Kajuan Arthur Harris, a 29-year-old resident of Wheatfield Drive in Palm Coast, faces a charge of child neglect with great bodily harm, a second-degree felony, following the second hospitalization of his 5-year-old autistic daughter after she ingested a large quantity of marijuana edibles while she was in Harris’s care.
He refused to take the child to the hospital, going to a football game instead and urging the child’s mother to let the child “sleep it off.”
The same child somehow consumed an unknown amount of opioids when she was 10 months old in 2020, “which caused hospitalization, having developmental disabilities making her non-verbal and autistic,” according to the Flagler County Sheriff’s arrest affidavit. (While a direct link between effects from drug use and autism has not been convincingly established, there is a significant link between early or prenatal exposure to drugs and developmental disabilities.)
A Flagler County Sheriff’s deputy was summoned to the Department of Children and Families’ office in Palm Coast the afternoon of Oct. 8, where he learned that the child had been hospitalized at Wolfson’s Children’s Hospital in Jacksonville “hours after consumption.” Harris was at the DCF office.
The mother of the child lives in Jacksonville. She reported the incident to the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office on Oct. 6 after taking the child to the hospital.
Harris had been with his daughter in Palm Coast since Oct. 3. There is no formal custody arrangement between him and the child’s mother. He sees his child when he asks. He told the deputy that on Monday he’d woken up around 10 and was taking his daughter to McDonald’s in Palm Coast. He had a drink, which he placed in a cupholder in the car. His THC gummies (the edibles) were in the cupholder.
He then drove to St. Augustine with his child to see a friend of his (he did not disclose the identity of the friend to the deputy). There, he noticed that his daughter was acting “more playful” than usual, and that she was drowsy. He noticed that his gummies had disappeared and realized his daughter had ingested them.
He said he then took the child to her mother’s house in Jacksonville, dropped her off, and went to the stadium to watch the Jacksonville Jaguars-Kansas City Chiefs football game.
Harris would not tell the deputy at what point he realized that the gummies had vanished, only that he’d stopped for gas–but he wouldn’t say at what gas station, nor would contact his bank to get a record of that transaction so the deputy could establish a timeline. Harris told the deputy he did not contact authorities because he was a fugitive. When the deputy checked a law enforcement database, no warrant turned up for Harris. He refused consent for either DCF or the deputy to look at his phone.
Once DCF had no further questions for him, he was free to go. He left.
The deputy learned from the child’s mother that Harris had told her in a facetime call around 4 p.m. that Monday that their daughter had “gotten into a whole bag of edibles at 0900 hours,” meaning at 9 a.m., and that he’d told her that in a “joking manner.” The mother tried to figure out the amounts ingested and told the deputy she begged Harris to take the child to the hospital, but he refused.
“you need to take her to the hospital bro,” she texted him, “that’s too much THC in her system.. A WHOLE ENTIRE BAG and how many mg a piece.”
“Man she straight man. Nothing wrong wit her, her breathing regular and she still functioning, she just gone sleep it off,” Harris texted back. “happened to my cousin daughter.”
“If I see any signs that’s not normal I’m taking her to the hospital,” the mother texted.
“She good, she gone be back to normal tomorrow,” Harris texted, “it’s nothing like that other shit at all. She can’t die from thc fam.” He texted: “I’m not taking her to the hospital. Aint nun wrong wit her tf.”
The mother pleaded again, to no avail.
“I’m already 15 min away, you take her tf. If u that worried, you take her.. aint nun wrong wit her,” he texted. “Is you retarded that shit happen at 9 am, it’s 4:30.. she would be dead rn.” Harris added: “I really don’t care.. kuz I know ain’t nun wrong wit her. I’m wanted. I can’t take her to the hospital. You gotta take her regardless.”
Harris texted the mother at 5:26 p.m. to hurry outside to claim the child–because he was running out of gas. She said he handed her a duffel bag and the child, whose head was falling back. The child could not stand up, and appeared to have trouble opening her eyes. The mother immediately took the child to Wolfson’s, where the child spent two unconscious nights until she began to act herself again Wednesday afternoon (Oct. 8).
Since this was the second incident of negligence on Harris’s part, the mother told the deputy, she wanted to pursue charges.
Deputies went to the Wheatfield Drive property in Palm Coast, where Harris’s stepfather and mother live. The stepfather was upset that law enforcement was there and asked them to leave, telling them Harris does not live there.
Harris soon pulled up, got out of his car, extended his wrists in the motion signaling surrender (to be handcuffed), and asked why he wasn’t placed under arrest at the DCF office earlier that day. He declined to answer questions without his attorney present, so there were no further questions from law enforcement.
He was charged with the second-degree child neglect charge, which carries a maximum penalty of 15 years in prison if convicted. Harris had three previous minor charges for pot possession, two of them dropped, one of them entailing the withholding of adjudication. He was booked at the Flagler County jail on $25,000 bond, where he remains.
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