The craziest professors making meth story you will read today

Great story from Debra Hale-Shelton and Benjamin Hardy, reporters for Arkansas Nonprofit News Network on the Henderson State professors charged with making meth: 

Late one October night in 2019, Joseph Andrews and three other Henderson State University students were studying in the chemistry department of the Arkadelphia campus when Andrews became sick. 

“I started to fill [sic] a pain in my chest, and my arm felt numb,” he recalled in an affidavit given to police the next day. “I asked the other guys if they felt bad, [and] they said that they could smell something. I started to taste/smell iron, so I thought that I was bleeding but I was not.”

About 9:30 p.m., the four began searching for the source of the odor, which another student described in his statement as being “v. sweet [and] v. pungent.” The students made their way toward a lab used by two chemistry professors, Terry David Bateman and Bradley Rowland.

“I had to stop at the end of the hallway due to overwhelming sickness,” Andrews wrote. He fled the building, the Reynolds Science Center, and the students contacted the two professors. Rowland arrived first, followed by Bateman about five minutes later.

Fifteen to 20 minutes later, Rowland told the students the problem was an open bottle and that he had “fixed or capped it,” Andrews said. Student David Thompson recalled in his statement that Rowland said the chemical was a substance called benzyl chloride and that “it was all good now.”

It wasn’t.

It gets crazier from there, if you can believe it. I don't understand what these two professors were up to, and I really don't understand why. Here's hoping that the Henderson State chemistry department can recover from this mess. 

Read the whole thing.