Toddler is served wine instead of apple juice at California restaurant, ends up in emergency room with .12 BAC
When wine was accidentally served to a 2-year-old girl at a California restaurant instead of apple juice, a terrifying incident occurred.
According to KSBW 8, the toddler’s parents, Noemi Valencia and her partner, noticed their daughter was acting strangely while they were eating at Fujiyama Japanese Restaurant in Salinas.
The young girl was wobbly, slurring her words, and having trouble staying balanced. Valencia looked into the girl’s juice cup, startled to see a brownish-red liquid with a strong alcohol odor.
“She was swaying, she was falling over, she was leaning on walls, she couldn’t hold her head up, she was slurring her words,” Valencia described her intoxicated toddler.
The parents were horrified to discover the toddler’s blood alcohol content when they hurried her to the emergency room.12. The legal driving limit for adults is almost twice as high as this concerning reading.
The manager of the restaurant subsequently acknowledged that the child had been given house-made cooking wine by a server, which had been mistakenly labeled as apple juice.
Due to the incident, Valencia is advising other parents to exercise caution and taste their children’s food and beverages before giving them a go, “take proper precautions on how you store things and label things properly so that this doesn’t happen to anybody else,” she quipped.
She has further demanded that Fujiyama enforce stronger labeling guidelines and storage protocols in order to avert similar mishaps in the future.
Since then, the 2-year-old has recovered, and the California Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control is looking into the incident along with local law enforcement.
