A woman faces felony charges after she was accused of spraying a food order she was delivering to an Indiana home for DoorDash with an unknown aerosol after which two people fell ill, officials said on Friday.
The woman, Kourtney Stevenson, was captured Dec. 7 on the home’s doorbell camera spraying an aerosol from a small can “in the direction of the food” and then leaving, the Vanderburgh County Sheriff’s Office said in a news release.
She was charged with two counts of battery resulting in moderate injury and two counts of consumer product tampering, which are all felonies, according to the release.
The sheriff’s office said that it got a call from one of the two victims reporting that they were both suffering from a “burning sensation in their mouth, nose, throat and stomachs” after eating the food. They said they both had started vomiting.
The authorities identified Ms. Stevenson through DoorDash records, and she was found in Kentucky, where she was arrested on Friday and held pending extradition to Indiana, the sheriff’s office said.
Ms. Stevenson told detectives that she was in Evansville, Ind., visiting her father and that she was working for DoorDash at that time.
She also told them that she sprayed not the food but a spider that she had spotted while making the delivery, adding that she was “terrified of spiders,” the sheriff’s office said.
But it was cold that night, the sheriff’s office said, with temperatures at 35 degrees.
“At that temperature, outdoor spiders in Indiana are not active and would not be capable of crawling on exposed surfaces,” the office said.
One of the victims, Mark Cardin, told NBC News that his wife began to cough and choke after she began eating the food that Ms. Stevenson had delivered. He said it looked like something red had been sprayed on the bag and that prompted him to check the security footage.
Ms. Stevenson was arrested after she canceled an in-person interview with detectives, according to the sheriff’s office.
It was unclear on Saturday if Ms. Stevenson had a lawyer. The Vanderburgh County prosecutor’s office declined to comment on Saturday.
DoorDash said in a statement that it had permanently removed Ms. Stevenson’s access to the platform.
“We have absolutely zero tolerance for this type of appalling behavior,” the company said.
Sheriff Noah Robinson, of Vanderburgh County, said that “residents should be able to trust that the food they order for their families is safe.”
“When someone violates that trust and endangers others, we will respond with urgency and we will pursue charges,” he said.
Aimee Ortiz covers breaking news and other topics.
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