A northern California woman has been arrested on suspicion of spiking orange juice bottles with a deadly dose of rubbing alcohol and stocking the bottles at a Starbucks coffee shop, law enforcement officials told Reuters news service on Tuesday.
Ramineh Behbehanian, 50, was arrested at her San Jose home on Monday night and booked into the Santa Clara County Jail on charges of attempted murder and poisoning. Behbehanian is accused of carrying two bottles of tainted juice into a Starbucks in San Jose on Monday and placing them in the display case of a cooler stocked with various beverages before customer saw the woman and alerted the store’s employees, according to Reuters.
When the woman alerted employees Behbehanian allegedly fled, but not before her license plate could be written down, and afterward employees called 911, summoning San Jose police and the San Jose Fire Department, which brought its hazardous materials team cleared out the store, according to a report from the San Jose Mercury News. Hazardous materials technicians took samples of the liquid and ran it through a portable mass spectrometer that confirmed it was isopropyl alcohol, a common household solvent.
The store closed early to aid in the investigation, and all of the bottled drinks in the display case were destroyed, according to a Starbucks, who said all nearby Starbucks stores were directed to check the seals on beverage bottles in their inventory as a precaution, but no evidence of additional tampering was found.
Topics California
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