Grandmother Is Arrested After Giving 4 Year Old A Bottle Of Whiskey, Killing Child As The Mother Watched

A 4-year-old girl died after her grandmother suspected she may have stolen a sip of whiskey and then forced the child to drink the rest of the bottle as her mother watched, Baton Rouge Police said Friday.

The East Baton Rouge coroner's office said China Record, 4, died Thursday from acute alcohol poisoning.

BRPD Spokesman Sgt. L'Jean McKneely said that the little girl had a blood alcohol level of .680 when officers arrived at her family's home on Wallis St. late Thursday morning — more than eight times the limit at which adult drivers are considered intoxicated.

Both the little girl's grandmother, Roxanne Record, and mother, Kadjah Record, were booked early Friday morning on first degree murder, McKneely said.

He said that officers were dispatched around 10:50 a.m. Thursday to a house in the 12000 block of Wallis Street about an unresponsive toddler. Officers found the child dead, after Baton Rouge Fire and EMS personnel tried and failed to resuscitate her, according to booking documents for the grandmother.

Those documents said that China's mother and grandmother became angry after the child drank from a bottle of Canadian Mist, an 80 proof whiskey. The grandmother then forced the child to drink the remainder of the bottle, which was "over half full," with the child on her knees in the hallway as her mother looked on, the documents say.

Whiskey at 80 proof is 40 percent alcohol.

Detectives said in the arrest papers that Kadjah Record, 28, was "present and failed to stop" Roxanne Record "from providing the alcohol," and that she later placed the unresponsive child in a bathtub.

After she was taken into custody, Roxanne Record, 53, said that "this went too far" and that she had "ruined everyone's lives," detectives said in the arrest documents.