If you’ve managed to get through the whole of Monday without being driven into a white-hot rage, don’t worry, I’ve got your back: the owner of an unlicensed daycare has been sentenced to decades in prison for drugging the kids under her care, daily, so that she could go to the gym to work out and tan.
According to The Oregonian, when parents left their kids with 32-year old January Neatherlin at her Little Giggles, they did so believing that their children would be well cared for while they were at work.
And they were–provided your definition of care includes pumping kids full of a compound that makes them sleep for hours, every day.
It seems that, instead of doing her job, Neatherlin would, on a daily basis, give each of the children under her care a gummy candy chockful of melatonin, so that the kids would snooze for long enough that she could nip out to get swol and tan. To cover for her behavior, Neatherlin insisted that parents not drop off or pick up their kids between 11am and 2pm, as it would screw with the day care’s nap-time schedule.
Neatherlin might have gotten away with her high-fallootin’ pro-grade narcissism, had it not been for complaints about her pattern of child endangerment to the police from a former roommate and an ex-boyfriend. The police surveilled Neatherlin and discovered that she was routinely clocking in at a local cross-fit gym when she was supposed to be watching the kids back at Little Giggles. Boom: charges were laid.
Neatherlin was charged with 11 counts of first-degree criminal mistreatment and one count of third-degree assault, resulting in a sentence of 21 years and four months in prison. While this sounds like a harsh sentence, which she totally deserves, I’d like to point out that there’s a silver lining for Neatherlin: Suddenly, she’s got all the time she’ll ever need to hit the gym.
Image: Alexis O’Toole from Who The Hell Knows Anymore, USA – tanning bed, CC BY-SA 2.0, Link