He criticized his wife’s instant oatmeal. She shot him in the head, Penn. police say

A Pennsylvania couple’s fight started innocuously enough.

Rachel Eutsey, 36, and her husband began to argue about breakfast on Thursday after waking up from a drug-fueled bender at their Saltlick Township home, according to state police.

The battle lines in the argument? “It was the difference between traditional oats and instant oatmeal,” Pennsylvania State Trooper Robert Broadwater said.

The husband, 29, wasn’t pleased with the oatmeal that Eutsey tried to give him Thursday, police said, and their verbal argument over the breakfast food had turned physical by Thursday afternoon. At one point, the husband tried to choke Eutsey, according to a probable cause affidavit.

That’s when Eutsey ran into her father’s bedroom, grabbed a revolver and took it back to her bedroom to continue the fight with her husband, police said.

Her husband, meanwhile, had a baseball bat. Eventually the husband threw the bat out an open door at the home and started walking down the hall towards Eutsey while yelling, Eutsey told police.

At that point, Eutsey pointed the gun at her husband “to scare him,” she told police. Then Eutsey fired a single shot.

Eutsey didn’t intend to hit her husband, but she ended up striking him, Eutsey told police. Her husband fell to the ground, bleeding from the head, according to police.

After the shooting, Eutsey herself called 911, telling dispatchers she had shot her husband. She said he was lying on the ground, hardly breathing.

When police arrived, they arrested Eutsey and found her husband lying on the living room floor. He was flown from the crime scene to a hospital in nearby Pittsburgh, where he underwent emergency surgery on the gunshot wound, police said.

The husband remains in critical condition.

Eutsey faces attempted homicide charges. She’s being held at the Fayette County Jail on $100,000 bond, police said.

The incident began at 1:30 a.m. Thursday, when Eutsey and her husband left their home with their 8-month-old daughter to buy crack cocaine. The couple smoked some of the drugs in their car in the parking lot of a bar, police said. Their daughter was in the car with them as they smoked the crack cocaine. Then the couple went home and smoked the rest.

The couple had gone through the same drug-purchasing routine the previous three or four nights, Eutsey told police. The shooting occurred about 12 hours after that morning’s drug purchase, just before 2 p.m. in the afternoon.

This story was originally published April 6, 2018 at 4:19 PM with the headline "He criticized his wife’s instant oatmeal. She shot him in the head, Penn. police say."