The murky story behind the woman who stabbed her date to death while high

It was a story straight from Reefer Madness: A young woman smokes weed and stabs her date more than 100 times, killing him, before turning the knife on herself and her beloved dog. Tragic, stranger than fiction and horrifying – the incident captured the headlines for its extreme violence. And, later, it garnered even more attention when the woman in question was sentenced to only two years of probation and 100 hours of community service.

Prosecutors have argued that the horrific crime and resulting lenient sentence could set dangerous new precedents for marijuana and its effects — especially with weed becoming legal in a growing number of states — but the defense claims the circumstances surrounding of what he was smoking and why are not entirely clear.

Last week, Bryn Spejcher, 33, was convicted for the involuntary manslaughter of 26-year-old Chad O'Melia in 2018. She faced about five years after her December conviction, but was instead given only probation and community service by Ventura County California Superior Court Judge David Worley . Experts for both the defense and the prosecution had previously determined that the weed had caused her to slip into a psychotic state, and as a result, prosecutors reduced the murder charge against Spejcher to involuntary manslaughter. However, the conviction came as a shock to many.

“It sets a very dangerous precedent,” said Audry Nafziger, who prosecuted the case for the Ventura County District Attorney's Office. NBC. Adds to Rolling rock: “As the prosecutor in this case and someone who has spent 29 years fighting for justice, the sentence makes a mockery of the criminal justice system. … Of all the cases of involuntary manslaughter I have ever heard of, this is the most heinous and violent.”

O'Melia's family is also upset. “There are people right now in jail just for possession of marijuana. We can't apply our laws based on someone's age, skin color, occupation,” Chad's father, Sean O'Melia said Daily Mail, noting that Spejcher is a young, white woman. “This marijuana is being sold all over Thousand Oaks and you don't see hundreds of dead people everywhere … There is clearly something unique about this girl's chemistry that meant this happened.” (Experts for both the prosecution and the defense found no evidence of mental problems or violent tendencies in an evaluation.)

According to Spejcher's lawyers, however, it's not as simple as preferential treatment or a mental problem. There were factors at play, they say, that converged to make this both a unique case and a kind of warning to those who see marijuana as solely a “chill” drug. “The prosecution made the analogy at trial that our case was the equivalent of a DUI,” says attorney Robert Schwartz. Rolling rock. “That's not what we have here. Breen didn't know what was in the bong. That's the whole point. This case depends on its unique circumstances. And it is not permission, as has been suggested by some in the media, for people to get high [and kill someone].”

Back to the night of O'Melia's death, things started off pretty normal. The two — who had been dating for a few weeks after meeting at a dog park — were hanging out at O'Melia's apartment when Spejcher took two hits from O'Melia's bong. The second blow came after he claimed he felt nothing, and was allegedly under pressure from O'Melia. Spejcher claimed she wasn't that experienced with weed, despite prosecution claim that he “enjoyed getting drunk.” (Speicher refused Rolling rockhis request for comment.)

According to her testimony, after the second hit, Spejcher first felt like she was caught in a time loop and then became convinced she was dead. She then said she felt like she was out of her body, seeing her hands collect two knives as they stabbed both her dog and O'Melia. Then, he said, everything went black. While blacking out, Spejcher began stabbing herself in the neck with a long, serrated bread knife.

O'Melia's roommate, Vinnie Oliviera, called the police, whose cameras caught the tail end of the incident. Police tasered her four times – to which she appeared to be unresponsive – and hit her with a baton nine times to get her to drop the knife. her arm was broken in five places. She was taken to the hospital and, while intubated, answered the authorities' questions by writing down her answers. When asked what happened, her lawyer says, she wrote: “I told him I didn't want any more. He made me take the second hit.”

That statement is the friction between defense and prosecution — and when it went to trial, the jury rejected the idea that he was “unwittingly intoxicated” at the time, since he didn't choose to smoke that second hit. “He got up from his chair and turned the bong in my face, threw it in my face and was going, 'Hurry up, hurry up, you have to inhale,'” Speicher said in her deposition. “Everything happened so quickly. I felt I couldn't say no and inhaled from the bong.” Nafziger rejected this claim, telling the court that Spejcher willingly accepted the hit. In an interview with Rolling rock, adds that Spejcher initially wrote a statement after the incident that said she knowingly took the second hit. She claims that the document was initially withheld from the prosecution.

