Parents Busted For Tot Smoking Pot

Cops: Seized video shows mom, dad laughing as boy, 3, smokes pipe

MARCH 25--While executing a warrant at the home of a duo suspected of selling narcotics, Connecticut police discovered a Kodak camera with a video on it of the targeted couple's 3-year-old son allegedly attempting to smoke marijuana. According to the below affidavit filed this week in Middletown Superior Court, police went to the residence shared by Kristian Augeri, 23, and Thomas Way, 22, to execute the drug warrant early last month. Prior to showing up, two confidential informants told cops that the pair had "taken pictures of their toddler son smoking marijuana" and the boy "knew how to crush pills and roll dollar bills." During the search a detective discovered a digital camera and when he turned it on to make sure it was a functioning device and not just a hiding place for drugs, a video showing the tot "attempting to light a glass smoking pipe" began to play. Police seized the camera and later obtained another warrant to look more fully at the camera's contents and saw a video of the child, indentified as "JV1," holding a pipe in his left hand, a lighter in his right hand, and attempting to light the bowl while his father is "watching him and laughing." At one point in the video Way tells the child "he's getting spit all over it and takes it out of his mouth to wipe it down" before handing it back to the boy. Augeri, who is working the camera, is also heard in the background laughing. While the kid doesn't get the pipe lit while the camera is running, he does appear to officers "to inhale and then starts coughing." Both parents remain locked up on $150,000 bond charged with felony risk of injury to a child as well as various drug and weapon counts related to the earlier warrant. (3 pages)