Poisoned
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This episode discusses the death of several children. Please use discretion.
We saw some blood in his stool, and we were also noticing decreased urine output. But the bloody diarrhea was, I mean, that was, as you can imagine, that was alarming.
This is Darren Detweiler. In early 1993, he was living just north of Seattle with his wife and their two children. In late January, their 16-month-old, Riley, got sick and they took him to the hospital.
They started on my V fluids and, you know, just sitting there in that hospital, which strangely was across the street from his daycare center. sitting there with him, holding him on my lap for much of this when he was, you know, with his IV. And there was a sense of, oh, this is going to be fine. We're just going to pump through full of fluids and it'll be fine. But everything escalated so quickly.
Riley wasn't getting any better. The doctors decided that he should be airlifted to Seattle Children's Hospital.
I wanted to go up to the helicopter pad and they wouldn't, you know, our protocols won't allow this, you know, and I could understand that. Believe me, I can understand that. But the craziest thing was that by this time the local news had been notified of this and him being taken on a stretcher on the helicopter pad and loaded onto the helicopter was being covered live on the television. And so his mother and I are still down in his hospital room where the nurses were basically processing us out so we could leave to drive down. It's about an hour and a half drive. down to the Children's Hospital. And we turn around and we're watching this being covered live on the local news. And there's my son. He's under a silver space blanket.
I could see his face. He's dwarfed by this huge teddy bear, but I could see this tuft of hair and I can see his eyes wider than you would ever imagine as he's being loaded onto this helicopter.
Earlier that month, within a span of 24 hours, nine kids had shown up at Seattle Children's Hospital with symptoms just like Riley's.
And one of the primary doctors at Children's Hospital in Seattle, when he saw that there were a number of children that had come in with these symptoms, mainly in their stomach and the throwing up, the diarrhea, the bloody diarrhea, he was immediately alarmed because of the number. And they kept coming.
This is writer Jeff Benedict. The doctor at the hospital got in touch with the state health department and reported that he'd never seen anything like this before. Nine sick kids with E. coli in 24 hours made him worry that there were going to be a lot more. This was on a Tuesday, and by Friday, the number was up to 37. A few of the children had been moved to the ICU. Doctors were trying to figure out what was going on.
One of the things that helped them early was the recognition that the victims who were showing up at the hospital were all children. And that tells you something. And it's like trying to solve a puzzle and you start looking backwards. Okay, where did these children eat? And it didn't take them long to start turning their focus to fast food restaurants in the Pacific Northwest, particularly around the greater Seattle area.
What unusual symptoms did children experience in January 1993?
And step by step, they got to Jack in the Box.
Jack in the Box is one of the oldest fast food chains in the country. 27 of the 37 sick children had eaten there.
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