“The fact that Spejcher arrived at Chad's that evening, she went to his house at 10:30 p.m. and asking him for a bit from MJ confirms the obvious: he wanted to get high,” says Nafziger. Rolling rock. “For anyone involved in the case to continue to espouse the idea that this was involuntary in the face of the evidence, the jury's findings, and it's another failed attempt to blame the victim, which in my view is cruelly untrue.”

However, Spejcher's lawyers claim there were circumstances at play that night that caused her to consent to smoking beyond her control. Also, they say, she was a naive user who could never have guessed that marijuana would have such a strong reaction. First, they claim he was unaware of an incident earlier that night when O'Melia's roommate, Oliveria, was smoking the same bong and began hallucinating that he was dead, shedding his clothes and calling for help. Lawyers argue it was the same weed Spejcher was smoking. Additionally, the product they smoked that night was reportedly ordered from an illegal delivery service and carried a warning that it was for high tolerance users only. Finally, they claim, O'Melia stacked his three-foot bong with several hits of marijuana before handing it to Spejcher, which made it even stronger.

According to her lawyers, authorities tested the bong after the incident, but were only able to determine that it contained THC, not its activity or whether there were other substances in it. Dr. Daniel Buffington, a defense medical expert, says Rolling rock that drug tests are not one hundred percent foolproof and that the weed was purchased from an illegal source and therefore could have been mixed with other substances that may not have come up in the test.

“Even our best national forensic labs will recognize that until they see a chemical structure often enough, it's not within the scope of what that test is looking for,” he says. “So it's still possible that in this case there was something else besides the high power.”

However, he is of the opinion that marijuana is not always as safe as the public believes – a sentiment shared not only by the prosecution but also by forensic psychiatrist Dr. Ziv Cohen. “Marijuana has become so accepted and so many people use it and see it as harmless that people have a hard time accepting that this can actually happen,” he says. Rolling rock. “The data and the research is very, very clear that marijuana is associated with psychosis [and with] developing serious diseases. This does not mean that most people who use marijuana will experience these types of conditions. But when you have very large amounts of people in a population that use marijuana, then you see that a certain percentage of them will probably develop psychosis as a result of using marijuana.”

An oft-cited 2019 study by The Lancet Psychiatry The journal suggested there may be a link between daily marijuana use and psychosis, but NORML associate director Paul Armentano previously said Rolling rock take such studies with a grain of salt, as it's not entirely clear whether people are suffering from psychosis as a result of marijuana or if they are self-medicating with the drug. The study also took place in European cities, where weed was largely illegal at the time and often sold on the illegal market, making its potency suspect.

Regarding Spejcher's sentence, Cohen allows that “there is no precedent that I know of for someone being ordered to do community service for manslaughter.” Meital Manzuri, a lawyer who has worked in the cannabis field for years, also says she has never seen a case like this. “I've never heard of anything so dramatic,” he says Rolling rock. “Psychosis is not extremely unusual, I think what is unusual is a violent response. Who knows what the real conditions are? But as far as the precedent goes, I think there are probably some smart defense attorneys who will reconsider their cases if there's any chance they're going to bring it up.” No one Rolling rock the respondent would be able to say with certainty whether such a crime has occurred in the past.

In the end, however, two families break up. The O'Melias, of course. Chad's mother died a little over a year after her son. She suffered from diabetes and, in grief, stopped taking care of herself, according to Chad's father. And the Spejchers are also, in a sense, mourning the life their daughter is no longer living.

“She spent the last five and a half years of her life in therapy to deal with the post-traumatic stress disorder that she suffered as a result of this,” says Spejcher's other attorney, Michael Goldstein. Rolling rock. “That the O'Melia family lost their son is not lost. He will never forget and he will never live a normal life. This was a tragedy. And, unfortunately, two families were torn apart as a result of that.”