Teen Dies Of Alcohol Poisoning After Parents Try To Teach Him A Very Bad Lesson About Drinking

Most likely none of us want our kids to start smoking, or drinking before they are old enough, but keeping a teenager from doing either of those things is pretty difficult. When it comes to smoking, there’s a famous and folksy old “tough love” punishment where parents who catch their kids smoking force the kid to finish smoking the whole pack, in the hopes that the kid will feel terribly sick and associate smoking with awful nausea and will never want to smoke again. That doesn’t exactly sound like a great idea, but some parents try it anyway. When it comes to alcohol, however, that is a wildly inappropriate and dangerous thing to do, and now one set of parents is facing charges after their teenage son died of alcohol poisoning after they tried to “teach him a lesson.”
According to Yahoo Parenting, 16-year-old Kendal Balls died of alcohol poisoning in early July after drinking with his stepfather. Balls’ mother, Paulette Richardson, says they gave Kendal a few shots of Fireball whiskey and a few shots of Jack Daniels over the course of about two hours, and that they were hoping he would get a bad hangover that would “teach him a lesson” about alcohol and inspire him to stay away from it. The Richardsons say Balls’ biological father is an alcoholic and they were worried that he would take after him and were just trying to help. But however much alcohol Balls consumed was enough to kill him.

Balls’ stepfather, Joseph Richardson, says Balls went to bed around 10:30 p.m., and he went to check on him at 3:45 a.m. and found him unresponsive. The Richardsons called 911, but their son died, and a coroner’s report found that his blood alcohol level was 0.587, which is more than seven times the legal limit for an adult in Wyoming.

This is a tragic, awful story and a terrible, irresponsible act of idiocy on the part of the parents. Everyone knows that too much alcohol can kill a person, and a bad hangover never stopped anyone from drinking anyway.

The Richardsons have been arrested and charged with involuntary manslaughter for the death of their son. They face up to 20 years in prison if convicted.