10 months’ jail for Sarnia woman who used fentanyl while serving house arrest for baby’s death

Initially it appeared Katie McPhail caught a break.

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The 32-year-old Sarnia woman was taken by Sarnia police Const. Greg Armstrong to the city’s jail on Sept. 1 amid allegations – by her own mother and brother – she’d broken the rules of her house arrest by using illegal drugs. But due to a paperwork issue, jail staff said they couldn’t hold her that Friday afternoon, so Armstrong told McPhail she’d be released unconditionally until after the Labor Day long weekend, a Sarnia courtroom heard this week.

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The officer drove McPhail, serving a two-year conditional sentence for her role in the accidental fentanyl overdose death of her infant daughter three years ago, home and released her shortly before 4 pm But little more than an hour later, Armstrong was called back to the same house for a reported overdose and found McPhail slumped over in her basement bedroom near a lighter, burnt tinfoil and a makeshift straw.

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She initially was unresponsive, but was breathing and had a pulse and later regained consciousness.

“She’s very fortunate to be alive, quite honestly,” assistant Crown attorney Lori MacIntosh said Tuesday in court.

Taken to hospital as a precaution, McPhail admitted to Armstrong she’d taken fentanyl shortly after he dropped her off. She was trying to get better, she added, but her addiction to opioids was controlling her.

During a hearing Tuesday where McPhail admitted to breaking the rules of her conditional sentence, defense lawyer Sarah Donohue said her client is trying to climb a mountain – battling a decade-long addiction while also dealing with the grievance of losing her baby.

“This is a very tragic, tragic case,” Donohue said. “This is something that my client continues to deal with every single day. She is remembered of it many, many times a day.”

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McPhail was sentenced in June to 18 months’ house arrest, six more months of a curfew and a further year of probation for failing to provide the necessaries of life after her nine-month-old daughter, Tressa MacPherson, died on Nov. 20, 2020. The sentence included a ban on using illegal drugs.

As a penalty for breaking that rule, McPhail now will serve the next 10 months in jail before being released to serve the rest of her earlier sentence at home. Justice Krista Lynn Leszczynski said this new sentence, suggested by both lawyers, was necessary, but also in McPhail’s best interest to address her addiction issue.

To help her on that front, the judge recommended she serve the 10 months at the Vanier Center for Women in Milton, where she may be able to get treatment. Leszczynski also added a rule to the house-arrest portion, permitting her to leave home to go to a residential treatment program.

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“I wish you well during this time in your recovery efforts,” she said.

Donohue pointed out her client is a well-educated woman whom she believes can beat the addiction. She also added McPhail was first introduced to opioids by her co-accused.

McPhail and Brock MacPherson, the baby’s father, initially were charged with manslaughter and criminal negligence causing death in September 2021 by Lambton OPP, about ten months after their daughter died. The manslaughter charges were dropped in 2022, but the other two charges continued.

MacPherson, a 31-year-old Mooretown resident, eventually pleaded guilty to the charge as laid and was sent to prison in June for two years while McPhail pleaded guilty to the lesser included offense of failing to provide the necessaries of life.

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The incident took place in MacPherson’s bedroom inside his mother’s Mooretown home. They normally didn’t all stay there together – the baby typically lived with McPhail at her parents’ home – but the young family went there that Thursday evening after crashing their car.

Before going home in a taxi, MacPherson made a pit stop at a known Sarnia fentanyl dealer’s house.

A coroner found no obvious cause of death after the lifeless infant was rushed to Bluewater Health in Sarnia and an autopsy the next day in London found no anatomical cause of death. But toxicology and chemistry reports from the Center of Forensic Sciences released in early 2021 found a high concentration of fentanyl in the little girl’s stomach and concluded her death was caused by fentanyl toxicity.

It could not be determined if she ingested or inhaled the highly addictive opioid, but she had more than seven times a lethal dose in her system.

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@ObserverTerry

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