Mom put feces into 15-year-old son’s IV during cancer treatment, Indiana jury rules

A mom in Indiana was found guilty of battery and neglect after injecting feces into her son’s IV bag in 2016, reports say.

Tiffany Alberts’ 15-year-old son was undergoing treatment for leukemia when he came down with a number of unexplained infections in November 2016, WXIN reported. Hospital staff told officials the teen went home after his first round of chemotherapy but returned several days later with severe diarrhea, vomiting and fever.

He spent 18 days in the intensive care unit and underwent surgery to change his “central venous line,” WXIN reported.

Doctors said that dealing with the infection caused them to miss the most optimal window in treating the teen’s leukemia, WTHR reported.

The baffling nature of the infection led officials to open an investigation, the news outlet reported. It was discovered on surveillance video that Alberts had been injecting a then-unknown substance into her son’s IV bag.

Initially, Alberts said she was injecting water into the line to flush it out “because the drugs were burning” her son, but eventually admitted to injecting fecal matter into the bag, WTHR reported. Alberts said she wanted to get her son moved to another floor with “better care,” according to the news outlet.

Alberts told officials she’d been collecting her son’s fecal matter and injected it into his IV bag several times, the Indianapolis Star reported.

Initially, Alberts faced an attempted murder charge along with six counts of aggravated battery and one count of neglect of a dependent resulting in serious bodily injury, the newspaper reported. Alberts has since been acquitted of the murder charge but found guilty of the seven other charges.

Alberts is scheduled to be sentenced on Dec. 6, the Star reported.