(Herald Sun) – A drunken mother who plied her five-year-old son with home-brewed liquor cheered him on as he downed at least four shots in her kitchen, an Australian court heard Wednesday.
Kylie Eastwood, 34, faced a court re-hearing over the 2008 incident on Wednesday after the Crown appealed against her original sentence on the grounds that it was manifestly inadequate.
The mother-of-two from Moe, east of Melbourne, was initially slapped with a five-month jail sentence that was wholly suspended after she pleaded guilty to reckless conduct endangering serious injury and failing to protect a child from harm over the drinking bout.
The boy’s father, whose name has not been released for privacy reasons, told the court that Eastwood had returned home on July 20, 2008, from a friend’s house with a big bottle of homemade grappa. Tests later found that the liquor contained 44 percent ethanol. He said he confiscated the bottle after he caught his son drinking it in the kitchen.
“I walked into the kitchen and saw my son with a shot glass to his lips,” he told the court.
The father said he took the bottle into another room, but he soon heard Eastwood “woo-hooing” in the kitchen and discovered his son drinking more shots. The five-year-old recorded a blood-alcohol reading of 0.09 after he was taken to the hospital by an ambulance.
Police estimated he consumed between four and six units of the home brew. Officer Sonia Cummings said she arrived on the scene at Eastwood’s home to find the boy so drunk he was “making grunting noises” and walking into walls.
Eastwood Wednesday pleaded not guilty to the charges. Her lawyer, John Verhoeven, argued she had not intended to cause physical harm to her son by allowing him to have some grappa.
A tape recording of Eastwood’s initial police interview in January 2009 revealed she told investigators her son “loved a drink.”
“He likes his alcohol and asked me for a drink, and I told him, ‘Well OK, just one’,” Eastwood said.
“At the time I didn’t see the severity of it but I tell you what, the next morning I did.”
