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Mother faces charge in son's bathtub drowning
By LEANORA MINAI, Times Staff Writer ST. PETERSBURG -- Bonnie Hyland put her 17-month-old son in the bathtub, turned on the faucet and left him in water about a foot deep. "He loves the water," Hyland, now 22, used to tell relatives who warned her about the practice. "We do it all the time." While she went to wake up her husband Sept. 25, 2000, Hyland could hear the child turning the faucets on and off, playing with them. But when she returned about 15 minutes later, the tub was full, and her son was floating face down. Had Hyland taken her family's advice, James would be alive today, prosecutors say. The case was labeled a suspicious death and languished for two years while authorities decided whether to prosecute. But on Aug. 2, Hyland was arrested and charged with aggravated manslaughter of a child. Some of her family members will testify against her. Most drowning deaths of children are judged by police and prosecutors to be accidents, not caused by preventable neglect. But Hyland was reckless, prosecutors allege. Her grandmother told her not to leave the child alone in a tub. So did her sister-in-law. So did posters in doctors' offices. "She was basically playing Russian roulette with her kid," said Tim Hessinger, Pinellas-Pasco assistant state attorney. Hyland, being held in the Pinellas County Jail on $25,000 bail, is set for a pretrial hearing Sept. 30. Her husband, Martin D. Hyland III, 21, has not been charged. The Pinellas-Pasco Public Defender's Office, which is representing Hyland, declined to comment on the case. It took two years to charge Hyland because of a misunderstanding between police and prosecutors. Police first gave the case to prosecutors thinking the state attorney's would consider the evidence and come back with a formal decision on whether to charge Hyland. The state attorney's office, however, thought police wanted feedback on how to strengthen the case before it was formally sent to the state. Prosecutors ended up asking police to establish more evidence of Hyland's alleged negligence. "For two years, we've been on a roller coaster, not knowing what was going to happen," said Marlene Hyland, James' grandmother. "This arrest brought some finality." A year after James' death, Bonnie Hyland and her husband had another child, a boy. Her husband's parents, Martin and Marlene Hyland, are caring for the couple's two surviving children, ages 1 and 21/2. "This is more than just the little boy dying," said Martin Hyland, 44, who lives in Treasure Island. "The whole family is a mess. She's in jail, and he's unemployed. I don't know how worse it can get." Bonnie Hyland's grandmother, Elsie Subach, 80, remembers rushing to the emergency room at All Children's Hospital that night. James was on a heart monitor, but Subach wouldn't realize until later that there was no activity. She bent over and kissed the little boy. "Come on sweetheart," she whispered. "Open your eyes, and tell Nanna, "Hi.' " James didn't move. He had been dead three hours. Subach warned Hyland about leaving James alone in the tub. Hyland would do it when she visited Subach. Subach said she tries to put the tragedy out of her mind because the more she thinks about it, the madder she gets. She said she thinks about events that make her smile -- how after she fixed James a hoagie sandwich, he ate the meat, dug out the bread and threw the crust on the floor. Subach and several other family members will testify against Hyland because they witnessed instances when Hyland left James alone in the tub. Hessinger, the prosecutor, said Hyland was charged because she was warned "so many times" about not leaving her child alone in a bathtub. Jurors will have to decide whether Hyland, while not intending to harm her child, showed a reckless disregard for his life. "We're going to be presenting a case on her reckless indifference to her child," Hessinger said. Hyland, who has no previous criminal record, faces 17 to 30 years in prison if convicted. There is a similar case pending in Dade City in Pasco County, involving a swimming pool drowning. In April, Stephanie Armstrong, 31, was charged with child neglect in the death of her 4-year-old daughter, Christina, who slipped out of her house and drowned in a neighborhood pool. The charge was filed because eight neighbors in the Sandalwood Mobile Home Park told investigators they had often seen Christina wandering the neighborhood alone. Like the Hyland case, prosecutors say, it showed blatant neglect. "If you have a mother on the telephone and the kid sneaks away and falls in the pool, that's one thing," Hessinger said. "But if the kid's left alone for an hour and mom's upstairs taking a nap, that's a different scenario."
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