MONTICELLO, Ky. — Larry Branham held his 20-month-old grandson as the boy's father ran red lights during the frantic late-night drive to the hospital. He didn't know what exactly was wrong with Kayden. But he knew the blond-headed toddler drank something noxious enough to have his 14-year-old mother panicked and crying, and that he had a blister on his chest and was starting to gag.
"I knew something was bad wrong," Branham, 40, said last week in an interview at the Wayne County Detention Center. "I was praying the whole time."
Branham soon learned his grandson had ingested Liquid Fire drain cleaner, which can be used in making methamphetamine.
Someone had left some of the corrosive liquid in a coffee cup after making meth earlier that day at the trailer on a hill a few miles outside Monticello, where Kayden and his parents had been staying.
Kayden had wanted some juice before bed.
While his father went to the kitchen to get some and his mother looked for his pajamas, the toddler grabbed the coffee cup and took a drink. Kayden suffered severe internal burns. He died of respiratory failure less than an hour later, on May 30, 2009.
A judge released records on Kayden and his mother last week to the Herald-Leader, which had sued to get them.
Read the full story at Kentucky.com
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