An engineer who caught a colleague poisoning her water bottle with the toxic metal cadmium says that she’s still too unwell to work full time, years after discovering what was making her ill.
The man responsible has now had his felony conviction controversially dismissed by a judge.
Rong Yuan, from Berkeley in California, installed a small camera at her desk that caught her colleague David Xu pouring a substance into her water bottle. Tests identified the presence of the toxic metal.
She and both her parents tested positive for cadmium poisoning.
Xu was charged with premeditated attempted murder in 2019, but the case ended with a plea agreement and a conviction for poisoning. He received two years of probation.
On October 12, a judge granted his request to dismiss the conviction despite objections from prosecutors.
The process is commonly called ‘expungement’, although California court guidance makes clear that it doesn’t erase or seal the criminal record.
‘I don’t think he deserves a second chance,’ Yuan told ABC7 in a recent interview. ‘A second chance for a lot to hurt other people, to make other people turning into victims.’
Her health problems began in 2017, with symptoms including vomiting and hair loss. She sought answers from doctors for more than two years. Her condition, however, just kept getting worse.
After all those medical appointments, the clue came from her mother noticing an unusual smell from a water bottle. Yuan cleaned it, but the smell remained. She decided to install a camera at her desk.
Faced with a problem that she couldn’t explain, Yuan approached it as an engineer.
She hadn’t expected that her investigation would necessarily catch someone tampering with her drink.
‘It’s a just an engineer’s routine,’ she said. ‘If you have some issue, you think about the root cause.’
The camera answered one question: what exactly was happening to her water. Why her colleague was doing it, however, remains unanswered.
Asked about her reaction to seeing the footage, Yuan said: ‘Shocked. I don’t know why.’
A sample of the water that was taken and analyzed contained cadmium at a shocking 3.5 million times the federal limit. Yuan believes that her parents were exposed because water from the bottle was also used for cooking at home.
She said that she feels guilty about bringing the contaminated water back to her family. Her father died from heart failure last year, and she said that he was part of the reason she decided to speak publicly.
Yuan said that she wanted ‘to tell the public what kind of effect it had on my family and how broken the system is’. She continues to question the decision to dismiss Xu’s conviction.
Looking back at their time working together, she recalled that Xu had discouraged her from working in the laboratory. He had also suggested she pursue other jobs.
Asked what she would want to say to him, Yuan replied: ‘Why do I talk to him? He’s a nobody. He’s a coward.’
‘Poisoning is not something like you suddenly got angry and lose control,’ she added. ‘It’s planned.’
Yuan says that she ingested the chemical for more than a year. She continues to experience health problems that she attributes to the poisoning. She’s able to work now, but only part time.
She said that she asked for $500,000 in restitution. The amount she says she received was just $7,000.