An Indiana couple may be driving to restaurants to pick-up their orders from now on, after a delivery driver allegedly laced their dinner with pepper spray.
Mark Cardin, 42, said he and his wife had ordered Arby’s, but the food was dropped off at their Vanderburgh County home nearly caused his wife to asphyxiate.
“I noticed my wife had started eating and she started choking and gasping, and after she had a couple bites of her food she actually threw up,” Cardin recounted to 14 News.
Alarmed, he rushed to figure out what was wrong. That was when he realized something about the delivery bag looked off.
NEW: DoorDash driver accused of spraying pepper spray on Arby’s food after dropping it off at a home in Indiana.
Mark Cardin says his wife started choking and gasping after she started eating the food.
"I noticed my wife had started eating and she started choking and gasping,… pic.twitter.com/yFrvXVBGtR
— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) December 10, 2025
The packaging, he said, appeared as if someone had handled it after leaving the restaurant.
“I had to look at the bag and seen that there was some kind of spray or something,” he said, recalling the moment he suspected the meal had been tainted.
Growing suspicious, Cardin pulled up the footage from their doorbell camera. In the clip, he said the purple-haired delivery driver could be seen placing the bag on the doorstep, snapping the required delivery photo and then spraying a liquid directly onto the bag.
“I pulled up my doorbell camera and seen that the lady who dropped the food off had actually tampered with it on purpose for some reason,” he said. “It’s horrific.”
The video, he said, shows her holding something in her right hand before allegedly squeezing a substance onto the order. Cardin said he believes it was pepper spray, though he added that in today’s climate it could have been anything.
“We assume it’s pepper spray, that’s more than likely what it is, but now in this day and age it could’ve been anything,” he pointed out.
“It could’ve been rat poison, it could’ve been fentanyl. I mean, my wife could’ve been dead.”
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Still shaken, Cardin said he contacted DoorDash immediately. The company issued a refund, but he claims they did little else. “I definitely want to see her prosecuted,” he said.
As of now, no charges have been filed, though the Vanderburgh County Sheriff’s Office confirmed that detectives have opened an investigation.
Cardin said he does not know the driver personally but noted that they had tipped her.
Cardin said the experience has left him reconsidering whether he will ever order food online again. He urged others to protect themselves when using delivery apps.
“I would say to anybody, if you order food on any kind of delivery service, make you you have a doorbell [camera],” he warned.
“This is making me second guess ever ordering food from anywhere ever again.”
This troubling case is one of several recent incidents involving delivery drivers caught behaving in disturbing ways.
Earlier this month, a Florida family captured video of a DoorDash driver who dropped a customer’s food on the ground, picked it up, put the fallen wing back into the box.
The Ring footage recorded the moment the driver accidentally spilled a boneless wing from an order placed by the daughter of Orange Park resident Trena Brown.
The driver casually retrieved it from the ground and put it back before licking his fingers.
The mother said the family checked their camera before eating and were shocked by what they saw. Since then, she has stopped using online food delivery services.
Brown urged DoorDash to address what happened. “If he can’t deliver food with due care, then maybe there’s something else out there for him to do,” she told the outlet.
She also said the company should revisit its training procedures. “I’m not really sure what the training is, but maybe it’s time to bring the drivers in or require them to have some type of training.”
In another recent Florida incident, police officers found themselves finishing a DoorDash delivery after arresting the driver who was supposed to drop it off.
Cape Coral police said they found 25-year-old Luis Angel Alania Estrella asleep behind the wheel of his car at a red light around 8:14 p.m. The car was still in drive.
Officers approached the vehicle and shouted for him to put the car in park.
Body camera footage showed multiple officers surrounding Estrella’s Toyota before he lowered the window.
Due to a language barrier, officers struggled to communicate with him before finally turning off the car and removing him from the driver’s seat.
During the arrest, Estrella told officers he was worried about finishing his delivery.
After checking the bag and confirming the address, one officer picked up the order.
“DoorDash?” the officer said on camera. “The address that he had on is DoorDash. Is that where he was going?”
“That’s where the order is,” another replied. “I’ll deliver it,” the officer told him.
The department later stated, “The actions of the officer helped ensure the resident received the meal safely and without unnecessary delay.”
Estrella was charged with driving with a suspended license and taken to the Lee County Jail.
