North Carolina woman accused of poisoning fiance's soft drink with eye drops to make him sick so she could take their 6-month-old daughter away
A North Carolina woman has been arrested after her fiancé found her putting eye drops in his soda. The woman, identified as Jaymee Lynn Cruz, is a resident of Salisbury and was arrested by cops on Saturday, June 22. Rowan County Sheriff's Office said she was arrested on felony charges of distributing noxious or deleterious food. Cruz is said to have looked to movies and films for inspiration and when she watched the 'Wedding Crashers' movie, the idea struck.
In the 2005 film, Vince Vaughn's Jeremy Grey manipulates Owen Wilson's character John Beckwith to spike Sack Lodge's drink, played by Bradley Cooper. He puts eye drops in the drink that makes Lodge fall very ill, although the characters mean it as a prank in the film and not with the intention to kill. Like the film, Cruz told the police that she only wanted her fiancé to fall ill. She claimed that she wanted to take their six-month-old daughter away from him without any interference, according to reports.
When the fiancé saw her spiking his drink, he and the child hid in the washroom and dialed 911, authorities said. She is also said to have behaved strangely at the time. "She said she wanted to talk to me, we’re talking… She says, 'Does your stomach hurt?' I said, 'No, my stomach's not bad, it's been hurting a little bit'," he told dispatchers. "Well, she comes walking back into my room. When I walk in there, she's pouring stuff into my drink."
When he asked her about her actions, she said that she was trying to make him sick. "Oh, I’m trying to give you diarrhea," she reportedly said. "She said, 'I was trying to make you get diarrhea so I could incapacitate you'," he said on the call.
When the police arrived, Cruz first denied the allegations and later admitted to poisoning him when the cop, as well as her fiancé, confronted her. The fiancé doesn't want her to be near the child and asked her to leave. He told the police, "I want her out of my place. That's not sane behavior."
This is not the first time that eye drops have been used as a poison. A South Carolina woman named Lana Clayton was charged with murder after she allegedly poisoned her husband by putting eye drops in his drinking water, for several days, in September 2018.