Justice told police that she gave her son Jireh medicine as she put him to bed at night, that he was alive and crying around sunrise, and that she found him silent and cold as she got ready for work that morning. But a medical examiner concluded that Jireh had to have died the night before, closer to the time he was given the methadone, because his supper was undigested and his body too cold for death to have occurred just before medics reached him.
Holohan noted that in a 2015 Bedford County case, Justice was found guilty of endangering some of her other children by driving while intoxicated with them in the car. He suggested that she put Jireh’s time of death later than it actually happened because she knew she had given him methadone, perhaps to keep the child quiet, and wanted to make it less obvious the drug caused the boy’s death.
Whatever happened, Justice showed “gross, wanton, reckless” disregard for her son’s health in exposing him to methadone, the prosecutor said.
“An exhausted mother who made a simple mistake, that’s not what this case is,” Holohan said.
Defense attorney Suzanne Moushegian, of Salem, said that Justice’s anguish had been obvious from the recording of her 911 call in 2021 on through to Tuesday’s hearing. The loss of her son was a greater punishment than any prison sentence,” Moushegian said.
