A heavy drinking session involving three teenagers from Taoyuan County allegedly led to a first-grade junior-high school student lapsing into a coma after drinking nearly a whole bottle of liquor.
Two young men have been charged with coercion and causing serious bodily harm due to negligence.
The student, surnamed Chao (趙), was diagnosed with alcohol intoxication-induced coma and respiratory failure with suspected aspiration pneumonia.
She only scored three on the Glasgow Coma Scale (GCS).
A preliminary police investigation showed the drinking session occurred some time after 8pm on Feb. 22, when a male high-school dropout, surnamed Chiu (邱), and a male third-grade junior-high school student, surnamed Tsai (蔡), who lived in Chao’s neighborhood visited Chao at her home.
Police said that Chao was drinking beer alone when Chiu and Tsai visited. They accompanied her in drinking a 700ml bottle of beer.
Chiu then asked Tsai to go to his place and fetch a 600ml bottle of Kaoliang liquor (高梁酒) containing 53 percent alcohol by volume and invited Chao and her younger brother — a third-grade elementary-school student — to continue the party at his place, police said.
The police added that Chao was already walking in an unsteady manner on her way to Chiu’s house.
The three then continued drinking in Chiu’s room, where he took out two shot glasses and persuaded Tsai and Chao to start a drinking contest in which they had to empty their glasses at the same time, the police said.
Chiu, who did not touch a drop of the liquor, persistently urged the pair to drink, the police said, adding that Chao’s brother was in the room and witnessed the drinking.
According to Tsai’s statements, he did not drink much because Chiu poured most of the liquor into Chao’s glass and encouraged her to drink more despite her already being fairly drunk.
Shortly after they finished the bottle of liquor, Chao passed out on the bed, Tsai said, adding that he and Chiu then sent her home to rest.
Having failed to wake his sister, Chao’s brother subsequently called for help from neighbors.
After seeing Chao sweating and her lips turning blue, the neighbors immediately called the police and contacted Chao’s mother, who was working.
Emergency paramedics performed CPR on Chao, who showed no vital signs, before taking her to a nearby hospital.
Test readings for Chao’s blood-alcohol concentration were 483mg/100ml, which represent a breath alcohol level of 2.29mg/L.
According to a doctor who treated Chao, she had consumed too much alcohol for her liver to process, which brought on complications and caused damage to her brain stem.
“While the alcohol Chao consumed might have been out of her system the following day, she has yet to come out of the coma,” the doctor said, adding that as Chao is young, she has a chance of recovery and could still awake from the coma.
Meanwhile, members of Chao’s family cast doubt on Chiu’s and Tsai’s statements, saying that Chao would not have drunk that much without coercion.
Saying Chiu was attracted to Chao, Chao’s family members accused him of harboring bad intentions in inviting the girl over for a drink as he knew that her parents were not home.
The pair denied they had made Chao drink so much, and maintained that she was drinking to get rid of a bad mood.
Despite being present at the scene, Chao’s brother appeared to have suffered extreme shock and could not give a detailed account of what really happened, police said.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching