Police: Drunk babysitter ignored child, crashed car

A New Jersey babysitter has been arrested after allegedly getting drunk Friday afternoon while watching a child, then upending a fire hydrant with her car.

Police said a mother hired 50-year-old Susan Porfido-Gibson through the website care.com to watch her young son at the family's Tom's River home. She left the child in Porfido-Gibson's care around 10 a.m.

The mother returned less than four hours later to find Porfido-Gibson passed out drunk on the floor and her son clothed in a soiled diaper and crying, according to investigators.

Porfido-Gibson awoke and ran out the front door, "stumbling and mumbling unintelligibly," a spokesman for the Tom's River Police Department said in a news release.

Within minutes, a traffic officer responded to a nearby crash in which a 2009 Honda Accord struck a fire hydrant, dislodging it from the ground.

Porfido-Gibson was allegedly behind the wheel of the vehicle, which sustained moderate front-end damage. Police said three empty bottles of alcohol were found in the car.

Porfido-Gibson's blood alcohol level was more than three times the legal limit, according to investigators.

She is charged with endangering the welfare of a child, driving while intoxicated, possessing alcohol in a motor vehicle and multiple other traffic offenses.

Porfido-Gibson, of Bayville, remained incarcerated Saturday at the Ocean County Jail, where she was being held in lieu of $50,000 bail.

A LinkedIn profile purporting to belong to the woman states she also interns as a drug and alcohol abuse counselor at an addiction treatment center in Brick, N.J.