A prosecutor has declined to file charges after an incident in which former University of North Dakota President Tom Clifford found prescription medicine in his food about three weeks before he died.
Grand Forks Police Capt. Kerwin Kjelstrom said officers went to Clifford's home Jan. 17 after two of his granddaughters called to report Clifford had spit out two pills while eating fruit salad the women were feeding him. They then poked through the salad and found another.
During a subsequent investigation, the granddaughters, who are children of Clifford's first wife, and Clifford's second wife, Gayle, said they suspected each other of putting the pills in the fruit salad, a police report says.
Gayle Clifford said she "couldn't believe that someone was trying to set her up," an investigator wrote.
Clifford was under hospice care at his home at the time and was not taking any medications, a police report says. His heart and kidneys were failing, and he had recently been brought home from a Grand Forks hospital. He died Feb. 4 at age 87.
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Tests at North Dakota's crime lab later identified the pills as blood-pressure medication, of the same type that had been prescribed for Clifford earlier.
Kjelstrom said the investigation was "a matter of is there, or was there, any type of crime involved in pills being found in a salad."
The granddaughters, Angela Heiden and Rebecca Clifford, said their father, Stephen Clifford, called when they found the pills, and suggested they should call the police. Stephen Clifford said "if something was done, whoever did it should be punished."
"One advantage of it coming out now is that maybe somebody will come forward who knows something," Stephen Clifford said.
A statement Saturday by Grand Forks attorney Patrick Fisher said Gayle Clifford, upon learning about the pills, had directed that Tom Clifford be taken to the hospital "to be examined for any adverse effects." None were found.
Tom Clifford later signed a statement telling police he wanted the investigation dropped, but it continued. Investigators submitted a report to Peter Welte, the Grand Forks County state's attorney, on Jan. 21.
Welte, in a Jan. 29 statement, said the evidence in the case did not merit prosecution. The pills in the fruit salad were not close to a fatal dose, and there was no evidence they were illegally obtained or that whoever put them there intended to commit a crime, he said.
Tom Clifford's first wife, Florence, died in 1984. Clifford married Gayle Clifford two years later.
