Couple finds out home was a meth lab when unborn baby tests positive, Missouri mom says

The tests for her unborn baby were supposed to routine.

An expectant mother in Jefferson County, Missouri, located just south of St. Louis, went to the doctor and everything was “looking marvelous” for the baby until one of the tests returned positive for meth, Elisha Hessel’s family said on a GoFundMe page.

Hessel said she couldn’t believe it, WAND reported.

“When they called me, I didn’t know what that meant. So, I asked the nurse if that meant like, drugs in general,” Hessel told WAND. “She basically just said ‘yes’ and asked me if I could explain that.”

Hessel couldn’t explain it — at least not at first.

She and her husband Tyler say they’ve never ingested meth, and court records show no history of drug use, according to WAND. They’d been trying to have a baby for three years, the Decatur, Illinois, TV station reported.

Hessel began investigating the new home she’d bought with her husband, according to CBS News. After all, their neighbors had previously made comments about past homeowners.

“Just through normal conversations as we got to know them a little better they said they were so happy to finally have ‘normal’ people move in next door,” Hessel told CBS News.

The Hessels decided to test their home for meth, according to the GoFundMe page.

“To their horror, their home, which they had recently purchased together, tested positive for unsafe levels of methamphetamines,” a family member wrote on the page.

According to a police report from 2013, cops found a burned barrel filled with allergy pill boxes, drain cleaner, camp fuel bottles and other supplies used to produce meth in the backyard of the home after receiving a tip that a meth lab was operating there, KSDK reported.

The home was on a list of the county’s meth lab seizures from the same year, KSDK reported.

State law requires homebuyers be notified if a home was previously a meth lab, CBS News reported. Jefferson County has extra rules that sayhomes that have been seized for meth production must be tested and cleaned up, according to WAND.

“When you look at the numbers, Jefferson County led the St Louis region, the state and the nation in meth lab seizures,” Jefferson County undersheriff Timothy Whitney told KSDK. “We could have looked the other way, but as an agency, we decided to go headlong at the problem.”

However, Jefferson County doesn’t have record of the home being tested for contamination, and it became the property of a bank, another buyer and then the Hessels, KSDK reported.

The Hessels said they didn’t know about the meth lab when purchasing the home.

“After countless visits to the lawyer and conversations with the bank, county, and insurance company, Tyler and Elisha were unable to receive answers as to why their home was sold before it was remediated and never disclosed,” according to the GoFundMe page.

According to the page, the couple had a choice: leave the home or clean it up by “stripping the house down to the studs and rebuilding” at a cost of $100,000. They decided to move in with Elisha’s mom for now, WAND reported.

As for the baby due in January, Hessel says the tests are now clean and “right on track,” CBS News reported.

“Everybody wants to have their own home when they bring their baby home,” Hessel told KSDK. “A lot of it’s the disappointment and being upset over it, but I have definitely been angry over it as well.”

This story was originally published September 23, 2019 at 4:13 PM with the headline "Couple finds out home was a meth lab when unborn baby tests positive, Missouri mom says."