Arkansas mother pleads guilty in 4-year-old's overdose death

Tabatha Bohac
Tabatha Bohac

An Arkansas woman has pleaded guilty to manslaughter in the overdose death of her 4-year-old son in 2014, court records show.

Tabatha Bohac, 27, of Saline County signed the plea Jan. 17. She faces up to 10 years in prison and a fine of as much as $10,000.

According to an arrest warrant, Bryant police arrived in the 3200 block of Ward Drive in Benton on the afternoon of Dec. 16, 2014, to find Bohac’s 4-year-old son being carried to an ambulance.

The child was taken to a Little Rock hospital, where he later died, police said. A detective spoke with Bohac, who said she had put her son down for a nap 30 minutes earlier but then called 911 when she couldn’t wake him.

According to the warrant, Bohac said she believed the child had “suffocated on the pillow” and that he could have gotten into her pills.

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The medical examiner’s office told police that the 4-year-old died from an overdose of Ambien and over-the-counter cough medicine.

According to court documents from an Arkansas Department of Human Services' case against Bohac and her husband, the amount of Ambien in the child’s system “would have been toxic to an adult and, by extension, clearly would have been toxic for a 37-pound 4-year-old.”

Court documents concluded that the child would not have been able to get to and open his mother’s container of Ambien, and so it must have been given to him. The documents stated the child was left unattended after being given the medication.

Bryant police gathered medical records of two other cases in which Bohac's son had been taken to the emergency room for drug-related causes: one when the child had taken Tylenol PM and another after the boy drank liquid nicotine.

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