A Perth café owner has been found guilty of selling weed brownies to a young family after a catastrophic mix up.
Yesterday, a Magistrate at Perth’s Magistrates Court found Bada Bing café owner Nathan Sharp guilty of selling marijuana-laced brownies to Sharon Hoysted, her five-year-old daughter and three-year-old son.
The family visited the cafe in 2018 and ordered two brownies that everyone ate except Hoysted’s husband, according to the ABC. Not long after the family arrived home from the café, the family’s five-year-old daughter reported feeling unwell. The three affected family members were then taken to hospital, with Hoysted describing the ordeal as “the most terrifying experience” of her life.
Tests were conducted in hospital, and all three were found with THC in their system. The mother of two recalls the “the bloodcurdling scream” that came from her daughter after consuming the brownie. Hoysted also started hallucinating and thought her children were going to be taken away.
“I thought they were going to take me away and I was never going to see my kids again because I knew what was happening to me, and I wasn’t able to control it, and I knew I couldn’t stop it from happening again,” she told the court earlier this year.
Sharp denied selling the brownies to the family and said he made cannabis brownies five months earlier for a family holiday to Rottnest Island, but had thrown them out. However, However, police officers allege that Sharp told them he must have mixed weed brownies in amongst regular ones. The café owner later denied saying that in sworn testimony.
Magistrate Lynette Dias found that Sharp was not a credible witness, and that his story about throwing them out after a family holiday was “far-fetched and fanciful.”
The case was found to be an isolated incident with Prosecutor Peter Gillet stating that what happened was simply “due to stupidity.”
Sharp was fined $15,000 and ordered to pay $25,000 in court costs. Dias also granted him a spent conviction order which means he won’t have a criminal record.
