By Latrishka Thomas
May 5 is the new date set for an 18-year-old mother to answer to the charge of failing to provide care and protection to a child, after a video surfaced last year of her two-year-old toddler smoking.
In late October 2020, a minor was seen apparently smoking a ‘spliff’ in the widely circulated video.
The girl is seen holding a lit joint in her hands and coughing from smoking what appeared to be marijuana.
A woman who seems to be recording the video is heard asking the child “wa you a do dey?” and laughing.
The mother of the child was subsequently charged and she made her first appearance in the St John’s Magistrates’ Court in November 2020, where Chief Magistrate Joanne Walsh asked the mother grandmother about the whereabouts of the child.
The teen said that two women took the child from school without her permission.
The godmother of the child, however, reported that the defendant asked her to collect the child from school.
The teenager denied those claims and the grandmother told the court that she was completely unaware of the child’s whereabouts.
Upon been given no clear statement as to the whereabouts of the child, the magistrate ordered social services to remove the child from their care.
Both the mother and grandmother were observed in tears after the magistrate made the order.
The young mother was then ordered to return to court in February but the matter was pushed back once more until yesterday’s date.
When the case was called the, girl’s lawyer Peter-Semaj McKnight requested that the charges not be read to his client since he had only been recently retained as her attorney.
He said that he requires disclosure from the prosecution in order to properly brief his client before she enters a plea on the next occasion.