Coatesville couple’s recklessness exposed their 8-year-old son to the narcotics that killed him, DA says

A Coatesville couple whose 8-year-old son died of a fentanyl overdose last summer showed “a level of recklessness we rarely see,” Chester County prosecutors said Friday at their preliminary hearing on third-degree murder and related crimes.

Mousa Hawa and Holly Back put their son, Hunter, “to bed in a room with bags of drugs everywhere,” First Assistant District Attorney Erin O’Brien said.

“They created the risk that the stuff they kept in that room could kill their child,” she added. “And they knew that risk because they warned him about it.”

Hawa, 41, and Back, 40, were admitted users of cocaine, heroin and meth, the latter of which Hawa sold for a local biker gang, according to prosecutors. The apartment the two shared with their son on East Lincoln Highway was in “disarray,” according to investigators who testified Friday, with hundreds of baggies of narcotics and paraphernalia strewed about the room where Hunter’s body was found in July 2023.

But their attorneys argued at Friday’s hearing that there was no evidence the two deliberately gave their son those drugs. Nor was it clear how the child had accessed and ingested the drugs, according to Back’s attorney, Brian McCarthy.

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“Holly Back is a mourning mother, not a murderer,” McCarthy said. “This case is a tragedy. There are no winners here, no matter the outcome.”

District Judge Gregory Hines was not swayed and ruled that prosecutors had presented sufficient evidence for the case to proceed to county court on all charges, including aggravated assault, and endangering the welfare of a child.

Hawa had called police to his home on July 26, 2023, just before 2:30 a.m., after Back awakened him in a panic, according to testimony Friday. She had found Hunter “folded like a sandwich,” pinned between the recliner he had fallen asleep on hours earlier and the wall behind it.

When Coatesville Police Officer Jennifer Schreiber arrived at the home, Hawa was performing CPR on his son, who had ashen skin and blue lips. He showed no signs of life, Schreiber said.

Clear signs of drug abuse were found feet from the boy’s body: small glassine bags filled with heroin, cocaine and meth, as well as a scale and a syringe. Doses of Narcan sat unopened on a coffee table.

Hawa became combative with police when they told him to go to the hospital with his son and girlfriend, seeming “more concerned with law enforcement searching his house,” Chester County Det. Sean Dowds wrote in the affidavit of probable cause for his arrest.

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An autopsy later concluded that the boy died of an overdose of fentanyl, morphine and cocaine. Samples of his hair showed he had previously been exposed to those narcotics, according to O’Brien, the prosecutor.

Hawa and Back initially lied about their drug use when interviewed by police, but confessed to being regular users weeks later when confronted with their son’s autopsy report, investigators said Friday.

Hawa told detectives he didn’t believe his son overdosed, saying the amount of the drugs found in his blood was too small to be fatal. He said he and Back had repeatedly warned the child not to touch the drugs in their home, telling him it was their “medicine” and that he could get sick from it.

The two are scheduled to be arraigned in county court later this month.