Sarnia woman serving house arrest in baby’s fentanyl overdose arrested on breaking rules

A Sarnia woman serving house arrest for her role in the accidental fentanyl overdose death of her baby is being held in the Sarnia Jail amid an allegation she broke the rules of her conditional sentence.

Katie McPhail, 32, 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.

But little more than three months later, McPhail was back in a Sarnia courtroom this week after police accused her of breaching her conditional sentence. A hearing will soon be held soon, likely in front of the same judge who sentenced her, to test this allegation.

The case, which briefly appeared twice this week in a Sarnia courtroom, was adjourned to Monday. In the meantime, McPhail is being held in custody as she hires a lawyer and puts together a lease plan.

McPhail and the baby’s father, Brock MacPherson, 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 for two years, but McPhail pleaded guilty to the lesser included offense of failing to provide the necessaries of life. Through her guilty plea, McPhail admitted to allowing her baby to stay in a basement bedroom where she knew MacPherson used drugs and there was drug paraphernalia scattered around.

Police did not find any drugs in the room, but they did discover tinfoil with burn marks, straws with burnt ends, and a digital scale with unknown purple residue, the court heard in June.

“Katie is extremely remorseful for her actions or lack of actions that resulted in Tressa’s death,” McPhail’s lawyer, Sarah Donohue, said at the time.

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 was an accident – ​​the scientific reports and the parents, both recovering drug addicts, never knew if she ingested or inhaled the highly addictive and often-deadly opioid – but she had more than seven times a lethal dose in her system.

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@ObserverTerry