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A man and a woman in Ohio have been charged with child endangerment after their 8-year-old son reportedly overdosed on heroin last month, according to police.

On Jan. 11, police responded to a report of a child not breathing at a home in Berea, a suburb southwest of Cleveland. There, they found the child unresponsive in the living room and his father doing chest compressions on him, according to a police report obtained by WKYC News.

After an officer found a pulse on the child, the boy was transported to a hospital, the report stated. Officers suspected the parents, Charles Dowdy and Danielle Simko, of narcotics use; drugs and syringes were found on the property, according to the report.

Dowdy told police he and Simko had been in bed with their son when he noticed that the child’s lips were turning blue, the report said.

In audio from a 911 call from the incident, a man’s voice — presumably Dowdy’s — is heard alternately pleading frantically with the dispatcher and shouting at a nearby woman.

“Please hurry,” the man tells the dispatcher, before yelling “Move! Move!” to someone else in the home.

The dispatcher begins to coach the couple on how to perform CPR on the unresponsive boy.

“I think he was sleeping and I think what happened was he rolled over and I don’t think he could breathe,” the man explains to the dispatcher. “I think he was just, like, in the pillow and he suffocated.”

Once at the hospital, staff discovered prescription pills and a small bag of heroin tucked inside the boy’s sock, according to cleveland.com. Dowdy admitted to police that he had used drugs inside the house earlier that day, and both he and Simko were arrested at the hospital, the news site reported.

— The Washington Post

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