Housekeeper jailed for spiking baby’s milk with medicine that causes drowsiness

Prosecutors said she did it to avoid having to tend to the child during the night.

A woman in Singapore has been jailed for spiking her employer’s 13-month-old baby with a medicine known to cause drowsiness.

The woman, who worked as a housekeeper, put a tablet of the muscle relaxant Anarex into the child’s milk bottle and fed it to her so that her sleep would go undisturbed.

The incident took place on December 5 of last year, according to local media.

The child’s mother, 33, asked the accused, 32, to feed milk to the infant. The housekeeper then went to a bedroom to retrieve the tablet from a cupboard where she stored her own medication.

She then put the tablet in the child’s bottle and fed the mixture to her. The baby fell asleep around 20 minutes later.

“The accused knew that Anarex was a stupefying substance which would cause drowsiness, as she had consumed Anarex herself on previous occasions,” the Deputy Public Prosecutor (DPP) told the court.

“Earlier that evening, the accused had formed the intention of feeding the victim Anarex so that the victim would sleep through the night and the accused would not need to wake up to tend to her.”

The mother’s niece spotted “something blue and white” inside the bottle when the housekeeper tried to wash it out and alerted her aunt to it.

The 33-year-old asked her housekeeper what the tablet was, and she initially claimed not to know.

“(The mother) tasted the tablet and confronted the accused again,” the DPP said. “The accused then admitted to lacing the victim’s milk with an Anarex tablet (and) apologised.”