An 87-year-old Florida grandmother gave her adult grandson enough sleeping pills to kill him last month because she believed she was dying and he would have no one to take care of him, police said.
Lillian Parks was taken into custody on Friday and charged with 2nd degree murder. She had also taken sleeping pills and spent 12 days hospitalized for treatment and evaluation, the Bradenton Herald reported.
Joel Parks, who reportedly needed adult supervision and care since an accident when he was a child, lived at a group home during the week and with his grandmother on weekends. His sister, Yvonne Parks, had been at the home on the morning of September 22 when she realized her brother was not sleeping in a recliner as she had thought.
“I said, ‘Grams, it doesn’t look like he’s breathing,’” Yvonne Parks told WWSB. “And that’s when she said clear as day, ‘Because he’s not.’ And I said, ‘What do you mean he’s not? Like what are you talking about?’ And she said, ‘Oh, I’m doing us both in, we’re going together.’”
She called 911. When police arrived, they questioned Lillian Parks, who admitted to giving him sleeping pills the day before, but couldn’t say how many she’d given him or how many she had taken herself. Police later found a prescription that had been filled in Lillian Parks’ name on September 17 for 120 sleeping pills. Only two remained.
The grandmother told police she had five months to live and didn’t want her grandson to be alone. “I want him to be with me when I go, so I put him to sleep and, and then I’ll go to sleep, too. I wanted him to go to sleep and now he’s asleep,” she said, according to police documents.
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