Coroner: ‘Disturbing’ substance found in toddler’s system
♦ The 3-year-old’s grandfather is charged with second-degree murder.
Officials say the decision to file a murder charge didn’t stem from how much of a drug a 3-year-old child ingested, but the type of drug the young boy consumed.
“It was not the amount, it was substantial product,” Coroner Gene Proctor said Wednesday.
The coroner, like police Tuesday night, declined to identify the drug involved.
Little Deajrain Hudson, 3, was pronounced dead a short time after he was taken to Redmond Regional Medical
Center on Jan. 8 last year.
His grandfather, Antonio Montezz Hudson, turned himself in at the Floyd County Jail on Tuesday to face a charge of murder in the second degree along with two felony cruelty to children counts.
Proctor said he got a call from the emergency room staff at Redmond around noon last Jan. 8 to examine the circumstances surrounding the death of what appeared to be an otherwise healthy young child.
After his initial examination sent up several red flags, he said he began to question the grandfather and other family members. Those talks sent up additional red flags for Proctor and he called the Rome Police Department’s lead juvenile investigator, Randy Gore.
“(The family’s) stories were never consistent. The more questions we asked the more different answers we got,” Proctor said.
Proctor said Deajrain had been staying with his grandfather for three nights prior the trip to the hospital.
The youngster’s body was sent to the GBI Crime Lab for an autopsy and the first set of toxicology results came back on Feb. 22, 2019. When Proctor got those results, he immediately decided to seek a confirmation of the information about the chemical substances that were found in the boy’s system.
The second set of toxicology results did not come back until July 25, 2019, and the final autopsy report was not received until Aug. 8, 2019. Detectives then went to work gathering evidence and a warrant was issued Monday for Antonio Hudson.
Proctor — who called the substance found in the youngster “very disturbing chemicals” — said that it was not useful for police to proceed with their investigation until all of the analyses were completed.