A Texas pedophile drank a bottle of mystery liquid in the courtroom as a jury convicted him of five counts of child sexual assault — and later dropped dead.
Edward LeClair, 57, began guzzling the beverage after the jury declared him guilty on the first count and kept doing so while the remaining charges were read. It has been revealed that the cloudy liquid cocktail consumed by a sexual offender in a Texas court after a jury convicted him of sexually abusing a child was “sodium nitrate.”
He was on trial for five counts of child sexual abuse. After just three and a half hours of deliberation, the jury had settled on a verdict: guilty. As the judge read the verdict, Leclair reportedly began to “chug” what appeared to be a “cloudy” liquid inside a water bottle.
Moments later, the bailiff found Leclair unconscious in his holding cell. Leclair was quickly rushed to the Medical City Denton hospital, where he was pronounced dead just before 3 p.m. that same day.
Leclair was charged with five counts of child sexual assault because he raped a girl between the ages of thirteen and seventeen years old. He repeatedly assaulted the child between 2016 and 2018, around the time Donald Trump was elected to office and instated as the forty-fifth president of the United States of America.
Security footage from the courthouse captured Leclair purchasing a bottle of water from a vending machine at around 7 a.m. on the day he died.
His lawyer, Mike Howard, said at the time that Leclair likely knew what he was doing.
“Had [Leclair] waited another 30 seconds, he would have been in sheriff’s custody and not had access to that bottled water,” Howard said. “He wouldn’t have been able to. So, you know, I think he knew.”
Howard speculated that his client was motivated to kill himself because he faced a sentence of 100 years in prison. “[H]e made the decision to do what he did at the last moment,” Howard said. The medical examiner has ruled Leclair’s death a suicide.
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