Ear Hustle

Toddler Dies After Grandmother Gives Her Morphine For A Toothache

 

penny

 

It is hard to figure out what goes on in a person’s head and it is harder to understand that a grandmother would give her 1 year old grand daughter morphine for a tooth ache.

According to Reading Eagle

A 53-year-old woman told a Berks County judge Friday that she wished she would have died instead of her 1-year-old granddaughter who she gave a fatal dose of morphine to ease the baby’s teething pain in 2009.

“I often wish I could trade places with her and that everything would be all right,” Penny S. Kochel said before she was sentenced by President Judge Paul M. Yatron to two to 23 months in the county jail for killing her 1-year-old granddaughter on May 8, 2009.

The sentence was based on a plea agreement between Assistant District Attorney Kevin F. Howard and Polyak. Howard said Kochel was taking care of Leanna when she gave morphine to the child. Kochel initially told police that Leanna would not stop crying, so she gave the baby a teething tablet provided by her daughter-in-law, Long, and rubbed tequila on the baby’s gums to numb the pain.

Kochel of the first block of Jay Bee Drive, Heidelberg Township, pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter in the death of Leanna E. McEntee of Levittown, Bucks County.

Kochel said not a day goes by that she does not think of her granddaughter who she was baby-sitting for while the baby’s parents, Colleen R. Long and her husband, Matthew N. McEntee, went on weekend vacation.

“Leanna was my beautiful angel,” Kochel said during the sentencing. “I would never have done anything to her that I thought would hurt or kill her.”

But Kochel said she accepts responsibility.

“I loved Leanna as much as anything in the world,” Kochel said.

Kochel’s lawyer, James M. Polyak, said Kochel had morphine in her home because she was helping to care for her brother, Norman M. Anderson Jr. of Robesonia. Anderson died two weeks after Leanna.

Yatron said the case is tragic.

“I offer my sincerest condolences for your loss,” Yatron said to the baby’s family. “Obviously, there was no intention to hurt the child.”

 

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