Introduction

Halloween has always been one of the best days of the year for me and my family. We have enjoyed dressing the kids up in costumes and going door to door to meet the neighbors. This year something happened, however, that has given us a reason to be concerned about future events and to question the sanity of certain members of our community.

The Article Summary: Receiving tainted Halloween candy is no fun.

The Incident

This year was different than previous years. We decided to meet some friends and go trick-or-treating in a different neighborhood. We took some kids through a kid-friendly neighborhood and had a good time (Figure 1).

Figure 1 – Jett (the dragon) and a few of his friends from school.

The actual incident occurred four days after Halloween on Sunday night, as I was watching Tom Brady play against Aaron Rogers for only the second time in their careers.

While sitting on the couch, my son Jett came up to me and handed me two Reece’s peanut butter cups from his Halloween basket. One was one regular size and the other one was one mini-cup. I said thanks to him because he knows that I really like that candy!

About a minute later, I ripped open the big cup and took one bite, and then the second bite. When the second bite happened, I thought one of my teeth had fallen out because I bit into something really hard. This object was so hard and the pain so intense, I thought that one of my upper molars split in half.

After spitting out the candy into my hand, I discovered the culprit. It was a steel BB (shown in the brown cup holder) (Figure 2).

Figure 2 – Take my advice and don’t chew on a steel BB.

Upon close inspection, my wife determined that someone carefully pulled open a seam on the package, inserted the BB, and closed the seam. We could tell this because the three other seams were perfectly formed but the fourth seam (Figure 2) had a crease.

The Aftermath

After thinking about what had happened, I should have realized something was wrong with the candy. The top texture was rough, not like the smooth surface that typically is present on a peanut butter cup.  Since I had not looked at the candy before eating it, however, I didn’t notice this textural difference until it was in my mouth. In fact, when I noticed it, I thought it was just one of the crunchy varieties. However, when I bit down on the BB, I immediately knew that the candy was tainted.

For this reason, we called the sheriff to make a report just in case this event was more than a one-time occurrence. The sheriff came to our house, looked at the evidence, and told us that unless other people reported similar incidents, there would be no report written.

We hope that the person that did this is not in an early experimental stage of tainting candy with the hopes of harming kids. We will have to re-evaluate our Halloween festivities because we now know that this type of thing can happen to us (Figure 3).

Figure 3 – Isn’t Halloween supposed to be safe and fun?

Figure 4 – Thanks to my buddy Philip Riggs, I keep working on my drawing/cartooning skills. I still have a long way to go, but I do enjoy it!