Woman who fatally stabbed her lover 108 times in psychotic weed attack speaks out in first interview since AVOIDING jail as she reveals his aggression during SEX, wicked 'temper' - and makes shock claim: 'We are BOTH to blame'

At 2am on Memorial Day in 2018, Bryn Spejcher watched herself die.

'I saw my own body laying there on the porch with paramedics,' she recalls. 'Then I heard my mom weeping over my corpse.'

Next, 'a funeral, where people were crying.'

And, most horrific of all, a hand clutching a bread knife, a dog covered in stab wounds and the bloodied, lifeless body of Chad O'Melia, the man she'd been dating for just a few weeks.

Then everything went black.

Some 24 hours later, Spejcher woke up in the hospital having undergone emergency surgery to save her from multiple near-fatal knife wounds to her own neck.

'Where's Chad? Is he okay?' she screamed.

Of course, Chad was dead.

Spejcher's terrifying, bloody vision hadn't all been imagined. She'd stabbed O'Melia a total of 108 times in a frenzied attack at his apartment in Thousand Oaks, California, that a court judged to be brought on by cannabis-induced psychosis.

She'd then turned the knife on her Alaskan husky, Aria, before plunging it into her own neck multiple times.

When police arrived at the scene – alerted by concerned neighbours – Spejcher was so uncontrollable with murderous rage that she couldn't even be restrained with a taser, and detectives had to beat her with batons until the bones in her arms broke.

In January, Spejcher — now 33 — made global headlines when she was handed a verdict of no jail time and just 100 hours of community service.

Despite a jury finding her guilty of involuntary manslaughter, the judge deemed her 'not in control of her own actions'.

Many commentators were up in arms, accusing the judge of giving marijuana users 'a license to kill'.

As the only national journalist covering her case in court, I watched as O'Melia's family launched furious attacks on Spejcher, damning her as 'remorseless'.

But now, speaking exclusively to DailyMail.com and for the first time since her sentencing, Spejcher is giving her side of the story — and the details are explosive.

Far from the innocent man O'Melia's family sort to portray in court, Spejcher reveals her one-time lover to be 'angry, intimidating' and at times even physically aggressive.

Notably, she says she felt 'pressured' by O'Melia – who was a daily cannabis user — to inhale the high-potency marijuana that sparked her psychotic episode.

She also implies that, on two occasions, he attempted to non-consensually choke her during sex, saying he 'put his hands on me during an intimate moment' but declining to go into further detail when I pressed her.

'I felt intimidated by him,' she says. 'If something felt personal to him, even if it really wasn't, he'd have this short fuse.'

In fact, Spejcher says, such were O'Melia's 'temper outbursts and uncontrollable emotions' that she 'feared the consequences' of declining to use his marijuana when he offered it to her on the night of his death.

'I think we're both accountable for what happened,' she says, describing how O'Melia 'prepared' weed in a 'bong' device he owned before alleging coercing her to inhale it.

'He said 'hurry up. Inhale now… Do it really fast, go go go',' she says.

'Yes, I physically inhaled it. So, we're both accountable. But there's obviously been more attention to my part [in the attack] versus Chad's part.'

These key detail form the basis of an appeal that the Mail can now exclusively reveal Spejcher's legal team are launching.

They will argue her intoxication was 'involuntary', and the result of O'Melia's 'fraud and trickery'.

Spejcher met O'Melia when she was 27 at a dog park Thousand Oaks in early 2018. She had recently moved to the area for a new role in the audiology department at UCLA, and the pair bonded over their pets.

'We got along great,' she recalls. 'We just laughed about all kinds of stuff and we're both sarcastic. I have brothers and a lot of male friends, so I know how to talk and hang with a guy.'

Previous reporting has described O'Melia as Spejcher's 'boyfriend', however she now says this characterization is false.

'It didn't have a label,' she says, admitting their connection was initially romantic.

However, within just a month of knowing O'Melia – a 26-year-old accountant and amateur boxer – Spejcher ended things due to his 'intimidating' behaviour.

She says she made it clear she 'was not interested in any sort of romantic relationship' two days before her psychotic attack.

'He was fine with it. It was mutual and we remained friends,' she says.

Asked why she wanted to remain friendly with a man she claims was aggressive, Spejcher explains that her friendship group in the area was 'limited'.

Spejcher also says that while she has used cannabis 'less than 10 times' in her life, O'Melia was a daily user – allegedly admitting to her that he would even smoke in the mornings before taking his own dog for a walk.

In court documents seen by DailyMail.com, O'Melia's roommate, Vinicius De Oliveira, or 'Vinnie', testified: 'If Chad was home, he was high.'

