Girlfriend: Man accused of spiking drinks was ‘just joking’

The girlfriend of Iolan Trevor Hockaday, a former McDonald’s employee accused of spiking an Allen County sheriff’s deputy’s drink with industrial cleaner, said her boyfriend was innocent.

“There’s still a lot of people mad about it, and I understand why they’d be mad. I’d be mad, too,” said Iolan Whitney Ulrich, Hockaday’s girlfriend of nearly a year. “I’d understand if it was one of my people. But to put away Trevor for a joke that he didn’t do, I don’t think that’s right.

“It seems like a lot of speculation and accusation,” she continued. “Everybody is quick to prove him guilty because of the media.”

Prosecutors allege Hockaday laced the deputy’s drink with cleaner the evening of Aug. 29.

The deputy became ill the next day with an upset stomach, but did not miss work because it was his day off, Sheriff Bryan Murphy said. The deputy, whose name has not been released, fully recovered. A second deputy, also believed to have been poisoned, did not suffer any symptoms.

Ulrich said the incident in question did not occur, that Hockaday and one of his managers — the only two on duty at the time — were simply joking around.

Ulrich admitted she was not at the scene — “This is what Trevor told me,” she said — but recalled the incident the evening of Aug. 29.

With the restaurant under construction, all McDonald’s customers must order their meals through the drive-thru window.

“The manager made a joke about giving him old fries,” Ulrich said. “That’s when Trevor made a joke about putting something in his drink.”

Hockaday returned to work the next day, as normal, then was off duty for the weekend, when he and Ulrich went to Missouri.

He returned to Mc-Donald’s the following Monday, Labor Day, to learn he had been suspended from work, “because his manager had changed his story,” Ulrich contended.

The suspension, she said, was because of the joke, not because Hockaday had done anything to the drink.

Hockaday returned to work Sept. 10, then quit abruptly after Ulrich said he had been “bombarded” with comments and questions from his coworkers.

He was arrested two days later.

“It was a complete shock,” she said. “We had no idea what it was about.”