Man charged after Enfield baby ingests fentanyl, dies
ENFIELD— An arrest warrant served Wednesday charging a local father with criminally negligent homicide indicates police believe the man likely brought home the fentanyl that fatally poisoned his 1-year-old son.
Lenin Rodriguez, 30, of Enfield, was also charged with risk of injury to a child stemming from his son’s death in November 2021 that a Massachusetts medical examiner determined was caused by a “lethal level of fentanyl” in the boy’s system, an arrest warrant said.
The baby is one of eight children under the age of 2½ who have died in Connecticut due to acute fentanyl intoxication since 2020, according to officials with the Office of the Child Advocate and the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner.
Before 2020, there were no known fatal fentanyl overdoses in children under 2½, according to state Child Advocate Sarah Eagan.
Like many of the other cases, medical examiners and police could not pinpoint how the 1-year-old ingested fentanyl, the warrant for Rodriguez shows.
According to the warrant, Rodiguez found the baby unresponsive and he was taken to a Massachusetts hospital, where he was pronounced dead last November.
The caregivers who were watching seven of Connecticut’s eight infants or toddlers who died of fentanyl intoxication since 2020 had a history of substance abuse, Dr. Gregory Vincent with the state Office of the Chief Medical Examiner said during a meeting of Connecticut’s Child Fatality Review Panel in October.
The Enfield child’s case is included with the eight Connecticut cases, but at the time, Vincent was still working with Massachusetts authorities to get information on the baby’s death.
The fatalities prompted the state Department of Children and Families to move quicker to get parents into treatment or possibly remove children from a home with an immediate threat of unintentional overdose, agency officials said in October.
After learning in February that her son had died from fentanyl poisoning, the child’s mother told police her husband had friends over the night before the baby was found unresponsive, the warrant said.
She also said Rodriguez had asked his friends, and they all denied bringing anything into the house that could have killed the child, the warrant stated.
In the toxicology report released in February, a Massachusetts medical examiner concluded the results showed a lethal amount of fentanyl in the child’s system. But the medical examiner was unable to determine the manner of death, including how the child had ingested the drug, court documents said.
The baby’s mother told investigators she put the child down for a nap around 2:30 p.m. on Nov. 22, after rocking him for a bit. Minutes before, the mother told police, the baby had been playing alone in the living room, according to the warrant. She has not been charged with a crime.
Rodriguez later went to check on the child, who had been sleeping for about three hours, and found him “cold and not breathing,” the warrant said.
Enfield officers responded to a 911 call at the home and began an investigation as the baby was brought to nearby Baystate Medical Center in Springfield, Mass., the warrant said.
The child had no obvious signs of trauma and no known health conditions, the warrant said. He was pronounced dead at the Massachusetts hospital, and the case was turned over to medical examiners in that state, police said.
As Enfield investigators questioned the mother about what happened in the hours before the child’s death, they asked her about drug use, the warrant said.
The child’s mother told investigators she and Rodriguez
used recreational cannabis, but the woman said she had never used narcotics, according to the warrant. Rodriguez declined to be interviewed by police, the warrant said.
After the February toxicology report indicated there was a lethal level of fentanyl in the child’s system, the mother again denied any narcotics use and told police she didn’t know what fentanyl was, the warrant said. When both parents took a drug test obtained by police, Rodriguez tested positive for fentanyl while the mother tested positive for cannabis, the warrant said.
A second toxicology report issued by the Massachusetts medical examiner in May determined that a lethal amount of fentanyl was also found in the child’s stomach, the warrant said.
“According to Dr. Andrew Elin, of the Massachusetts Medical Examiner’s Office, he believed the victim would be able to live for only several minutes with that amount of fentanyl in his system,” the warrant said.
While the tests on the contents of the child’s stomach were conducted to determine a possible route of transmission, the manner of the child’s death remains “undetermined,” the warrant said.
Rodriguez admitted to a state Department of Children and Families worker in February that he had used Suboxone, which is used to treat opioid dependence. Massachusetts State Police had also charged him in July with operating under the influence, Enfield police said in the warrant.
The summary of the driving-while-impaired case indicates he passed field sobriety tests and a breath test but told officers that he had taken a Percocet painkiller that he didn’t have a prescription for earlier in the day, the warrant said.
Rodriguez turned himself in to Enfield police Wednesday on the arrest warrant charging him in his son’s death, police said. Rodriguez was released on $50,000 bond and is expected to be arraigned in state Superior Court in Hartford on Nov. 29.