12-year-old detained, accused of trying to poison her mother twice in Boulder County

BOULDER COUNTY, Colo. — A 12-year-old girl was accused Friday of trying to poison her mother two different times after the woman took away the girl’s iPhone.

The Boulder County Sheriff’s Office detained the girl at the Juvenile Center following an investigation that has been going on for a couple of weeks.

Most parents know the struggle that comes with separating their kids from their cell phones. “I have two teenagers that, I think as most teenagers this age, are kind of addicted to their phones.” For Luciana Cordova sometimes the only answer is to take their phones away.

“I have done it on occasion and luckily they have reacted well about it.”

That wasn’t the case for another Boulder County mother last week. The sheriff’s office responded to Boulder Community Hospital after learning a loss of cell phone privileges prompted a 12-year-old girl to go to extremes.

“It’s pretty scary.” Commander Heidi Prentup said the girl’s mother noticed a bleach smell in her smoothie a couple of days earlier. “She thought that her daughter had maybe just cleaned the glass and that there was still bleach left in it. Then she started feeling sick.”

The sickness passed, but she noticed a bleach smell again a few days later coming from a water carafe in her room. “When she smelled the bleach in the carafe she confronted her daughter and her daughter told her that she was trying to kill her for taking her iPhone,” Prentup said.

“It sounds like the situation was probably out of hand before that,” Cordova said.

The sheriff’s office can’t say what led up to the confrontation. But Friday they took the girl into custody at the Boulder County juvenile center on two charges of attempted first degree murder.

“It seems a little bit of an outrageous reaction to having your phone taken away, but I think it’s also reflecting of how our teens and our kids are so dependent on that, that they’d be willing to those extremes,”  Cordova said.