A Texas woman is suing a U.S. Marine, alleging he spiked her drink with nearly a dozen abortion pills, killing their unborn child, after she rebuffed his repeated requests to “get rid of it,” according to a wrongful death lawsuit filed in federal court Monday.
Liana Davis alleges Christopher Cooprider secretly dissolved at least 10 abortion pills into a cup of hot chocolate that he prepared for her April 5 and then left the house and stopped responding as she profusely bled, the suit says.
Cooprider, 34, declined to comment Monday.
The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas, contains several purported text messages the pair exchanged for weeks, beginning Jan. 31, when Davis asked Cooprider for his input in case she is confirmed to be pregnant.
Cooprider said he “would like to get rid of it,” the texts show, saying the two were “not in love” or together and that it would be “messed up to bring a child into the world without both parents raising them.”
When Cooprider reiterated his desire for Davis to “get rid of it” after her pregnancy test came back positive days later, she asked him to use a different phrase.
“Every time you say ‘get rid of it’ it’s like an electric shock,” she wrote, according to the lawsuit. “I literally feel like I’m going down the steepest hill on a roller coaster when I read that.”
The following text messages allegedly show Cooprider telling Davis, without her approval, that he would order abortion pills online. The pills were purchased from Aid Access, an online service that ships abortion pills to Americans from abroad, according to the lawsuit.
Aid Access, and Dr. Rebecca Gomperts, a Dutch physician who runs it, are also listed as defendants in the lawsuit. They did not immediately return requests for comment.
For the next several weeks, Cooprider was unable to convince Davis to get an abortion, and the text messages grew more contentious.
On March 6, Cooprider called the baby a “thing” and blamed Davis for her “psycho mentality” that he said caused her ongoing divorce. The lawsuit says Cooprider also threatened to testify against Davis in her divorce proceeding and bid to have custody of her three children.
At the end of March, Cooprider texted that he wanted to “abort this monstrosity of a situation” and said he felt “trapped” by the situation.
But on April 2, Cooprider appeared to change his tone in text messages to Davis. He proposed making them “some warm relaxing tea” in what they could call a “trust building night,” according to screenshots shared in the lawsuit.
Davis, who was eight weeks pregnant, accepted. When the two met up at Davis’ Corpus Christi residence on the night of April 5, Cooprider handed her a cup of hot chocolate shortly before midnight, according to the lawsuit. Within 30 minutes of drinking it, the suit says, Davis began hemorrhaging and cramping.
Davis knew she had to go to the emergency room, but she knew she could not leave her three children who were sleeping upstairs, the suit said. They came up with a plan for Cooprider to pick up Davis’ mother, who lived nearby, so she could watch the children while Cooprider took Davis to the hospital.
But once Cooprider left the house, he became unreachable, according to the lawsuit.
“I am gushing blood. Please hurry,” Davis texted him around 12:30 a.m.
Davis’s mother took an Uber ride to her daughter’s house around 1 a.m. Around that time, Cooprider apologized and said he had to catch a flight the next day, the suit said.
A neighbor drove Davis to the hospital, where her unborn baby, whom she had named Joy, did not survive.
Back home, Davis said she found the opened box of abortion pills and a pill bottle, which she turned over to the Corpus Christi police, according to the lawsuit. The suit claims Cooprider mixed 10 misoprostol pills into the hot chocolate.
The Corpus Christi Police Department said there are no active investigations involving Cooprider.
The Marine Corps did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
