A Texas woman may have been poisoned after she threw out a napkin that was on her vehicle in a potential kidnapping attempt, KRIV-TV reports.
On Tuesday, Erin Mims was at a restaurant in Houston celebrating her birthday with her husband when she encountered a napkin on the door of her car.
Mims told the television station that she just tossed the napkin away and did not consider it to be a big deal – at first.
“I just threw it out,” Mims told KRIV-TV. “I opened the door with the tips of my fingers. I asked my husband, did you put a napkin in the door? And he said ‘no.’”
After touching the napkin, Mims returned to the restaurant to wash her hands, and that’s when her fingers first started to tingle suddenly and got increasingly worse.
“Maybe five minutes, my whole arm started tingling and feeling numb. I couldn’t breathe,” Mims told KRIV-TV. “I started getting hot flashes, my chest was hurting, my heart was beating really fast.”
Mims went to a local hospital, where all sorts of tests were performed including blood tests, urine tests and a CAT scan. Her vital signs were reportedly unstable.
“The doctor came in, and told me it wasn’t enough in my system to determine what it was, but said it was acute poisoning from an unknown substance,” Mims told KRIV-TV.
The doctor also reportedly said that whatever happened sounded like a possible kidnapping attempt.
The woman filed a report with the Houston Police Department, which has said that Mims’ case is the first the department has heard of such an incident. Mims also shared what happened in a video on social media; commenters have suggested that similar things have happened to them, although these claims have not been substantiated.
Mims was also contacted by someone who said they saw the napkins on multiple vehicles, KPRC-TV reports.
Mark Winter, managing director of the Southeast Houston Poison Center, told KRIV-TV that whatever was on the napkin could have been any of hundreds of poisons.
“The probability is that you would have to have a lot more than just a casual exposure,” Winter told KRIV-TV. “In her video, her symptoms match hundreds of different poisons. It is possible. I’ve learned over my 40 years, that anything is possible when it comes to the human body.”
For Mims, confronting the possibility of being poisoned or kidnapped gave her perspective.
“All I could do was think about my babies. It was the scariest moment of my life,” Mims told KRIV-TV.
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