A Texas father says he accidentally took the pills while out with his wife, after he gulped down her drink shortly after she encountered a “creepy” man at a local bar they frequented.
Date night for Daniel and Melissa Zuniga took a dark turn as they were leaving Rudyard, a Houston-area bar they’d been regulars at for more than 20 years.
As Daniel finished paying the bill, a man approached Melissa, who was sitting nearby, and said, “Hello.” the couple told Click2 Houston.
“I just looked up at him and said, ‘Hello,'” Melissa recalled. “And he said, ‘I think you should hang out with me tonight.’ And I was like, OK. It was kind of creepy. So I grabbed my drink and I said, ‘I’m going to call my husband.'”
Melissa felt uncomfortable about the exchange and decided to go home instead of finishing her drink.
Her husband said, “I was like, ‘I don’t want to waste $8.’
“So I grabbed my drink and swung it around. I drank it all in one go.”
Once the couple left the bar, Daniel had trouble walking, and by the time they got home, Melissa had to text her daughter Natalia to help her carry Daniel home, the couple told the outlet.
“My mom texted me upstairs and said, ‘Can you help me get my dad out of the car?'” Natalia said. “We had to drag him into the car. He was crawling on the floor.”
According to the mother and daughter, Daniel stumbled into the house, violent and swearing beyond recognition.
“I had never seen him like that before so I thought he was just really drunk,” Natalia said.
Daniel woke up the next day with no memory of anything, and a commercial drug test later confirmed he had been given so-called date rape drugs designed to make it impossible for people to fend off sexual advances, his family said.
“It wasn’t even about me,” he said. “He wanted to hurt my wife, which makes it even more infuriating.”
The family has since filed a report with Houston police and are working with the bar owner to identify the culprit.
Security cameras inside the bar captured the man Melissa had spoken to walking behind her husband.
“You just have to be careful,” Daniel said.
