One of the 12-year-old girls who alleges her friend’s father gave her drug-laced mango smoothies during a sleepover says the unsettling father from Oregon was “testing” the children to see if they were awake as pretended to be asleep.
A probable cause affidavit states that the child frantically texted a family friend, pleading for a ride from the Lake Owego home. She claimed that the friend’s 57-year-old father was forcing her and two other girls to drink smoothies that he had laced with benzodiazepine, a depressant that slows the nervous system.
“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.
The girl added that as the family friend arrived at the house, she got up to grab her belongings and was greeted by her creepy father, Michael Meyden, who “seemed drunk” and stumbled over his words as he heard her go, but he did not try to stop her. Meyden handed himself in at the Clackamas County Jail on Wednesday following the issuance of an indictment by a grand jury charging him with several felonies and misdemeanors related to the sleepover from hell on August 26.
The girl also told police that she had retrieved her shoes from the garage while running, using a “very loud door,” and that she had became “concerned” when one of the other girls didn’t wake up when she slammed the door.
Once the girl was brought home by the family friend, she woke her parents, who made the decision to travel to Meyden’s residence around 3 am to pick up the other two girls.
One of the kids told Lake Oswego Police Detective Nicole Palmeri at the hospital the following day that she was feeling hot, woozy, and clumsy, while another child stated she couldn’t remember what had happened when she “blacked out.”
One of the three girls, whose mother said she usually sleeps lightly, spoke of entering a “thick, deep sleep” that she had never known. When the same girl got home, she couldn’t walk and needed to be helped inside. Before her parents decided to take her to the hospital, she kept asking, “What happened?”
One of the girls “spoke slowly, had heavy eyelids, and walked carefully, using her mother’s help for balance,” according to police observations.
Since his then-wife’s primary language is Japanese, none of the girls or their families had any special relationship with the Meyden family or had visited their house prior to the sleepover, according to the affidavit.