A California woman who stabbed her boyfriend 100 times and killed him before turning the knife on herself and her dog has been given just 100 hours of community service.
Good Samaritan Bryn Spejcher, 32, was given the astonishingly light sentence after psychiatrists ruled the tragedy was ‘100 per cent’ caused by cannabis-induced psychosis, which she suffered after taking two hits from the victim’s hookah .
The judge ruled that Spejcher “experienced a psychotic break with reality” and “had no control over her actions” when she killed Chad O’Melia, then 26, over Memorial Day weekend 2018.
She will spend the 100 hours educating others about marijuana-induced psychosis, but has vowed to spend the rest of her life dispelling the myth that cannabis is harmless.
O’Melia’s family cried as the verdict was read in Ventura Superior Court, with the victim’s father warning that it “gave anyone who smokes marijuana in this state a license to kill.”
Good Samaritan Bryn Spejcher, 32, hides her face as she walks into court today, where she was given just 100 hours of community service
Bryn Spejcher, a Chicago audiologist, underwent emergency surgery after stabbing herself in the face and neck during a marijuana-induced coma
Spejcher, an audiologist originally from Chicago but living in Thousand Oaks, California, was found guilty of manslaughter in December 2023, after a dramatic and heartbreaking trial.
Spejcher, who is partially deaf, described at the time how she had taken a puff from a hookah but “didn’t want to smoke anymore.”
She said she felt “pressured” by O’Melia, who was a regular smoker and with whom she had been dating for a month.
Within minutes of inhaling the powerful cannabis-infused vapor for a second time, Spejcher began “hearing and seeing things that weren’t there,” and believing that she was dead, and that she had to stab O’Melia to bring himself back. to life.
Some of the country’s top forensic psychiatrists concluded that this experience was “100 percent” consistent with previous accounts of cannabis-induced psychosis.
“We know quite conclusively that marijuana can lead to psychiatric illness,” Dr. Timothy Fong, faculty leader of the Cannabis Research Initiative at the University of California, Los Angeles and clinical psychiatrist, told DailyMail.com.
In today’s sentencing, Judge Worley said: ‘The task (of imposing a sentence) is made all the more difficult by the knowledge that the decision will affect good people.’
But he added that he does not believe further incarceration is necessary.
In her closing statement, Spejcher said: “I wish I could go back in time and prevent this tragedy.
‘I wish I had known more about the dangers of marijuana. I wish I had known. I would never, ever have smoked it that night.”
She vowed to dedicate her life to sharing information about marijuana and its harmful effects.
Spejcher reportedly cried during the first half of her three-hour testimony
Caught in the crossfire was Spejcher’s adored husky Arya, who suffered multiple stab wounds but survived, only to be hit by a car and killed months later.
Spejcher trained as an audiologist to help hearing-impaired children like her; she was born partially deaf
On the night in question, the young woman arrived at O’Melia’s Thousand Oaks apartment around 10:30 p.m., after he invited her.
The pair had met about a month earlier at a local dog park and had been dating for a few weeks, court documents show.
An hour and a half after the meeting, the pair went to O’Melia’s patio where he prepared and smoked cannabis from a bong – a device that filters smoke using water, allowing the user to inhale more without coughing.
Chad O’Melia, a trainee accountant, was stabbed 108 times. He is said to be a ‘regular’ cannabis user
Spejcher testified that she asked him for a hit from the hookah. He prepared it for her and she inhaled. All she felt, she told the court, was “burning and coughing.”
About 15 minutes later, when the effects had not yet set in, O’Melia added more cannabis to the device, creating more smoke, and, according to Spejcher, said, “Something like, let’s make this more intense for you… or more fucked up’.
In her testimony, Spejcher claimed that she did not want to smoke anymore, but felt pressured.
“He got up from his seat and turned the bong to my face, brought it to my face and pressured me: ‘Hurry, hurry, you have to inhale,'” she said, according to the Ventura County star’s testimony .
‘It all happened so quickly. I felt like I couldn’t say no and inhaled from the hookah.’
Immediately after the second blow, she began to feel unwell and ran to the bathroom to vomit before lying down on the couch. She then described the onset of a series of disturbing psychiatric symptoms.
Spejcher described seeing and hearing “things that weren’t there,” “feeling like I was a corpse,” and seeing her corpse “from above.”
She saw her hands, with which she grabbed the bread knife that penetrated O’Melia’s stomach, as someone else’s, ‘like in a movie’.
‘…and then it went black’.
That’s when she continued to stab O’Melia, followed by her beloved dog Arya, and then herself in the neck. She only stopped when police arrived on the scene and hit her nine times with a baton.
During the savage attack, Spejcher recalled hearing voices saying things like, “Keep going, don’t stop, you’re almost there, you can do this.”
She claims she can’t remember anything else – until she woke up in hospital several hours later after undergoing surgery to repair catastrophic stab wounds to her face and neck.
Dr. Kris Mohandie, forensic psychiatrist and expert witness, told the jury: ‘(Spejcher’s) behavior is, in my opinion, well documented about psychosis.
“The nature of it, the spontaneous things she said… it was consistent with the delusions and the command hallucinations and voices that she later claimed to hear.”
He added that her use of cannabis caused “delusions and hallucinations” and that she had “lost touch with reality.”
Dr. Mohandie warned against widespread legalization of the psychoactive drug.
‘It’s another drug that people now think is safe because it’s legal and now more people are trying it – (but) it’s more powerful than ever before. And it is problematic,” said Dr. Mohandie, who has previously testified in 80 cases, including some involving marijuana.
Spejcher is said to have only been high a handful of times in her life and claimed she felt “pressured” to take a second hit from the bong on the night of the attack.
“So people say, ‘It’s just marijuana,’ and they try to make it seem like it’s insignificant and how can that happen.
‘Well, that doesn’t really fit my professional experience.
A major review of hospital admissions in Canada in the years since legalization, published in October, shows that cannabis-induced psychosis admissions have increased by 40 percent due to the recent ‘commercialization’ of the drug.
The authors warned of the harm of a “rapid expansion” of the cannabis market.
Other research has shown that smoking cannabis regularly can increase the risk of developing psychosis fivefold.
Studies have long shown that cannabis products containing the powerful THC – the psychoactive chemical in cannabis that gets you ‘high’ – can cause serious mental health problems, such as psychosis and schizophrenia.
Experts believe the substance causes an imbalance in hormones in the brain, including the feel-good chemical dopamine, which causes mental illness.
Although the risks are thought to mainly affect regular users who have been exposed to the drug for years, doctors are increasingly seeing mental health conditions in non-regular use.
This is believed to be due to rising THC levels in marijuana products on sale today – which can be up to ten times the amount naturally found in the plant.
Dr. Kris Mohandie, a forensic psychiatrist and expert witness in the Spejcher trial, warned in his testimony that “people with no history of violence can consume cannabis, even in one session, and then proceed to commit physical violence against themselves and to others’.