An eight-year-old boy has died after apparently mistaking his father’s stash of crystal meth for breakfast cereal, according to US police.

Curtis Collman III died at a medical centre in Indiana after eating a massive quantity of methamphetamine left out on a plate by his father, Curtis Collman II.

According to court documents, on the morning of 21 June “the boy told his father he was hungry and his father told him there was no food and returned to sleep”, the Seymour Tribune reports.

The boy then consumed a “staggering” amount of the drug, says the New York Post, a quantity equal to 180 lethal doses.

Police said that the powerful illegal stimulant can have a brownish, lumpy appearance which a child could mistake for cereal.

When 41-year-old Collman got up at around 10am, he noticed his son was “not acting right”, he later told police.

He sought help from a female friend, but when the unidentified woman pleaded with Collman to take his son to hospital, the defandant “allegedly ripped her cell phone away, pointed a gun at her head and screamed ‘I’m not going back to prison’”, the Post reports.

The boy’s grandfather was eventually able to call emergency services, but it was too late to save the younger Collman, who was unresponsive, blue in the face and convulsing. He died at Schneck Medical Center in Seymour later that day.

Collman attempted to evade police after the death, but was taken into custody a few hours later.

The boy’s death is “another heartbreaking loss as a result of methamphetamine in Jackson County”, says local news network WLOX. It reports that one-third of the county’s drug arrests last month were related to meth.

Collman will go on trial on 4 December, charged with causing the death of his son, as well as threatening with a firearm, theft and failure to register as a sex offender. If convicted, he faces up to 50 years in prison.