A DoorDash driver accused of pepper-spraying a customer’s order in Indiana is now facing felony battery and product tampering charges.
Suspect Kourtney Stevenson, 29, was arrested in western Kentucky Friday, accused of purposely contaminating an order she delivered near Evansville, Indiana, on Sunday with pepper spray, the Vanderburgh County Sheriff’s Office in southern Indiana said.
Victim Mark Cardin told WFIE-TV that, after getting Arby’s delivered just after midnight on Sunday morning, “I noticed my wife had started eating, and she started choking and gasping, and after she had a couple bites of her food, she actually threw up. I had a look at the bag and seen that there was some kind of spray or something. The bag had been tampered with. So I pulled up my doorbell camera and seen that the lady who dropped the food off had actually tampered with it on purpose for some reason.”
Doorbell camera footage appeared to show the driver spraying something toward the bag from an aerosol container on her keychain. The Indiana sheriff’s office cross-checked DoorDash records, figured out the delivery driver was Ms. Stevenson and called her.
After she initially agreed to a later in-person interview, Ms. Stevenson, a resident of Paducah, Kentucky, told detectives she did DoorDash while visiting her father in Evansville, about 95 miles to the northeast, and that she used the spray on a spider, since she is terrified of them.
The Vanderburgh County Sheriff’s Office did not buy the excuse; the overnight temperature on Sunday was 35 degrees Fahrenheit, and Indiana’s outdoor spiders, they said, would not only not be active but would not be able to crawl on exposed surfaces.
Ms. Stevenson later called the Vanderburgh County Sheriff’s Office back and said she was not coming in for the in-person interview, at which point a warrant and affidavit were prepared for her arrest. The McCracken County Sheriff’s Office in western Kentucky then arrested her Friday morning.
Ms. Stevenson is facing charges of two counts of battery resulting in moderate injury and two counts of consumer product tampering, the Vanderburgh County Sheriff’s Office said. Both sets of charges are felonies. She is being held without bond ahead of her extradition to Indiana.
She has also been kicked off the DoorDash platform. The delivery app told NBC News in a statement that “we have absolutely zero tolerance for this type of appalling behavior.”
