Jocelyn Leslie Pater (Mower County Sheriff’s Office)
A 26-year-old mother in Minnesota will spend no time in prison after getting high on methamphetamine and falling asleep on her newborn son, ultimately suffocating the infant to death. Third Judicial District Court Judge Kevin H. Siefken on Wednesday ordered Jocelyn Leslie Pater to serve a sentence of five years on supervised probation in connection with her son’s tragic death.
Pater previously reached a deal with prosecutors in which she agreed to plead guilty to one count of felony second-degree manslaughter resulting from child neglect or endangerment. The plea deal — which was entered into more than a year ago — took into account that Pater had been sober and seeing chemical dependency and mental health professionals since that time. Judge Siefken also ordered Pater to serve 200 hours of community service. Pater faced a maximum of 10 years in prison on the manslaughter charge.
According to a probable cause affidavit obtained by Law&Crime, officers with the Austin Police Department at about 6:21 p.m. on Dec. 13, 2021, responded to an apartment complex located in the 400 block of 27th Street Southwest in regards to a call about an infant who was bleeding from the nose and not breathing.
Upon arriving at the scene, first responders located a small infant lying on the floor in the middle of the living room. The child had no pulse and was immediately rushed to the Austin Medical Center for treatment.
Pater, who had a history of substance abuse, told police she went to sleep laying on the couch with the victim between her body and the back couch cushions, advising that she “always wakes up whenever he moves.” However, this time she was awoken when a friend came into her apartment who was “hysterical” and “pulled [Pater] away from the victim before grabbing the victim and leaving the apartment.” The friend went to the apartment next door and called 911 while performing CPR on the child.
The friend, identified in court documents as “T.F.,” told police that she had been at Pater’s apartment helping her move but left when Pater laid down to go to sleep. When she returned, T.F. said she “could not get the defendant to answer the door.” When she finally got into the apartment, she said she saw Pater’s chest atop the victim’s face, advising that the child was “purple and blue.”
While at the hospital, police say Pater stated she felt like a “piece of s—” because people say “you’re not supposed to sleep with your kid.” She also reiterated that she didn’t suffocate the infant because “she wakes up at every move he makes.”
Inside Pater’s apartment, police securing the scene said they found a “loaded syringe” with what was later confirmed to be methamphetamine. In a subsequent search, investigators recovered three needles, a digital scale, a “meth pipe on the bed near a baby bottle,” and about a gram of methamphetamine.
“The bottle nipple tested positive for methamphetamine,” the affidavit states. “It was also learned that the victim had presumptively tested positive for narcotics.”
Pater initially told police that her drug use was “non-existent” since one week into her pregnancy and she had no idea how her son tested positive for methamphetamine. However, in a follow-up interview police say that she admitted she had recently relapsed.
“The defendant started to become upset and cry and stated that she was not being honest. The defendant stated that she was scared and she found some ‘s—‘ in her apartment the other night and relapsed. She said that she had been doing really good until she found that,” the affidavit states.
Pater then went on to admit that she’d been using meth “daily” for about three weeks and apologized for lying to police. A urine analysis for Pater later came back positive for both amphetamine and methamphetamine.
The victim succumbed to his injuries on Dec. 17 and was pronounced dead. An autopsy determined that his cause of death “was asphyxia due to overlay while co-sleeping with an adult.” It was “unclear” if the meth in the infant’s system contributed to his death.
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