Toddler Hospitalized After Eating Cocaine

A 22-month-old girl who stopped breathing after eating rock cocaine she picked up from the ground in Pomona was reported in serious condition Wednesday at Loma Linda Medical Center.

“She looks all right, better with all those tubes out of her mouth,” Dana Treadway, the girl’s shaken mother, said at the hospital. But she said her daughter, Anecia Keaton, who usually chatters happily, had temporarily lost her voice.

Treadway, 17, of Monrovia was visiting a friend Tuesday evening at a house near Abbott and Foxbury streets when the incident occurred.

Drug dealers can often be seen in the north Pomona neighborhood stooping to bury their stash in the dirt and under rocks and bushes, neighbors and police said. Because of drug and gang activity, the area has been the target of increased patrols and undercover drug busts, Pomona Police Lt. Leon Sakamoto said.

The neighborhood is so rough, in fact, that two hours after Anecia swallowed the cocaine, a 38-year-old man was shot and killed half a block away by a suspect who is still being sought, Sakamoto said.

“I’m going to stay away” from the area, Treadway said Wednesday. “If I do go there, I’m going to stay inside the house.”

Treadway said she was standing in the yard of her friend’s home when her daughter went off to play with neighborhood children. About 8:15 p.m., a 7-year-old boy ran to Treadway to report that Anecia was eating things she had found on the ground. Treadway saw white powder on Anecia’s cheek, put her finger on the substance and sampled it.

“It tasted like cocaine: nasty like medicine and it made my tongue numb,” she said.

Anecia suddenly went into convulsions and stopped breathing. The frantic mother and a friend flagged down Pomona Police Officer Scott Giles, 42.

Giles rushed the child to Pomona Valley Hospital, providing cardiopulmonary resuscitation instructions to Treadway as he drove. Treadway said her daughter began to breathe on her own before they arrived at the hospital.

The child was transferred to Loma Linda and placed under police protective custody, Sakamoto said. Pomona detectives, county child welfare workers and the district attorney’s office will decide whether negligence was involved, but Sakamoto said it appears Treadway did not deliberately endanger her child.

But the soft-spoken mother, who left Monrovia High School as a freshman and is struggling to raise her daughter alone, blames herself for what happened.

“I should have been keeping a better eye on her and not let her play with those other kids,” she said Wednesday afternoon in the hospital. “I should have kept her in the yard.”

After dark, the neighborhood Treadway was visiting becomes a hangout for sidewalk drug dealers and their customers who slowly cruise the streets on foot and in cars, residents said.

“Basically, you have (freebase) heads walking around trying to find somebody to sell them something,” said one 21-year-old resident. Police patrols have driven gang members from the streets in the last four months, she said, but the drug dealers remain.

“You have drug dealers everywhere you go. Everybody does it. Grandmothers do it. Those kids probably do it,” she said, pointing to a group of teen-agers hanging out in the apartment complex yard Wednesday afternoon.

Another resident, Gail Alexander, 38, said more police patrols are needed. “It’s slowed down a lot. We used to have a shooting every night and fighting every night,” she said. But, she added, “I won’t go outside at night. At nighttime, I go in the house.”