The stripper mother of an Ohio boy photographed in the back of an SUV with two adults passed out in the front from apparent heroin overdoses admitted she smoked crack cocaine and said she “bawled for four days straight” when she saw the horrifying image, according to a report.
“I want my boy back!” 25-year-old Reva McCullough told the Daily Mail in an exclusive interview.
Her reaction to the child neglect that drew condemnation across the country came as the 4-year-old has found a new home with his great-aunt and great-uncle in South Carolina, Columbiana County Court Administrator Dane Walton told NBC News.
His grandmother, Rhonda Pasek, 50, who was in the front passenger seat, had been granted custody of the boy only six weeks before she and her boyfriend, 47-year-old James Lee Acord, were arrested Sept. 7 in East Liverpool.
The Daily Mail tracked McCullough down at Tiffany’s Dolls, a jiggle joint in the Youngstown suburb of North Lima, Ohio, where she dances under the stage name Mercedes.
Clad in a G-string and a tiny black dress, the tattooed McCullough described her past drug abuse that led to her losing two of her three sons.
“I don’t take drugs anymore. I haven’t even had a drink all night,” the East Palestine, Ohio, woman told the paper. “Ironically, I have never taken heroin.”
McCullough did admit to having abused crack and marijuana for years.
“I’ve made a lot of bad decisions in my life,” she added. “I just went wild when I was 18.”
In the image that exemplified the scourge of heroin, the boy was seen staring blankly as Pasek sat slumped and unconscious — a bra strap hanging down her arm — as a passed-out Acord sat in the driver’s seat.
Acord told cops he was taking Pasek to a hospital in East Liverpool about 3 p.m. Sept. 7. Off-duty cop Kevin Thompson pulled him over when he saw the vehicle moving erratically.
“The driver eventually went completely unconscious. Rhonda Pasek was completely unconscious and turning blue,” Thompson wrote in his report, the Daily Mail reported.
Pasek is being held on charges of endangering a child and public intoxication. Acord pleaded no contest to operating a vehicle while intoxicated and endangering children. He is serving 360 days in jail.
Amid criticism for posting the image and showing the boy’s face, the East Liverpool Police Department said it wanted to illustrate the dangers of “the poison known as heroin.”
Pasek’s sister, who has custody of the boy’s 3-year-old brother in Delaware, lashed out against the use of the image.
“They could have blurred his face and they didn’t. And now they’re taking him away from my sister. I’m not condoning what Rhonda done, but what they did to her and what they’re doing to her grandson is too much,” the sister, who asked not to be named, told NBC news.
Public safety chief Brian Allen was unapologetic, saying the reaction to the photo has been “90 percent positive, 10 percent negative.”
“As a public official I can’t blur public records and this photo is a public record,” he added.
Brian Macala, an attorney representing the boy’s maternal great-grandparents, told NBC News that the child is now with his great-aunt and great-uncle, Lori and Terry Lane, in Myrtle Beach, SC.
Pasek’s sister said she and Pasek were raising the boys because Pasek’s troubled son, Devon, 25, and his girlfriend couldn’t manage. McCullough has a third boy with a different man.
“It’s the old story,” she said. “No education. No jobs. My sister has fought for two years straight to get this child.”
During a custody battle, Pasek’s 2008 conviction for public intoxication and a 2007 conviction for resisting arrest and disorderly conduct were brought up in court, her sister and Walton said.
“But I didn’t know anything about heroin,” Pasek’s sister said. “I met Acord and he seemed all right. I talked to Rhonda by phone the day she got arrested and she seemed fine.”
The judge who awarded custody of the boy to Pasek on July 25 told The Review, an East Liverpool paper, that “there was never any indication she was involved in drugs.”
“Had I known (Pasek) was unreliable, I certainly wouldn’t have given her the child,” Judge Thomas Baronzzi told The Review.
The boy had been in the custody of his octogenarian great-grandparents, Dick and Barbara McCullough, who asked two years ago that he be transferred to their daughter and son-in-law, Lori and Terry Lane, in South Carolina.
“(T)he conduct of these parents is erratic at best and is certainly unreliable,” Dick and Barbara McCullough wrote, the Daily Mail reported.
But Rhonda Pasek objected and asked that she be given custody because she is “financially, mentally and emotionally” able to look after him.
Baronzzi noted that there was no evidence that either her drinking or her “diagnosed bipolar condition” affected her ability to care for the boy, who was handed over to her on July 25.