Killer Who Stabbed Man 108 Times While High Says He Tricked Her

a woman stabbed her friend more than a hundred times and claimed she experienced some kind of psychosis after using marijuana while a jury convicted her of involuntary manslaughter and many have called her punishment community service with no jail time a slap on the wrist but the convicted killer says she wants to still appeal we're taking a closer look at this latest development with clinical and forensic psychologist Dr April Alexander welcome to sidebar presented by law and crime I'm Jesse Weber [Music] okay so we first told you about Brin speter last year and this is when a California District Attorney chose to change her charges from second deegree murder to involuntary manslaughter there's a downgrading of the charge and this is after she stabbed Chad Amelia more than a hundred times stabbed him to death now that change came after testimony from Top forensic psychologists who said that speter ingested this High potency marijuana and this could have caused her to lose control of herself speter recently did an interview with the daily maale explaining her side of the story and we're going to get into that in a minute but here's what happen so we go back to May 24th 2018 speter and her dog a husky named Arya were hanging out at Amelia's condo in Ventura County California and Chad was smoking marijuana from a bong Speer took one hit when she claimed to not feel anything she says that Chad pressured her to take another hit spetra says that after that second hit she started to hallucinate and she felt like she was outside of her body she believed that she was dead or close to it that she needed to kill Chad to save herself so what did she do she took several knives and started stabbing Chad stabbed him 108 times he was found with stab wounds all over his body and then speter turned the knife on her dog and herself and when police got there she was hysterical she was covered in blood she started stabbing herself in the neck police tased her four times to try to get her to drop the knife but they say that she was apparently completely unfazed they ended up hitting her repeatedly with batons to make her drop it her attorney says that she ended up with five broken bones in her arms now one forensic psychologist said that based on the graphic body cam video speter almost appeared to be possessed after the da reduced the charge from second deegree murder to involuntary manslaughter speter went to trial a jury convicted her of manslaughter back in December and then in January of this year the judge gave her an incredibly light sentence 2 years probation and 100 hours of community service that's it our understanding is she faced up to five years in prison but Ventura County Superior Court Judge David Worley said that this killing was senseless but there wasn't the necessary culpability in this case to Warrant a stiffer sentence saying how after speter smoked the marijuana she quote had no control over her actions there was an outcry from the public with some calling this a mockery of the criminal legal system pointing out that there are people who are locked up right now for just possessing marijuana while speter killed someone after getting high Chad's father Shawn especially uh has been quite vocal he told Fox News that the system completely failed his son he Al reportedly said that the judge quote just gave everyone in the state of California who smokes marijuana a license to kill someone he also reportedly told People magazine that Chad was a good kind human being and that he was amazed about how many lives his son touched in his short 26 years so with this I want to bring on clinical and forensic psychologist Dr April Alexander uh doct thank you so much for coming on really appreciate you taking the time first off we haven't had a chance to talk about this what is your overall take on this case what's your reaction one just the tragedy of it all that we're in a double bind here obviously there was a victim who died in a horrendous um murder I'm thinking about over a hundred times in this stabbing um a person that their family described as a good person good friend good son um and so just really tragic in kind of thinking about the victimization um of him and what his family is experiencing and then we have this other issue of a person who Comm committed the stabbing who might have been um not in their right State of Mind during the time that our criminal legal system also tries to protect individuals who weren't in the right mind State at the time of the crime so we've had things in the past like using mental state as uh grounds for mitigation in certain types of crimes so I I think when I heard this case we're just in this double bind situation of wanting to support the rights of victims and their families while also considering and weighing where a person is when they commit this crime yeah absolutely and to Bri a little bit more context on this so she had experts sper had experts testify about what was called a cannabis induced psychosis and that what she did they said was unpredictable it was unforeseeable my understanding is that the type of marijuana uh that she ingested or or inhaled I should say it had a 31.8% THC level um there was even a warning on it that said this was for high tolerance users only now the early assumptions were that Chad might have laced the marijuana with another drug that caused these kind of psychotropic effect but blood test indicated that speter only had cannabis in her system what's your take on that the the effect that this could have on somebody the level of THC in that drug walk me through it I think at surface when people hear this person was using cannabis or marijuana they think oh they're just getting hot when we think of uh marijuana usage uh but with some of these high potency uh types of marijuana uh we don't know the consequences that that might have on a individual person especially for this