A woman in Indiana has been sentenced to seven years in prison after she injected fecal matter into her cancer-stricken 15-year-old son in an attempt to get him moved to a different part of the hospital.
Tiffany Alberts, 41, of Wolcott, Indiana, was convicted of six counts of aggravated battery and one count of neglect at her trial in September. She was found not guilty on one charge of attempted murder, court records show. In addition to the seven years in jail, Alberts will also have to serve five years of probation once her sentence is completed, Michael Leffler, a spokesperson for the Marion County Prosecutor's Office said.
Alberts was first arrested and charged three years ago in 2016 after she used a syringe to inject fecal matter into her son's IV bag while he was still undergoing treatment for leukemia at Riley Hospital for Children in Indianapolis. She claimed she did it in order to get her son moved from the intensive care unit to another department in the hospital where she believed the treatment would be better, Marion County Superior Court documents state.
Her son had to return to the hospital with several more symptoms including; fever, vomiting, and diarrhea. Doctors ran blood tests and were surprised to find organisms and bacteria normally associated with feces had caused a bacterial infection and sepsis, which they couldn't explain, despite a lengthy medical evaluation.
Doctors began suspecting someone had contaminated Alberts' son's IV lines and hospital staff began monitoring the 15-year-old's room with surveillance cameras, eventually spotting the boy's mother using a syringe to inject something into her son's central line.
Alberts initially told authorities she'd been injecting water to help her son because "the medicine that was given to him burned." She later admitted to doctors that she'd been injecting her son's fecal matter into the IV line that she retrieved from a gift bag on the bathroom sink in his room.
Photo: Marion County Jail