A Christchurch mother says her son was given laxative-laced sweet treats by a group of teenagers while he was out trick-or-treating for the first time.
The woman said her 11-year-old son was handed some lolly cake by “boys on electric scooters with ski masks on”.
The boy was only out with his friends for half an hour on Tuesday night, and was told he could do the rounds of one block in the suburb of Parkland with his friends.
His mother told Newstalk ZB she dropped him off at 6.30pm and remained in contact with him, until she picked him up from a friend’s house half an hour later.
When he entered the car, she was shocked to hear that he had been offered treats by random boys on the street.
“It was the first time that I’ve actually let them go trick-or-treating,” she explained.
She asked him if he had eaten it, to which he responded “Yeah, I did”.
“I tried to not freak out and tell him that it was a really silly thing to do,” his mother said.
She discovered out of all of his friends, he was the only one who had eaten the lolly cake.
He told his mother that as soon as he ate the cake his throat and mouth “started burning” and his lips “were tingling”.
“He had anaphylaxis last year so he has an EpiPen, but we don’t know what the allergy was,” she explained. “So he really panicked that it was the anaphylaxis again.”
“He was just very, very quiet, he didn’t eat any Halloween candy at all, over the course of the evening, his stomach pain just got really intense and severe.
“I immediately thought, you know, something could have been in that lolly cake.”
She said from 11pm his condition worsened and he began throwing up and running to the toilet.
“After probably an hour of that, he just fell asleep,” she said. “He was so, so tired.”
The mother considered taking him to see an after-hours doctor, however, they had closed at 10pm.
“Then I just sat awake all night while he slept,” she said.
The next morning her teenage daughter told her she had heard from friends that the “teenage boys put laxatives in lolly cake and were handing it out last night”.
“It all kind of clicked into place,” she said.
She admitted she thought it could have been something worse.
