A Texas dad says he was unwittingly drugged while out with his wife, downing her drink just moments after she encountered a “creepy” man at their favorite local bar.
Daniel and Melissa Zuniga’s date night took a dark turn as the couple prepared to leave Rudyard’s, a Houston-area bar they’d frequented for more than two decades.
As Daniel was checking out, a man approached Melissa, who was sitting nearby, and said, “Hi,” the couple told Click2 Houston.
“I looked up at him and said, ‘Hello,’” Melissa recalled. “Then he said, ‘Looks like you’re stuck with me tonight.’ I thought, ‘Whatever.’ It was a little creepy. So I picked up my drink and said, ‘I’m going to call my husband.’”
Oddly surprised by this interaction, Melissa decided she wanted to go home instead of finishing her drink.
Her husband said: “I thought, ‘Well, I didn’t want to waste $8.'”
“So I took the drink and just gulped it down. I took a big gulp.”
As soon as the couple left the bar, Daniel had trouble walking. When they got home, Melissa had to text their daughter Natalia to help her get home, they told the outlet.
“My mom texted me upstairs and said, ‘Can you come help me get your dad out of the car?’” Natalia said. “We had to drag him inside. He was crawling on the floor.”
The mother and daughter said Daniel was unrecognizable, acting violently and swearing as he stumbled around their home.
“We thought he was just very drunk because we had never seen him like that,” Natalia said.
When Daniel woke up the next day, he remembered nothing. An over-the-counter drug test later confirmed he had been drugged, or had ingested a so-called date rape drug, a substance designed to render a person unable to repel a sexual advance, the family said.
“It wasn’t even for me,” he said. “He wanted to hurt my wife, and that’s even more infuriating.”
The family has since filed a complaint with the Houston Police Department and is working with the bar owner to try to find the person responsible.
Security footage taken inside the bar showed the man Melissa had spoken to walking behind her husband.
“You just have to be careful,” Daniel said.
