Hard Lemonade Debacle

7-year-old boy removed from father and placed in state custody over mistaken order of hard lemondade

Christopher Ratte took his 7-year-old son to a baseball game at Comerica Park. He ordered a lemonade from a vendor and gave it to his boy. Unbeknownst to Ratte (a professor of classical archaeology at the University of Michigan) it was "hard" lemonade, meaning it contained alcohol. When a guard spotted the boy sipping from the bottle, the police were called in, the boy was taken from his father, driven by ambulance to the hospital, and put into foster care.

The 47-year-old academic says he wasn't even aware alcoholic lemonade existed when he and Leo stopped at a concession stand on the way to their seats in Section 114.

"I'd never drunk it, never purchased it, never heard of it," Ratte of Ann Arbor told me sheepishly last week. "And it's certainly not what I expected when I ordered a lemonade for my 7-year-old."

But it wasn't until the top of the ninth inning that a Comerica Park security guard noticed the bottle in young Leo's hand.

"You know this is an alcoholic beverage?" the guard asked the professor.

"You've got to be kidding," Ratte replied. He asked for the bottle, but the security guard snatched it before Ratte could examine the label.

... it would be two days before the state of Michigan allowed Ratte's wife, U-M architecture professor Claire Zimmerman, to take their son home, and nearly a week before Ratte was permitted to move back into his own house.

*****

Ok, the vendor should be hung for not specifying that the "lemonade" contained alcohol in the first place. Secondly, the over reaction on the part of the officialdom was not warranted if the prof was truly unaware of the very existence of hard lemonade - something I doubt, given the bombardment of advertising for it (I am an Archeaologist as well and even I know it exists), but I can believe he had no clue that the lemonade he was getting for his son was just such a lemonade ... the thought of an alcohol laced lemonade would not have crossed his mind when getting a 'soda' for his child.

However, if he deliberately got a alcoholic drink for his 7-year-old son ... let me know where the you want the hole dug to bury him in - alive!