3-month-old Texas child suffocates after rolling into shopping bag, officials say

"It's a sad way to start Christmas Eve," Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez tweeted.

Deputies responded to the home at 4:30 a.m., KHOU reported. Gonzalez told reporters the child was in the card of its grandmother, and that everyone in the home was asleep, including other children and teenagers. The baby's mother was working a night-shift job at a nearby restaurant, Gonzalez said.

According to the Houston Chronicle, Gonzalez said the grandmother told investigators she laid the baby down for the night on the living room floor and went to sleep around midnight.

Later during the night, Gonzalez said, a young family member moved the child to a mattress on the floor of a bedroom, the Chronicle reported. According to the sheriff, the child wiggled around and fell off the mattress into a plastic shopping bag.

“Even with bedding they can get their nostrils pressed against a sheet or blanket or pillow or in a bag of some kind, and they’re not strong enough to be able to lift themselves or react. The breathing begins to become labored and it can be tragic or deadly, and in this case, it was,” Gonzalez told reporters.

Deputies said around 4 a.m., the grandmother woke up and returned to the living room, KTRK reported. The woman panicked when she could not find the baby and searched the home before finding the child, face down next to the mattress, the television station reported. The baby died at the scene.

“We’ll look closely at the autopsy results eventually, try to corroborate the information and really try to piece together what exactly happened," Gonzalez said. "But what we do know is that a 3-month-old is deceased at this location.”