Sean Kobin, 22, is a convicted sex offender from Mequon, WI who is finally on trial for nearly fatally injuring a Grafton, WI woman November 8, 2005, by inducing her to drink industrial strength lye taken from a CD factory he was working in. Kobin initially pleaded guilty in September 2006, but rescinded his guilty plea in August of 2007. The woman, who is lucky to be alive following the industrial strength lye burns to her digestive system, was only weaned off her feeding tube last year, and still has been unable to work since the incident.
Kobin, from the Milwaukee suburb of Mequon, allegedly asked the woman, who then worked at an adult bookstore on the far northwest side of Milwaukee, to drink a liquid for $20 so he can videotape it. He also allegedly offered to get her daughter’s Ipod fixed for her drinking the liquid. Unknown to the woman, that liquid was industrial strength lye, taken from his workplace at a CD factory. Kobin is an emetophiliac, one who is sexually aroused by women vomiting, and faces charges in other cases where he has persuaded women to drink bleach or other emetics for his arousal throughout Milwaukee’s northern suburbs.
What followed in November [8], 2005 was a fit of violent, bloody vomiting and other effects so debilitating that homicide detectives were called in.
The first police officer on the scene, Thomas Balistreri of the Milwaukee Police Department, testified that he had never seen anyone so violently ill in his 16-year career. The woman, he said, was on the ground vomiting blood, yet he couldn't recall Kobin asking any questions about her condition. Instead, Kobin was urging police to watch his videotape of the event, the officer said.
Prosecutors said that Kobin willingly induced the woman to drink the lye for his sexual pleasure, and that he knew how dangerous the compound was.
"It is only by virtue of a miracle or chance or incredibly good medical treatment that (the woman) is alive," prosecutor Holly Bunch told jurors.
Kobin, she said, knew how dangerous the compound was from his training at a plant where compact disks were made. Workers there, Bunch said, were required to wear thick gloves anytime they handled the substance, yet Kobin goaded the cash-strapped woman into "some sort of bizarre agreement" to consume it.
"Any person in Mr. Kobin's place would have known that giving any amount of this substance to a human being could be fatal," Bunch said.
Kobin's attorney said in court that his client joked about stunt like the ones featured on MTV’s Jackass for months before the woman decided to take him up on the dare.
"She raises the thing of, 'Well, why don't we do this? I'll do it for $20,' "defense attorney Joseph R. Reback said in his opening statement." She takes him up on it. The rest is tragic."
"He was only (saying) that the video would show that he didn't do anything wrong," Balistreri testified.
A screen is set up in the courtroom in case attorneys decide to show the videotape. The trial is expected to take at least three days.
She was in a coma while doctors stabilized her from the effects of the lye. Surgeries and skin grafts were needed to close the holes the caustic liquid left in her body.
The woman, 33 at the time, lived, but has had to endure months of intense medical treatment because of the caustic effects of sodium hydroxide on her digestive system.
The victim only was able to stop relying on a feeding tube for her nutrition last year, after over a year. She still undergoes a procedure where her scarred esophagus and stomach is opened by forcing a tube down it every few weeks at a suburban Milwaukee hospital.
The Grafton woman who police initially thought was going to die says she has spent much of that time on feeding tubes inserted through her abdomen. She's eating now. But the problem, along with severe heartburn and acid reflux, is her esophagus won't stay open.
The doctors tried stents, but there was too much bleeding and throwing up. Now they just do esophagogastroduodenoscopies.
Yes, they're as nasty as they sound. An EGD is a little procedure wherein you are forced to fast and given something to diminish gagging. Then, while you try to remain still, somebody shoves a tube all the way down your throat into your stomach as part of an effort to stretch the esophagus.
This has been done to her, she noted in one of a series of e-mails we've exchanged, some 50 times.
She's spent so much time at Froedtert that the people there she calls her "heroes" have become like a "second family."
In the meantime, the thing is, she has a family of her own, and is unable to return to work. She and her two kids, she noted, are now living on less than $700 a month.
The victim has also filed a lawsuit against Kobin.
(Update 2-12-08)
The tape where Kobin is shown persuading the victim, Chrystal Kolinski, to drink the industrial lye was shown yesterday in Milwaukee County Circuit Judge William Sosnay's court. Testimony centered around how they met, and how Kobin wanted the woman to take "a shot."
"He basically told me he liked recording the look on people's faces," she said.
The day she finally acceded, she had run dry of luck.
An eviction notice had arrived, and her children didn't have a decent couch to sit on because the one she bought for $20 didn't fit through her door. As she explained it, she reasoned that she could drink Kobin's shot and shut him up and pocket some badly needed cash as well. He never said she could be injured, she said.
"As bad as it seems now, I was getting him to see that he could trust me," she said, "and I wasn't going to be out my $20 any more."
After she watched the videotape of the morning she took the drink from Kobin, Kolinsky's chin fell toward her chest and her shoulders heaved. The tape had been stopped moments before she drank the poison, collapsed to the ground and began vomiting blood.
Jurors were shown the part where Chrystal Kolinski went to the ground in pain, and Kolinski and her doctor testified.
"I thought having children was bad," said Kolinski, 35. "I had one without anesthetic before, and I thought if I could handle that, I could handle any level of pain. But that day was unlike anything I had ever experienced."
She suffered massive injuries to her throat and stomach from the drink and was unable to take solid food for months. A doctor testified that she will likely remain 1,000 times more likely than the average person to get stomach cancer.
(Update 2-14-08)
Kobin testified that though dropping the sodium hydroxide (lye) pellets into a bottle of water made the water burn, he had no problem giving it to his former friend. Kobin also said that the friendship was pursued as a potential romance, but he then gave Kolinski's boyfriend a literal wake-up call so he wouldn't be late for work. Kobin described taking the drink as a test of character and said it tasted salt like.
Milwaukee police Detective David Salazar testified Wednesday that Kobin had described himself during questioning as a sadist with an oral fixation. Kobin faces prosecution in connection with similar reported offenses in Ozaukee and Washington counties, and he is a registered sex offender from a 2004 Waukesha County case in which he persuaded a 13-year-old girl to drink bleach, lighter fluid and urine.
Kobin countered Wednesday that he had used the words sodium hydroxide at least once in her presence, perhaps jokingly, and had said she might get mild digestive discomfort. He said he handled the chemical at work and suffered no major discomfort.
"I was intending to figure out a way to abuse it," Kobin said.
(Update 2-16-08)
Kobin was convicted of 1st degree reckless endangerment for the incident which caused Chrystal Kolinski to nearly die and to continue to undergo treatments. He faces 25 years in prison when he is sentenced February 28th.
(Update 2-29-08)
Kobin was sentenced to 10 years of prison and 10 years extended supervision for the lye incident.
(Update 6-5-08) Kobin was sentenced to an additional 15 years in prison for sexually assaulting and persuading a 15 year old girl to drink blach for his sexual arousal. The 15 year sentence will run consecutive to the sentence in the Kolinski case.
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