Students become sick after eating school lunch; Mom says hospital confirmed GHB

VOLUSIA COUNTY, Fla. — Channel 9 learned Friday that two students in Volusia County became sick minutes after eating a school lunch, and one mother said test results came back positive for a date-rape drug.

Both victims attend Southwestern Middle School in DeLand and had to be hospitalized following their meal.

Eldric McCoy, 11, started vomiting shortly after eating the school lunch this week. He was taken to Florida Hospital in DeLand. On Friday night he was moved to Florida Hospital in Orlando, where doctors will do more testing.

When his family came to the school to get him, they found him passed out by a bench outside the building, so they called 911.

"He was screaming all night because he was in pain," said McCoy's mother, Dominique Heath. "I didn't know what to do. I didn't want to give him medicine, because I didn't know what was in his system."

Heath said she's worried her son was poisoned with the date-rape drug known as GHB because another student's parent told her that's what happened to her son at the same school last week.

"I asked them to test him for GHB," said Heath. "He was throwing up, headache. It's just, I don't know what to do at this point."

On Thursday, Heath said she talked with the mother of a student who went to the hospital from the school by ambulance last week with similar symptoms.

Heath said they connected through a message board after the other mother posted on Facebook that her son was the first to get sick.

She wrote, "He had no memory, couldnt walk ( when he 1st woke up) .. G.h.b was confirmed at the hospital."

The mother of the first student to get sick said she told the school about it the next day, so WFTV went to school officials to get answers.

Heath said she takes issue with the way the principal at Southwestern has handled the situation.

"If you're the principal, you should know these things," she said. "You should be warning other parents about the first incident and (it) probably wouldn't have happened again."

The district claims the school has not gotten any notification about GHB poisoning. The spokeswoman told WFTV that Southwestern has more monitors at lunchtime and has warned the students to keep close watch over their lunches until the school gets to the bottom of the sicknesses.

"She's (the principal is) following up with the families," said district spokeswoman Nancy Wait. "She's working with the entire community, because, obviously, something like that posted on Facebook has caused a number of parents to become upset, so she is addressing those concerns."

WFTV