Envy can push people into doing despicable things to their fellow man, but you rarely hear about someone trying to take the life of a coworker over a promotion. And yet that is the accusation currently faced by a lab worker at the University of Wisconsin who allegedly tried to poison a work colleague he had become upset with following a promotion that he felt was undeserved.
Makoto Kuroda has been charged with recklessly endangering safety and tampering with a household product “with the intent to kill, injure or otherwise endanger the health” of another person, after he admitted to lacing a fellow lab worker’s water bottle with paraformaldehyde and chloroform.
Kuroda and the victim, identified only by their initials, TM, had met in 2017 and had worked together at the university’s Influenza Research Institute in Madison for five years. The two had been pretty close, but had drifted apart over time to the point where Kuroda was so upset that he decided to poison his colleague.
TM noticed something strange on April 4, when he tried to take a sip from an already opened water bottle that had been sitting on his desk for a couple of days. He immediately spat out the mouthful of water because it tasted funny, and a fellow lab worker confirmed that the bottle smelled off.
A couple of days later, TM sensed a strong smell coming from his lab shoes, so he contacted the police. Samples from the water bottle and the shoes were analysed and came back positive for chloroform. The concentration was reportedly so high that the test strips could not provide an accurate result.
Strangely enough, Kuroda admitted to the poisoning attempt both to TM himself and to a professor from the university, adding that he had become “upset with TM for not following the lab rule of wearing a lab coat and goggles,” for a promotion that the victim had gotten and for other things that had just “added up” over time.
The Japanese-born man told police investigators that he retrieved “2 or 3 microliters of PFA mixed with Trizol,” from his work fridge and put “.5 microliters of the mix in TM’s water bottle,” and about “1.5 microliter of the mix into each of TM’s shoes.”
Kuroda said that he expected the chemical mix he put in TM’s shoes to cause a rash, and the poisonous cocktail in his water to make him sick. He also admitted to using ChatGPT to learn about the amount of chemicals needed to achieve his sinister goal.
Police documents show that Makoto Kuroda wanted his victim to “feel bad”, suggesting that he deserved it, because “bad things happen to bad people.”
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