Sure it’s tough when your favorite team jumps out to an 11-15 start when they were considered heavy World Series contenders. But it’s no excuse to give your 7-year old son a Mike’s Hard Lemonade in efforts to numb the pain.
47 year old Tigers fan, Christopher Ratte lost custody of his son for a week because his 7 year old son was caught drinking a bottle of Mikes Hard Lemonade in the stands. Ratte’s son was thirsty towards the end of a game and asked for a bottle of lemonade and Ratte obliged but he unknowingly purchased his son a bottle of “hard lemonade”, not knowing that it contained any alcohol.
“I’d never drunk it, never purchased it, never heard of it,” Ratte of Ann Arbor told [the reporter] sheepishly last week. “And it’s certainly not what I expected when I ordered a lemonade for my 7-year-old.”
A security guard saw the boy drinking it, took the bottle away from the kid, scolded the parent, called the police over and took Ratte in for questioning for an hour while his son was taken to a hospital for observation. The child was then kept from Ratte and his wife for two days in foster care, then once released, it was another week before Ratte could go back to his house and be around his son.
This seemed like an honest mistake, but what’s truly appalling is that the father attempted to get the kid sauced at a Tiger game. At least do it at a Lions game – where people really need to be sauced to enjoy the action.
