"Your date's over, mister" - Democratic Underground

shance

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Thu Mar-22-07 01:56 AM
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"Your date's over, mister"

"Your Dates Over Mister"

Quick-thinking San Francisco waitresses nail man slipping his companion a mickey

It looked for all the world as if the couple on a date -- he was darkly handsome and a little older than the pretty, petite blonde with the Russian accent -- were having a great time together.

"A really great time," their waitress, Karri Cormican, recalled thinking.

So it came as a shock when after the woman left the window-side table to visit the restroom, Cormican saw the man shake a white powder into the Hefeweizen beer he had ordered for his date.

"Did I really see that?" Cormican asked herself. "Why would he do that? It seemed like they were having fun."

(snip)

Or where a guy on a first date, like Joseph Szlamnik, at the time a 43- year-old senior management assistant for the San Francisco Unified School District, would commit a crime. Szlamnik was sentenced last week to a year in jail by Superior Court Judge Anne Bouliane on narcotic charges related to the incident.

(snip)

On the night in question, Cormican, 23, quickly approached the bartender, Hannah Bridgeman-Oxley, 27, and told her what she had seen.

The two women hatched a plan.

Cormican returned to the table and told Szlamnik and his date, whom the court identified only as Tatiana K., then 34, that the woman's beer had come from a fermented keg and that they were going to replace it.

(snip)

After seeing the white powder, Bridgeman-Oxley said she "panicked a little bit. We had to figure out a way to keep her away from this man."

Their chance came when Tatiana went outside to smoke a cigarette.

(snip)

Cormican had to repeat herself several times before Tatiana absorbed what had happened. And then things got even worse.

The bartender rushed outside to tell the two women that while they had been talking, Szlamnik had dropped two pills into the new beer Tatiana had left behind on the table.

"He did it again," she said.

All three women looked through a window and saw Szlamnik trying to wipe up beer that had foamed over the edge of Tatiana's glass and was fizzing as if there were Alka-Seltzer in it.

In fact, as Dr. Lemos would later testify, the pills were alprazolam, commonly sold as Xanax, a central nervous system depressant prescribed to relieve anxiety. "In combination with alcohol," Lemos testified at the preliminary hearing, the two drugs "are encountered frequently in drug-facilitated sexual assaults ... without giving the victim the chance ... to even realize what's going on."

On the sidewalk, Tatiana was sobbing. Bridgeman-Oxley stalked back into the bar with Tatiana following, swiped the foaming glass off the table and looked the stunned Szlamnik in the eye when he began to protest that she had served him a second bad beer.

He said to Tatiana, "Let's go."

"Your date's over, mister," the bartender told him. "She's staying with us."

(snip)

Last Tuesday, Judge Bouliane sentenced Szlamnik, who had no prior criminal history, to one year in jail but suspended six months of that. Szlamnik entered jail voluntarily in January after agreeing to plead guilty to transporting and furnishing a narcotic rather than to a crime directly related to a planned sexual assault. He is due to be released in May.

At the time of his plea, he was terminated by the school district, said a spokesperson.

Cormican had arrived in San Francisco from Fargo, N.D., only six months prior to the incident and still works at Noe's. She shrugs off any attempt to call her a heroine.

"It's just the kind of place where everybody looks out for everybody," she said recently while working behind the bar. "I mean, people look out for me. I hope."

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2007/03/20/MNG0UOOA1I1.DTL