiana’s murder statute includes a provision for people who distribute or dispense controlled substances that cause a fatal overdose. It is a subsection of the law typically applied to drug dealers who sell fatal batches.
During an opening salvo in Ard’s trial on Sept. 9, her defense team pressed prosecutors, arguing that they can’t use the drug raid as a basis for Ard’s murder conviction. “I believe the state is trying to allude, with the other drug case, that she is a drug dealer,” James Page said.
“Whatever was found in the (May) drug bust cannot be considered in an overdose that happened in June, when they had already taken all of the drugs out of the house. It has to be the same day that it occurred. The circumstances have to be found at the time of the child’s death.
” Dale Glover, who is also representing Ard, said her client intended to use the fentanyl that her son ingested for her personal use, not to sell it for profit. He pointed to her son’s three overdoses in a short span as evidence of her spiraling addiction. Ard penned a letter to a previous judge presiding over the case in October 2022, asking to be released from jail to undergo substance abuse treatment.
“The thing with this case is no one ever plans to be an addict. You can’t plan for addiction to take over your life,” Glover said. Defense attorneys acknowledge criminal negligence factored in Robinson’s death, but say Ard took no direct actions to cause the overdose.
James Page pointed to the case of Tiffany Thomason, another Baton Rouge mother arrested two months after her 1-year-old son died of fentanyl poisoning in January 2023. She is now being prosecuted for negligent homicide in an ongoing case. “She (Ard) was originally charged with that,” the attorney said Friday.
“They charged Tiffany Thomason with that, and she is a White woman. They’re trying to put the hammer on my client because she’s a Black woman when everyone knows that DCFS failed to do what they were supposed to do — not once, but twice.”.
