An Oregon dad has been accused of drugging his daughter’s young friends with smoothies laced with sedatives during a sleepover at his house, then creeped over them as they drifted off to sleep.
One of the three 12-year-old girls texted her mom with a desperate plea for help at 1:45 a.m. as she lost consciousness and begged to be rescued from the home in Lake Oswego, just south of Portland.
“Mom please pick me up and say I had a family emergency. I don’t feel safe. I might not respond but please come get me (crying emoji), Please. Please pick up. Please. PLEASE!!” she wrote, according to police.
Michael Meyden, 57, turned himself in at the Clackamas County Jail on Wednesday after a grand jury issued an indictment accusing him of multiple felonies and misdemeanors stemming from the Aug. 26, 2023, sleepover, Lake Oswego police said.
It has now emerged that one of the 12-year-old girls allegedly fed drug-laced mango smoothies during the sleepover claims the creepy Oregon dad was “doing tests” to see if they were conscious while they pretended to sleep.
The child desperately texted a family friend begging for a ride from the Lake Owego home, saying her friend’s 57-year-old dad was making her feel unsafe after he had coerced her and two other girls into drinking the smoothies he had laced with benzodiazepine — a depressant that slows the nervous system, according to a probable cause affidavit.
“So I’m ‘sleeping,’ and her dad comes down and [I’m] hugging [one of the other girls] because she was scared, and he kept moving us away from each other but kept doing tests to make sure we weren’t awake,” the unidentified girl wrote in a text.
“Also, [the other girl] won’t wake up and she did for like 2 seconds, but she kept her eyes closed and didn’t talk,” the girl added before the family friend agreed to pick her up.
When the family friend arrived at the home, the girl stood to get her things and was met by creepy dad Michael Meyden, who “seemed drunk” and slurred his speech in response to her leaving but did not try to stop her, the girl said.
The girl also told police that she had used a “very loud door” to retrieve her shoes from the garage while fleeing and became “concerned” when one of the other girls didn’t wake up when she slammed the door..
After the girl was brought home by the family friend, she woke her parents, who decided to drive to Meyden’s house at 3 a.m. to retrieve the two other girls, the document says.
At the hospital the next day, one of the girls told Lake Oswego Police Detective Nicole Palmeri she still felt hot, woozy and clumsy, while another child said she couldn’t recall what occurred upon “blacking out.”
One of the three girls, whose mother said she is typically a light sleeper, described falling into a “thick, deep sleep” that she had never experienced before. The same girl was unable to walk upon getting home and had to be carried inside the house, where she repeatedly asked, “What happened” before her parents decided to bring her to the hospital.
Police observed that one of the girls “walked slowly and used the assistance of her mother for balance, her eyelids were heavy, and she spoke slowly.”
None of the girls or their families were particularly close with the Meyden family or had been at their home before the sleepover, which Meyden had arranged because his then-wife’s primary language is Japanese, the affidavit said.
Meyden faces charges including causing another person to ingest a controlled substance and application of a controlled substance to the body of another person.
