Kentucky Mother Arrested After Daughter Tests Positive for Cocaine

Zachary Stieber
By Zachary Stieber
February 11, 2019US News
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Kentucky Mother Arrested After Daughter Tests Positive for Cocaine

A Kentucky mother was arrested after her daughter tested positive for cocaine, police officials said.

The 4-year-old girl became unresponsive at school on Feb. 7. She was taken to Clark Regional Medical Center, where Winchester police officers went after receiving a report on the situation.

At the medical center, the girl tested positive for cocaine, reported WKYT.

Police officers then interviewed the mother, Anniquta Wright, 31. Wright admitted that she had let a friend sell cocaine at her house while her children were there.

“Wright admitted that the kids would even sit at the table with the friend,” according to a police citation obtained by the Lexington Herald-Leader. The friend had been at Wright’s house until about 3 a.m. Thursday, the day the girl was found unresponsive at school.

A subsequent test of Wright’s 2-year-old son tested positive for cocaine.

Wright was charged with two counts of criminal abuse. Police said she was a fugitive from another state.

Wright was being held at the Clark County Detention Center on $25,000 bond.

Mother Charged After Boy Found

A New Jersey woman was charged with murder on Feb. 9 after law enforcement officers found the remains of her young son in the yard just hours after she reported him missing.

Nakira Griner, 24, called the Bridgeton Police Department on Feb. 8 around 6:36 p.m. and said that her child, Daniel Griner Jr., nearly 2 years old, had been abducted.

Officers responded along with bloodhounds and searched for the boy. They found his remains in the yard of Griner’s Bridgeton house at 3 a.m. on Saturday.

Griner was arrested and charged with first-degree murder, second-degree endangering the welfare of a child, second-degree desecration of human remains, and fourth-degree tampering with evidence, according to the Cumberland County Prosecutor’s Office.

She was booked into the Cumberland County Jail pending a detention hearing.

“No further information will be released at this time as the case remains under investigation,” the county prosecutor’s office said in a statement released Saturday morning. “No additional arrests are expected at this time.”

According to Griner’s Facebook page, she is married. In her final post before her arrest, she said that she had “two beautiful children” and that she loved her husband. In the past, she had posted several pictures showing the children.

NTD Photo
Nakira Griner in an undated file photo. (Nakira Griner/Facebook)
Mother charged for killing son
Daniel Griner Jr., 23 months old, was found dead in Bridgeton, N.J., on Feb. 9, 2019. His mother Nakira Griner, 24, was arrested and charged with murder. (Bridgeton Police Department)

Child Abuse

According to a report published by the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services (pdf), approximately 3.5 million children nationwide in 2016 were the subjects of at least one maltreatment report to authorities.

“Child abuse is one of the nation’s most serious concerns,” the authors of the report wrote in the introduction. About 17 percent of those reports were substantiated; the department said that there were an estimated 676,000 victims of child abuse and neglect, or 9.1 victims per 1,000 children.

Children in their first year of life had the highest rate of victimization at 24.8 per 1,000 children of the same age in the national population. About three-quarters of the cases were neglect while about 18 percent were physical abuse. Some children suffered from multiple forms of maltreatment.

Of the perpetrators of the abuse, more than four-fifths were between the ages of 18 and 44 and more than half were women.

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