A Texas dad says he was unintentionally roofied while out with his wife, whose drink he chugged mere moments after she encountered a “creepy” man at their favorite local dive bar.
Date night for Daniel and Melissa Zuniga took a dark turn as the couple was getting ready to leave Rudyard’s, a Houston-area bar they’d been regulars at for more than two decades.
As Daniel closed out their tab, a man approached Melissa, who was sitting nearby, and said, “Hi,” the couple told Click2 Houston.
“I just looked up at him and said, ‘Hello’,” Melissa recalled. “Then he told me, ‘It looks like you’re stuck with me tonight.’ I was like, whatever. It kind of was, it was creepy. So, I grabbed my drink and I told him, ‘I’m going to call my husband.’ ”
Weirded out by the interaction, Melissa decided she wanted to head home instead of finishing her drink.
Her husband said, “I was like, ‘Well, I didn’t want to waste $8.’
“So, I grabbed the drink, and I just swung it. I took a big swig.”
As soon as the couple left the bar, Daniel was struggling to walk. By the time they got home, Melissa had to text their daughter Natalia to help her get him inside, they told the outlet.
“My mom had texted me upstairs, and she’s like, ‘Can you please come help me get your dad from the car?’” Natalia said. “We had to drag him in. He was crawling on the floor.”
The mother and daughter said Daniel was unrecognizable, acting violently and cussing as he stumbled into their home.
“We thought he had just been very drunk because we’d never seen him like this,” Natalia said.
When Daniel woke up the next day he didn’t remember any of it. An over-the-counter drug test later confirmed he had been roofied, or slipped a so-called date-rape drug, a substance designed to render someone unable to fend off 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 police report with the Houston Police Department and is working with the bar’s owner to try and find the person responsible.
Security footage from inside the bar showed the man Melissa had spoken to walk behind her husband.
“You just got to be careful,” Daniel said.
