INDIANAPOLIS -- A woman accused of injecting fecal matter into her son's IV will now face an additional charge of attempted murder, according to new court documents filed Friday in Marion County.
Tiffany Alberts, 41, was charged last month with multiple counts of aggravated battery and neglect of a dependent for allegedly injecting feces into her son's IV while the 15-year-old was receiving treatment for leukemia at Riley Hospital for Children.
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Hospital staff first became concerned something was wrong when the teen developed multiple infections they couldn't explain.
Hospital staff then moved the boy to a room where they could keep him under video surveillance. That same day, Alberts was caught on video injecting a substance into the boy’s IV multiple times.
Alberts was taken in for questioning she initially told police that she had been injecting water into her son’s IV line to “flush it” because she claimed the medicine that they were giving him burned.
She later admitted to police that she had actually been injecting the boy’s IV with his own fecal matter, and that she had done this multiple times since November 13.
During the period Alberts was allegedly injecting feces into her son's IV, the teen went into septic shock multiple times – once so severely that he had to be placed on a ventilator. He also required multiple surgeries.
Doctors said the boy's chemotherapy treatment was placed on hold for 55 days due to the persistent infections.
"This places him at a high risk of relapse of his leukemia and decreases his chance of survival significantly," doctors told investigators. "However, if he had received any chemotherapy while he had bacteria in his blood, he would have died."
His treatment team also told police the delay in chemotherapy may have caused him to miss his best window to keep his leukemia in remission.
"Most concerning is that we may have missed our best window to keep [his] leukemia in remission," one doctor wrote in a probable cause affidavit. "[He] could have died from any of the episodes of septic shock and may well from his leukemia due to the prolonged delay in therapy."
A pretrial conference was scheduled for Alberts for January 17 in Marion County Superior Court. No trial date has yet been set.