'When he doesn't have his weed, he can be mad that he doesn't have what he likes,' Vinnie said, adding that O'Melia smoked the 'biggest, the best, the strongest strains' of the drug.

Vinnie also recalled how, two months before his death, O'Melia had also persuaded him to get high for the first time – preparing the same bong he gave to Spejcher.

Vinnie testifies that the drug made him feel sick and as if he was 'dying': 'My heart beating really fast. The wall and faces were kind of moving.'

Vinnie says he pleaded with O'Melia and another friend to take him to a hospital, but they simply laughed.

On the night of Spejcher's attack, she describes how she and O'Melia were 'chatting and laughing' on the balcony of his apartment.

Around 1am, he took a 'hit' from his bong which he said made him feel 'very high'.

Despite her 'neutral' attitude to marijuana, Spejcher asked for a hit.

'I get asked why I did it a lot,' she says. 'When you're with your friends who have a drink, or are doing some sort of activity, it's natural to ask if you can do it with them. It was for social reasons. And of course, I regret those decisions.'

Spejcher tried the bong but said she wasn't feeling high, to which O'Melia alleged replied: 'Oh, well let's make this really intense for you.'

According to court documents, O'Melia then 'layered' the bong with extra doses of high potency marijuana - although it is not clear exactly what was added.

Spejcher says she didn't want to take anymore, but that O'Melia 'was quickly rushing and pressuring me… he quickly rose out of this chair, turned the bong around to face me. He was so close, and moved the bong much closer to my face.'

And so she took another 'hit'.

'I do take complete responsibility for taking that dose that he provided to me,' she says. 'And I wish I didn't. I would have never smoked marijuana my entire life had I know something like [the attack] could have happened.'

Almost immediately, Spejcher says she recognized a wildly different reaction to anything she'd experienced before.

She felt an 'intense burning sensation' in her throat, causing an uncontrollable cough.

'I felt like a puff of air was stuck in my throat and I needed to vomit it out,' she says.

She then felt dizzy and stumbled between the bathroom and the living-room, as everything 'spun clockwise'.

Tearful, she lay on the sofa and asked O'Melia to stay awake and 'keep an eye' on her in case she choked in her sleep.

But she says he simply laughed at her and told her she was 'acting high'.

It is at this point that Spejcher claims she lost all sense of reality.

She describes seeing a 'television screen' playing clips of her disembodied limbs moving totally out of her control.

It was as if 'a camera was recording someone else doing all these horrible, horrible things'.

'There was no thought, there was no emotion, there was no pain, there was no morality, there was nothing. I was just literally watching a screen as a zombie,' she says.

The 'screen' moved towards the kitchen, where she saw 'two hands' grab multiple knives, throwing them in O'Melia's direction.

'Then there was a brown dog in front of me [her own husky, Aria]. And the knife in the left hand stabbed that dog. It [the 'screen'] kept moving towards Chad, who was on the other side of the dining table,' she says. 'As the vision got closer to him, I saw the knife in my left hand stab his abdomen. And then it just went black.'

Spejcher's next vision on the 'screen' was Chad's body on the floor, accompanied by voices in her head bidding her to, 'keep going, don't stop. You're almost there. You can do this.'

'I remember seeing one knife in both of my hands aimed towards the center of my throat,' she says. '[Initially] it was like [I felt] no pain... but at some point, when trying to aim the knife again toward my throat, it felt like a thousand bullets a second.'

The early investigation suspected that O'Melia had laced the bong with a secondary drug that caused the extreme psychotropic effects.

However, toxicology experts later showed marijuana to be the only substance in Spejcher's blood.

Asked what she thinks of critics who believe she has been let of lightly, Spejcher says: 'The people around me know that I am remorseful.'

'I think that, no matter what, somebody is going to be dissatisfied with my words, my actions, my behaviors.'

Spejcher, who has been forced to move back to her parents' Chicago house, still struggles to sleep.

Following the attack, she lost her job as an audiologist. She is currently struggling to raise the thousands of dollars she owes O'Melia's landlord to remdy damage to his property that she caused during her frenzied attack.

'I think about that night everyday,' she says. 'I wish I could go back in time to change everything. It will be carried with me for the rest of my life.'

'I pray for my family, my inner circle of people. But more importantly, I pray for Chad and his grieving family and friends. His life was taken too soon.'

She hopes to dedicate much of her future to working with charities such as the non-profit Every Brain Matters, which aims to help educate people on the risks of high potency marijuana, something that has been made all the more urgent by the Biden Administration's announcement this week that they plan to lower the 'classification' of the drug.

'The popularization of these potent strains has created a misconception that cannabis is harmless. But my experience obviously shows that this is not always the case,' she says. 'I am not special. This can happen to anybody.'