HOUSTON – A father and husband was drugged while out drinking with his wife at a Montrose bar.
Daniel and Melissa Zuniga were out at their favorite local watering hole, Rudyard’s, along Waugh Drive in Montrose. It’s a bar the high school sweethearts have been visiting for more than two decades.
“It was supposed to be just a normal night,” Daniel told KPRC 2′s Gage Goulding.
It started out as just that. After drinking, he walked up to the bar to close out their tab while Melissa sat at their table and waited.
“I had my drink right here in front of me,” she said. “And then I grabbed it, stirred it, drank it, set it down.”
While sitting and texting her daughter, a random man walked up and sat down next to her. When she set her drink down on the table, the man said, “Hi.”
“I just looked up at him and said, ‘Hello’,” Melissa said. “Then he told me, ‘It looks like you’re stuck with me tonight.’ I was like, whatever. It kind of was, it was creepy. So, I grabbed my drink and I told him, ‘I’m going to call my husband.’”
What’s even creepier: the man walked right by her husband who was at the bar waiting to close out their tab.
Security camera video obtained by KPRC 2 shows the man, who Melissa pointed out.
But to this point, they thought this was a run-in with a weirdo.
Still, Melissa just wanted to go home and leave that drink behind.
“I was like, ‘Well, I didn’t want to waste $8.’ So, I grabbed the drink, and I just swung it. I took a big swig,” Daniel said.
By the time they walked out of the bar, Daniel was starting to fall apart. By the time they got to their home in the Energy Corridor, Daniel was a mess.
“My mom had texted me upstairs, and she’s like, ‘Can you please come help me get your dad from the car?’” said their daughter, Natalia. “We had to drag him in. He was crawling on the floor.”
Daniel was violent, cussing and unrecognizable.
“We thought he had just been very drunk, because we’d never seen him like this,” Natalia said.
When Daniel woke up, he didn’t remember a thing.
The next day he took an over-the-counter drug test, which lit up like a Christmas tree for drugs he’s never taken before.
The only plausible reason they could come up with is Daniel was roofied. But the drugs weren’t meant for him.
“It wasn’t even for me,” he said. “He wanted to hurt my wife, and that’s even more infuriating.”
The family filed a report with the Houston Police Department. In the meantime, they’ve been working with the owner of Rudyard’s. He wasn’t able to speak on camera, but he wants to help in every way possible.
He told KPRC 2′s Gage Goulding that this kind of person isn’t welcome at their bar.
“This shouldn’t end your life. You just got to be careful,” Daniel said.