one it says in the warning label that you need to be careful if you're not a regular user we've also seen some similar cases with things like synthetic marijuana uh which are quite different than maybe the things that we see with medical use or even some of the typical recreational Cannabis that you see on the market Market in states where that's legal um so one of the things that we have to keep in mind is that not all forms of cannabis are going to have the same type of effects on each and every individual so in this case we had Spectre who wasn't a regular user who used this High potency um drug and it had these adverse effects on um her and her well-being hey guys I want to take a quick sidebar from sidebar to talk to you about something look this is a very sad and tragic and disturbing case and it makes you think about how scary the world is and it is there's no way of saying it otherwise it is and one of the scariest things that can happen to you one of the most unpredictable things is if you get hurt if you get injured 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we had to determine were they competent to stand trial um so due to mental illness were they able to understand the court system the proceedings be able to testify in their own defense and for some of them they weren't that at the time that they used this they were still very very much psychotic they weren't competent to St trial and then later if they were ever to become competent uh thinking about how what impact did that have on their offending uh both of them did have some violent assaults um in the cases that I saw um so thinking about was it the drug and did that impact their mental state at the time of the crime and what I mean by that is did they know what they were doing did they know it was wrong were they able to control their behavior so similar with Spectre that the police and tasing didn't even control her behavior so being that out of your mind State at the time is one of the things that we would be looking for in mental state at the time of the crime to be clear it does it's not like she's faking it right that what you would say say is this is somebody who's really having an episode it really seems like it and that's why we uh as we're doing these evaluations have to weigh all the evidence so it's not just her Word of Mouth um so that's one thing we have to be careful of we do want to hear her side of story but uh it looked like the psychologist did weigh the police footage uh and the dash cam and looking at the tasing and not being able to control yourself stabbing your own dog as well so yes this was a new romantic partner but also a dog that she cared about was stabbed and she also harmed herself in a way uh that seemed unusual and by the way again I think you you nailed it on the head that sometimes people have a misconception about what the drug does um you know kind of makes you you know maybe a little bit calm chill but but this psychosis is if you can explain to us the best way you can what does the drug have on the brain does it it removes inhibition it creates a heightened fear level um what are these images or these hallucinations if the best you can explain it to us yeah and it differs from um person to person so it seems like in her case uh hearing voices telling her to do things that she typically wouldn't do in listening to those voices really being in the state that she believe that she had to um comply with these voices in order to alleviate some type of Woe that's what we in other forms of psychosis like schizophrenia like bipolar disorder with psychotic features um so those unique aspects of this case do match up with maybe a substance induced psychosis let's talk about the dynamic uh we briefly touched upon it but let's talk about this because I think it adds some important context including with her appeal because we know that the cas is with the uh District Court of Appeal at least they filed a notice of appeal um so she's appealing the conviction seemingly to get her record clear her attorney says that the conviction was wrong sentence was appropriate spatcher and her lawyers say that Chad tricked her into consuming this High potency marijuana on that night she claims that her intoxication was involuntary that uh as a result of Chad's quote fraud and trickery this happened let's give a little more context to that so at the time this happened Chad was a 26-year-old accountant living in Thousand Oaks speter was 27 years old recently moved to Southern California for a new role in the audiologist department at UCLA the two met at a dog park according to speer's interview with the Daily Mail Chad was often angry intimidating at times he became physically aggressive he had a short fuse interestingly she claims that she never called Chad her boyfriend that they had only been out a few times she told the outlet that she said to Chad she didn't want to pursue anything romantic they remained friends um so what do you make of those statements that she's giving now or that she's giving to the the daily mail um but also if true does that affect the dynamic of how things came into play on that night this is so difficult because we'll never know um again we only have her side of the story we don't have the victim's side of the story in all of this um so this could change some certain factors uh if the decision maker whether it's the judge or the jury does believe that she was coed um into consuming this substance then maybe they might side a bit differently and see uh See this as further mitigation for her actions I mean in your experience um because B essentially means that she felt like she was being bullied into taking this and um I think that's an interesting dynamic because they weren't even in a committed long-term relationship they had gone out a couple times I'm curious again that Dynamic um you know how that might have played into things if we just like you said we just don't know um but have