VENTURA COUNTY, Calif. (WKRC) – A woman who admitted to stabbing her then boyfriend to death while in a “drug-induced, dissociative fugue-like state” was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter.
32-year-old Bryn Spejcher didn’t contest that she killed 26-year-old Chad O’Melia by using multiple knives.
According to a report, he was cut and pierced 108 times in his condo in the Conejo Valley which is about 40 miles northwest of Los Angeles. The incident happened around 1 a.m. on Memorial Day 2018.
On that same night, Spejcher also stabbed her dog and then tried to take her own life before she was stopped by police.
Originally, she had been charged with murder, but it was dropped to a substantially lesser charge after the state’s expert ruled that she was “acutely psychotic” due to three successive hits of marijuana from a bong. A key point in this ruling was the fact that she had stabbed her beloved pet.
Kris Mohandie, a state-appointed forensic psychologist, said that she appeared “possessed” in the video obtained from police who were present at the scene. The report also said that stabbing “her own beloved dog, without any evidence of animal cruelty tendencies, is highly inconsistent with her love of dogs and underscores her level of impairment.”
Immediately after stabbing her dog, Spejcher began slashing at her own neck with a bread knife, which resulted in her cutting her jugular vein. She continued to cut herself while kneeling over O’Melia as he bled out on the floor.
Police attempted multiple times to shock her with a stun gun but this didn’t stop her. It wasn’t until the 9th hit from a steel baton that she finally stopped.
Despite the rare nature of cannabis causing such an intense psychotic break, both the state and the defense agreed that she was in a severe drug-induced psychosis.
“She had an out-of-body experience,” Ventura County Senior Deputy District Attorney Audry Nafziger said. “She could see her own dead body, and she could hear voices, emergency room doctors doing CPR, her family, other voices, unknown voices.”
According to the prosecutor, the voices that she heard were telling her that she was dead and that the only way to come back to life was by killing O’Melia.
“The more she stabbed him, the more she felt she was bringing herself back to life,” the prosecutor told the jury. “After killing Chad O’Melia, she took the large, serrated bread knife and began to stab herself, over and over.”
O’Melia’s family said the dismissing of the original murder charge was a “shock and ambush” to them.
“You’re supposed to fight for the victim and his family, and I’m sitting there listening to them, and it was a group of people that were out acting purely from either fear of something,” Sean O’Melia, the victim’s father, said. “Maybe it’s politics, publicity, I don’t know.”
It took a jury less than a day of deliberating for them to reach a guilty verdict. Spejcher was convicted on one count of involuntary manslaughter by an unlawful act.
Spejcher has been out on bail since 2018. On Friday, prosecutors asked for her bail to be revoked. The judge denied that request.
She now faces up to four years in prison for the manslaughter charge.