Wisconsin couple convicted of child neglect after overdosing in car with 2-year-old in back seat
The video was taken by a woman in Milwaukee.
A video has emerged of two adults slumped unconscious in a car in an apparent overdose while a young child is left in the back seat of a car. The scene, filmed by a concerned mum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, is similar to one from Ohio in which two adults had passed out while a four-year-old sat strapped in the back of their car.
The couple named in the Wisconsin video have been named as Matthew Huber, 41, and 27-year-old Victoria Warzyniakowski, whose two-year-old boy can be seen in the back seat.
The video was taken by a local woman in Milwaukee called Theresa whose eighth grade son found the couple in the car with its engine running and thought the couple were dead.
When Theresa went to investigate she found the pair were still alive and called emergency services who administered Narcan to reverse the effects of the drugs.
"We didn't touch them because we didn't know if there were needles in the car, and we didn't want to, we just grabbed the baby out," Theresa told WISN. "He was in the back seat. He was trying to get out. He was walking around in the car, and the car was running."
Huber was found to have around 200 pills in his pockets, mostly opioids. The couple - both from West Allis - were arrested and charged with and convicted of child neglect. Huber was also found guilty of felony drug possession.
Theresa said she was grateful the situation wasn't even worse. "I thank God that it happened here, because what if they were driving, or you know, there could've been an accident."
Theresa decided to share her footage after similar scenes emerged from East Liverpool, Ohio, where 50-year-old Rhonda Pasek and 47-year-old James Lee Acord were photographed unconscious as Pasek's four-year-old grandson sat in the back seat.
Police said they released the images to show the sort of drug-related problems they had to deal with every day, but were criticised for not pixelating the little boy's face before releasing the images to the media. Pasek and Acord are in prison awaiting trial on charges of endangering a child and public intoxication, NBC reported.
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