Woman Loved Meth More Than Her Son, Prosecution Says at Trial

Orange County prosecutors say Christine Nicole Symmonds loved methamphetamine more than her infant son, who died when his mother rolled over during a deep, drug-induced slumber and suffocated him.

But the young woman’s lawyer said Tuesday in her opening statement that although Symmonds was “horribly flawed,” she never intentionally endangered 3-month-old Jason Blanchard.

“Although she admits she isn’t raising the baby properly,” she never intended to harm the child, Deputy Public Defender Dolores Yost told the jury.

Jurors will be asked to decide whether Symmonds’ drug addiction and the deficiencies in her care for Jason amounted to a “reckless disregard” for her baby’s well-being, the prosecutor told them. Symmonds faces from 15 years to life in prison if convicted of second-degree murder.

In a similar case last year in Riverside County, prosecutors also tried to prove that addicts were responsible for the effects of their drug use. A jury there convicted a Perris woman of murder because her infant son died after ingesting a lethal amount of meth through her breast milk.

The younger of Symmonds’ two children, Jason died June 27, 2003, when she rolled over him while they slept on an air mattress in a Lake Forest home where the pair had temporarily been staying.

In his opening statement, Deputy Dist. Atty. Howard Gundy described Jason’s last hours.

The night before Jason died, Symmonds partied, smoking meth and marijuana and drinking rum and whiskey straight from the bottles while Jason slept in another room. She changed Jason’s diaper and dressed him in a yellow sleeper before she went to sleep around dawn.

While asleep, the 100-pound woman rolled onto the infant, pushing his face against the mattress and suffocating him, Gundy said. She slept until 2 p.m., when the man who invited Symmonds to stay in the house came in.

He woke her, and she started crying when she saw the dead child and immediately called 911. The man grabbed the phone from her and hung it up, telling her, “Not in my house.”

When a dispatcher called back seconds later, Symmonds’ tone was bright and composed as she told him not to send anyone. “Sorry,” she tells him on a recording of the 911 call played for the jury. “We’re O.K. We’re fine.”

Symmonds then called her mother, who came over and took the baby to nearby Saddleback Memorial Hospital in Laguna Hills, where he was pronounced dead.

When Gundy displayed a photo of the dead child on several television monitors, Symmonds averted her eyes and sobbed. Her lawyer turned off the monitor closest to her, then stroked the 21-year-old woman’s waist-length brown hair.

The prosecutor told the jury that Symmonds deserved to be convicted of murder, saying that she knew her drug use presented risks to her child and that she had a “willful disregard” for the baby.

“Using meth is more important to her than any other thing in her life,” Gundy said.

In her statement, Yost tried to show that Symmonds was a caring mother who took pains to make sure Jason was taken care of even when she was making choices that the lawyer described as “reprehensible.”

“Those choices never reflected a willingness to put Jason’s life in danger,” Yost said.

In Jason’s short life, Yost said, his mother had taken him to the doctor several times and made follow-up calls to get treatment for his chronic congestion problems.

Yost said that during the night of partying before Jason’s death, when Symmonds was told her baby was crying, she immediately went to his room to tend to him.

And before she went to sleep, Yost told the jury, Symmonds spent more time making sure Jason was comfortable and warm.

“His mother’s last conscious acts before he died,” Yost said, “were ones of love.”