After evading authorities for the past three days, the 34-year-old grandma who allowed her 13-month-old grandson to ingest cocaine while in the care of her and her 22-year-old boyfriend turned herself into authorities in Palmetto, Georgia, while the boyfriend did the same later in the day.
The duo, Ebony Daniel and her boyfriend Charlie Martin, have become a curiosity across the web as people have expressed their outrage at the couple’s stunning level of irresponsibility. They have also started a conversation about intergenerational teenage motherhood and its longterm effect, as Ebony Daniels had her own daughter when she was 17, and her daughter had the 13-month-old when she was just 16.
Daniel turned herself in at about 5:35 p.m., while Martin came in a bit later. They are both charged with possession of cocaine, cruelty to children in the first degree and reckless conduct.
As he was being led to a waiting squad car, Martin answered questions on camera posed to him by reporter Eric Philips from Channel 2 News in Atlanta.
“You already know I love you and that baby girl so you don’t even have to do all of that, for real,” Martin said. Though it’s not clear, perhaps he was directing his comments at Ebony Daniel, saying he loves her and her daughter—the mother of the 13-month-old boy who swallowed the crack.
Asked whether he allowed the baby to get the drugs, Martin angrily said, “No.” But when asked if the crack was his, he said, “Yeah.”
Authorities said the crack cocaine was left out in the open.
“The mother of the child is cooperating with us, and we spoke with other witnesses who stated cocaine was open and unprotected on the table,” Sgt. Lee Gragg of the Palmetto Police Department told Channel 2.
According to officers, they were informed that the boy, whose name was not released, had ingested cocaine at the home the boy’s grandmother and her boyfriend share in the 200 block of Elm Street. The child was brought into Piedmont Newnan Hospital on Friday afternoon by his mother. When the hospital staffers found out what happened, they called in the police and they transported the child to Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta at Egleston, where he was admitted to the hospital for observation and tested positive for cocaine.
When the Channel 2 reporter went to the house, a man yelled from behind the door, “Baby doing fine!”
Though the boy was released from the hospital, authorities are still awaiting toxicology reports to determine how much cocaine he ingested.
