Florida man, John Welden, accused of tricking girlfriend, Remee Lee, into taking abortion pill

A Florida man is accused of switching labels on a pill bottle to trick his girlfriend into taking an abortion pill after discovering she was pregnant.

John Andrew Welden, age 28, allegedly made the pill bottle appears as though it was Amoxicillin, a common antibiotic. After his girlfriend, Remee Lee, age 26, took the drug, she purportedly miscarried, reports The Tampa Tribune.

John Andrew Welden

“In my years as a prosecutor, this case is one of the most shocking and premeditated cases I’ve seen,” Assistant U.S. Attorney W. Stephen Muldrow told U.S. Magistrate Anthony Porcelli during a hearing Wednesday.

Welden now faces the possibility of life behind bars without parole, charged with murder under a rarely used federal statute known as the “Protection of Unborn Children Act.” He also is charged with tampering with a prescription “under circumstances manifesting extreme indifference” to the risk of death or injury.

Lee made it known in March that she was pregnant. He urged her to have an abortion, but she refused, planned on keeping the baby, even if she had to care for the child on her own.

The woman didn’t have medical insurance so Welden arranged for her to see his father, Stephen Welden, a practicing OB/GYN doctor. On March 28, the woman had a sonogram and learned her unborn baby was viable and healthy, Muldrow said.

“In a cold, premeditated fashion,” Muldrow said, Welden forged his father’s signature to obtain a prescription for the abortion drug Misoprostol, also known as Cytotec. On March 29, Welden obtained the drug from a local pharmacy and removed the label, replacing it with one that said Amoxicillin and the woman’s name.

The next morning, the woman took the pill before going to work. She began having abdominal pains and began bleeding. She went to the hospital, Muldrow said. “The baby was lost.”

Hillsborough County Sheriff’s investigators discovered a recording, the woman called Welden and said, “What did you give me, Andrew?”

“Cytotec,” Welden said, according to Muldrow.

“He admits throughout the recoding that he knew the pills were going to cause contractions,” Muldrow said. He also “confesses to the premeditated nature of the crime.”

Muldrow said Welden “confesses that he had tampered with the pill bottle, that he put a fake label on the bottle.” Muldrow said Welden said he used a label maker to make the bogus label.