Katie Ripstra, Texas nurse arrested after poisoning daughter with ‘salt’
A Houston-area pediatric nurse was arrested for feeding her own daughter such a dangerous amount of salt that the child had to be hospitalized. She is now facing two counts of injury to a child/serious bodily injury.
Harris County sheriff’s spokesman Alan Bernstein said Katie Alice Ripstra, 31, is facing the charges after her daughter, 4, was hospitalized with excessive amounts of salt in her body. The child is suffering a brain injury from the overdose fed to her by Ripstra.
New reports confirm that Ripstra was released on bond and the child is recovering well, but is no longer in the mother’s custody.
Bernstein says Ripstra took the child last year on four separate occasions for treatment at the hospital where Ripstra worked.
He says the woman’s motives are not clear.
In 2010, a Tennessee woman, Amber Brewington, was sentenced after admitting to injecting salt water into her infant son’s feeding tube.
Brewington originally said she was trying to spare her son from suffering but was then thought to have Münchausen syndrome by proxy, a psychiatric disorder in which caregivers cause or exaggerate illnesses in those under their care, usually for attention.