you seen something like that where someone feels forced pure pressure to to to smoke this drug and why they would feel that kind of peer pressure I mean we might relate to that think about college students at the bar um and feeling the pressure to have an additional drink or to engage in um other behaviors in order to impress a friend or impress again a potential romantic partner it's not out of the norm um it's just a matter of again is this a valid statement does this align with uh the behaviors that we saw Chad engaging in the past so uh would other people in his life report things like this um I'd be curious of some of that yeah and look she said she was new to California maybe she wanted to make friends maybe there was that way of feeling now again this is her account okay we have to be clear about that now spatcher uh says that Chad was a daily cannabis user often multiple times a day had a very high tolerance speci Spectra claims that she had only used cannabis a few times in her life was very inexperienced and and the Daily Mail reported that Chad's roommate Vinnie testified that Chad smoked some of the most potent strains of marijuana available and that two months before Chad's death he convinced him to take a hit off of the same bong that speter would later use and he claims that this drug made him so sick he started seeing things he thought he was dying he pleaded to go to the hospital Chad allegedly laughed at it now Spectra gave very similar testimony claiming that when she started to feel the intense reaction to the marijuana she asked Chad to keep an eye on her to make sure she was okay but according to her he just said that she was quote acting High didn't really make anything of it um and she told the daily male that it was as if a camera was recording someone else doing all these horrible horrible things there was no thought there was no emotion there was no pain there was no morality there was nothing I was just literally watching a screen as a zombie um have you heard anybody describe that kind of state like that before some people uh as they experience psychosis uh almost have this out of- Body Experience again not being able to control your thoughts and your feelings not being as yourself um so again uh now we have some additional information from the roommates of feeling some similar types of features from just again the one hit of the bong uh so with that information we're really getting the the severity of this uh High potency uh type of cannabis that was used in this particular case um so again we're having more and more evidence of the potential psychosis that came from it and she also said that the people around me know that I'm remorseful I think that no matter what somebody is going to be dissatisfied with my words my actions my behaviors who thought that THC can lead to psychosis and violence there are no Public Health warnings marijuana has been so normalized if I knew I would never have used it apparently she lost her job as an audiologist she Mo back to her parents home out in Chicago she's been working to raise money to pay the landlord of Chad's condo for the damage that was done during her attack seems like she wants her record clear as well um and she told the Daily Mail I think about that night every day I wish I could go back in time to change everything it will be carried with me for the rest of my life I pray for my family my inner circle of people but more importantly I pray for Chad and his grieving family and friends his life was taken too soon is there a cautionary tale here I think so um I think there's a few different points that come from this case for me you know uh one uh I think we need to think about uh marijuana usage as a whole uh with more States uh making it legal whether it's medically or uh recreationally just thinking that it can have different effects on each and every individual again it's not one typical experience of being high for each and every individual we we still don't know the degree in which marijuana can affect people and especially people in their developing brains um these uh individuals are a little bit older in time in terms of when it happened but if we're thinking about Young Folks uh we still don't know the effects of marijuana on uh the brain in action I think there might be some call for discourse about the high potency marijuana um I think it's interesting that in the last week uh there has been discussions at the federal level with the da about the reclassification of marijuana um as a controlled substance there's some good and bad of that again we had this history of the criminalization of marijuana use that led to some problems including racial inequities but it can also lead to some good because it does open up room for further research um on marijuana usage and its potential effects on individuals so again I think this is a cautionary tale of just really thinking about uh what this looks like for individuals uh and then for our legal system we we we need to think about how we're going to address these rare cases again we want Justice for the victim and their families but also balancing we want to protect individuals when they truly made these lifechanging life-altering mistakes very well said Dr April Alexander thank you so much for coming on uh look forward to having you back to talk about other cases that we're going to be covering hopefully not under the same circumstances but uh thank you so much for coming on and thank you so much all right everybody that's all we have for you right now here on sidebar thank you so much for joining us as always please subscribe on Apple podcast Spotify YouTube wherever you get your podcast I'm Jesse Weber I'll speak to you next time [Music]

Channel: Law&Crime Network

Views: 69,814

Keywords: law and crime, law and crime network, true crime, truecrime, true crime videos, court, trials, law&crime

Id: LCWuEAxok7I

Length: 19min 43sec (1183 seconds)

Published: Fri May 10 2024