Child Neglect Charges For Three Busted At Walmart With Toddler, Garbage — And Something Else

The arrest on Monday came in the parking lot of a Walmart. That’s where, according to police in Huntington, West Virginia, three people from Kentucky were found sitting in an SUV filled with garbage — and three-year-old toddler.

But there was something else in the vehicle that left police even more shocked that the trio had a child in the car with them — all of the materials needed to produce the dangerous drug, methamphetamine.

In fact, the SUV itself was a rolling meth lab, police said. Crime scene technicians found that the lab was “active.”

Kristyn Porter (pictured, above center) and Subrina Wright (pictured, above right), both of Kentucky and both 27-years-old, were busted at the scene along with another 27-year-old from the state, Daniel Barker, who police said was arrested on a fugitive charge in addition to the litany of other charges facing the sorry trio — charges that include child neglect, exposing a child to methamphetamine, and various charges relating to the manufacture of the drug.

The three suspects admitted to officers that they all used methamphetamine, but amazingly claimed that they had no idea the SUV contained an actual meth lab. They are now being held on $250,000 bond.

Police did not identify the toddler, or how the child is related to any or all of the three adults arrested. The trio was busted after a Walmart store detective reported a suspicious car, a gray Dodge Durango, just hanging around the parking lot.

According to witnesses, the man and two women repeatedly entered the store, shoplifting items that could be used to operate their makeshift meth lab.

Made famous by the popular TV show Breaking Bad, in which a struggling high school chemistry teacher begins producing his own brand of potent methamphetamine, the drug can produce a rush of euphoria when consumed, but is known for its extreme dangers to the health of its regular users.

Not only does the drug cause premature aging and other often horrifying physical damage, prolonged use also destroys the very areas of the brain that it is meant to excite — the pleasure centers.

But what was more relevant for the Virginia case, the act of producing methamphetamine itself is literally playing with fire, dangerous not only to the adults engaged in the illegal manufacture of the drug but to the children who, sadly, are all too often found living in homes that double as meth labs.

Not only are the dangers of hazardous chemical exposure, fire, and explosion ever-present in the makeshift laboratories where the drug is manufactured by — unlike on the hit TV series — people with little if any training or qualification in the handling of hazardous material, but according to a government report, children who live in or around meth labs “are at increased risk for severe neglect and are more likely to be physically and sexually abused by members of their own family and known individuals at the site.”

Police did not say if the neglected child found in the mobile meth lab had been subject to any such physical or sexual abuse, but the toddler was transported to a nearby hospital for observation and decontamination due to methamphetamine exposure.

[Images: Western Regional Jail]