THE SOUND AND SMELL OF POISON
When I was ten, an employee at a Milwaukee brewery dumped fourteen packages of rat poison into an aging barrel in order to get back at the drunk driver who ran over his six-year-old daughter. He had carried it in in a backpack and put his plan into action during lunch when the other employees were out of the room. It’d been his goal the entire time he had worked there – in fact, it’d been the whole reason he’d gotten the job. What the employee didn’t know is that after being acquitted, the man who killed his daughter had reformed, gone to rehab, and had been sober for three years. After the poisoned beer was bottled, packaged, shipped out, and purchased thirty-eight people died. The guilty employee was quickly found out and jailed due to security camera footage; the drunk driver never even heard what happened.
The story would go on to make national news, everyone citing the perpetrator as a scourge upon American consumerism, putting him up there with the man who laced Tylenol with cyanide, and the father who poisoned his children’s Hallowe'en candy.
His trial became a sort of public event – everyone wanted to see the man that had burned their trust. People were reeling. Beer drinkers became suspicious of their breweries, and the FDA put out statistical documents mapping the odds of dying via poisoned beer. Their estimate was one in 12.6 million.
I don’t remember how I felt about the news itself – I may have been too young to really digest what all this had meant for my family, living in
