Italian woman gets 4 years in jail for spiking coworkers’ coffee with sedatives

A woman in Italy has been sentenced to four years in prison after she took workplace rivalry to the extremes — spiking her colleague’s coffee as job cuts loomed so the coworker would get fired … and not her.

Mariangela Cerrato of Bra, Piedmont, was found guilty of putting sedatives in Alice Bordon’s coffee over a period of several months in 2017 so as to discredit Bordon in front of the company’s bosses.

Bordon toldthe newspaper La Stampa (via the Guardian) she “had always trusted the colleague and was still incredulous that she had tried to ‘eliminate’ her by slipping a tranquilizer into her coffee so that she would feel sleepy and underperform at work.”

Cerrato’s plot began in October 2017 when she bought Bordon a coffee from a nearby bar.

“Usually I would just sip it, but on that day, I drank it all in one gulp,” Bordon told La Stampa. Bordon went back to work and soon lost her balance noting: “Everything was black, I felt like I was floating.”

Bordon was treated for a suspected stroke at a hospital but incidents, including a car crash, kept occurring — always after Cerrato got her coffee. Bordon finally put two and two together after Cerrato took time off for the holidays that year.

“She had taken a few days off and during that time I was fine,” Bordon told the paper. “I thought there might be a link between the coffee and the [health] crises. A neurologist advised me not to drink it for a month, and that’s what I did.”

The next time she accepted a coffee from Cerrato, she got it tested.

“I put the other half in a test tube and tests revealed that it contained 10 times the amount of tranquilizer that is usually advised,” Borden said, who then alerted the police and set a trap for Cerrato.

“With the police involved, we managed to stop her as she was putting the medicine into my cup.”

via: https://nypost.com/2020/10/17/italian-woman-gets-4-years-in-jail-for-spiking-coworkers-coffee/

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