Parents charged after 11-month-old son overdoses on heroin

The parents of an 11-month-old boy were charged Thursday after the child overdosed by licking a bottle cap dusted with heroin and fentanyl they left within his reach, authorities said.

Kristen Lynn Bristow, 30, and Charles Robert Salzman Jr., 31, face charges of aggravated assault, child endangerment, tampering with evidence, and drug possession, according to the affidavits of probable cause for their arrests. They had fallen asleep in Bristow’s Honda Civic after injecting five bags of heroin in a bathroom, police said, and left the drug-coated bottle cap near their son.

Medics gave the couple’s son three doses of Narcan, an opioid overdose reversal medication, then took him to Nemours Alfred I. duPont Hospital for Children in Wilmington, where he remained Thursday.

The couple bought nine bags of heroin Wednesday and used five of the bags in the bathroom of Salzman’s mother’s house on Limestone Road in West Fallowfield, police said. Shortly after, the pair told Salzman’s mother, Nancy, that they intended to clean out their car parked at the back of her home. Their son followed, police said, crawling into their Honda Civic.

When they did not return for some time, Salzman’s mother went to check on them and saw the baby slumped over in his car seat, unconscious, police said. Bristow was asleep in the front passenger seat of the car and Salzman was behind the driver’s seat, “not sleeping, but not reacting,” according to court documents. He came to and handed his son to his mother, who tried to revive the child before calling 911.

Salzman also gave his mother his phone and a bag of his belongings, which she stashed in her house before police arrived, authorities said. On Thursday, Nancy Salzman allowed Pennsylvania State Police to search her home, where police found a small plastic bag holding a “white powdery substance" and used needles.

Bristow and Salzman, who gave conflicting statements to Pennsylvania State Police when they were being interviewed Wednesday, said they had been trying to recover from drug addiction by taking methadone daily.

The pair, unable to post bail, were taken to the Chester County Prison on Thursday.