The California woman who fatally stabbed her boyfriend 108 times while in a cannabis-induced psychosis is appealing her conviction, arguing that her dead lover tricked her into consuming an extraordinary amount of the drug before she killed him, according to a report.
Bryn Spejcher, 33, was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter by a jury in the death of her boyfriend Chad O’Melia, whom she stabbed in an apartment in Thousand Oaks, California in May 2018.
In January she made national headlines after a judge gave her a slap on the wrist for the gruesome crime — two years probation and 100 hours of community service — after he found she was so out of her mind on marijuana at the time she “had no control over her actions.”
In her first interview since the controversial sentencing, Spejcher told The Daily Mail that she plans to appeal her conviction on the grounds that her intoxication was “involuntary” and the result of O’Melia’s “fraud and trickery.”
Spejcher claims that O’Melia, 26, had a temper and could be physically aggressive, noting that on two occasions O’Melia “put his hands on me during an intimate moment” without her consent.
“I felt intimidated by him,” she told the outlet. “If something felt personal to him, even if it really wasn’t, he’d have this short fuse.”
She was so scared of his “temper outbursts and uncontrollable emotions” that she “feared the consequences” of refusing to smoke marijuana with him when he asked her to the night of his death.
The former UCLA audiologist was 27 when she met O’Melia — whom she said she never labeled officially as her “boyfriend” — at a dog park.
Just two days before his death, Spechjer said she had made it clear she “’was not interested in any sort of romantic relationship.” She decided to remain close to him because she had just moved to the area.
Before meeting O’Melia, she says she only used marijuana about 10 times in her life. O’Melia, meanwhile, smoked every day, even in the mornings, she says.
During the trial, O’Melia’s roommate, Vinicius De Oliveira, or ‘Vinnie’, testified about O’Melia’s marijuana use.
“When he doesn’t have his weed, he can be mad that he doesn’t have what he likes,” he told the court, according to video testimony reviewed by the Daily Mail.
Spejcher recalled that the night of the stabbing, she and O’Melia had been laughing and hanging out on his balcony. Around 1 a.m. he took a bong hit and became very high, she said.
Spejcher asked him for a hit.
“I get asked why I did it a lot,” she says. “When you’re with your friends who have a drink, or are doing some sort of activity, it’s natural to ask if you can do it with them. It was for social reasons. And of course, I regret those decisions.”
After the first hit, she said she wasn’t feeling high. Then O’Melia egged her on to take an “intense” hit of high potency pot, despite her protests.
“He said ‘hurry up. Inhale now… Do it really fast, go go go’,” she told The Daily Mail.
“Yes, I physically inhaled it. So, we’re both accountable. But there’s obviously been more attention to my part [in the attack] versus Chad’s part,” Spejcher added.
Almost immediately after, she experienced a coughing fit and dizziness. She laid down on the couch and asked O’Melia to keep an eye on her, to which he laughed. Then she said she lost all sense of reality.
She got up and, in what she described as like watching a television screen, she walked into the kitchen and saw “two hands” grab several knives. First she saw O’Meila’s dog, Aria.
“Then there was a brown dog in front of me. And the knife in the left hand stabbed that dog. It [the “television screen”] kept moving towards Chad, who was on the other side of the dining table,” she recalled.
“As the vision got closer to him, I saw the knife in my left hand stab his abdomen. And then it just went black,” Spejcher said.
She went on to stab him an unthinkable 108 total times.
Law enforcement found the woman covered in blood, hysterically crying next to her boyfriend’s body, still gripping the knife.
She then stabbed herself repeatedly. O’Melia was pronounced dead at the scene.
Experts for the prosecution and defense both found that the marijuana bong hit given to Spejcher threw the woman into the deadly psychotic episode.