Law enforcement officials alerted the public to check the tops of commercially sold bottles of water for tampering because someone is injecting poison into them.
In March 2018, we began receiving inquiries from readers about an alert spreading on social media saying that several people had died after drinking bottled water purposely injected with poison.
The minute amount of information provided was vague and unsourced.
A few people have already died in the Richmond area.. the Sheriff just made the announcement.
The Richmond, California Police Department told us they were unaware of any such incidents; the Richmond, Virginia Sheriff’s Office has yet to get back to us.
In any case, we found no press reports of water bottle tampering or poisoning in either location, much less people dying as a result of such activities.
Its timing suggests that the rumor may have started as a riff on a 3 March 2018 Facebook post purporting to offer photographic proof that the caps of nearly all of the bottles of water in a shrink-wrapped package purchased at in Bennington, Vermont had been pierced with a pin, needle, or similar sharp object: A video attached to the above post has since reappeared in messages by other users claiming that the water was purchased elsewhere in the United States (South Carolina, for example).
Possible explanations for the punctured caps include a manufacturing mistake of some kind, tampering prior to the bottles being packaged, or tampering by the purchaser after the package was opened.
She also says the incident was reported to the Walmart store where the water was purchased.
Naturally, if someone is injecting poison into water bottles, someone else must have drunk it and died.