One of the reoccurring assignments for Mr. Casagrande’s Spanish 3 class is to make a video, in Spanish, about how to make salsa and then spend a Friday enjoying the work they made. The classroom smelled of salsa and chips, with the expectation of it being a fun Friday in the class. Until chaos ensued when three students decided to eat a Carolina Reaper pepper. Hadden Brown brought in the pepper as part of an assignment to make salsa and give the directions in Spanish. “I asked Casagrande if I could bring [the peppers] in for extra credit, so I brought in the peppers, and he changed his mind and said no but I already had the peppers, so I just figured why not,” Brown said.  

For a reference of how hot a Carolina Reaper is, it’s Scoville Heat Unit rating sits at about 2.2 million. The Scoville Heat Units have been used to measure the spiciness of peppers developed by pharmacist Wilbur Scoville. A Carolina Reaper compared to a Jalapeño, which sits at about a 8,000, is about 2,192,000 units of heat.

As the three students ate the peppers, the spice immediately started to kick in as the class watched. Riley Lowell rushed to the bathroom to throw up, while the other two, Hadden Brown and Wyatt Johnson, found chocolate milk to drink. “I honestly didn’t think it would be that bad. I ate the entire thing and immediately regretted it. I went home where I continued to throw up and it came out my nose and I couldn’t breathe,” Lowell said.  

The students that were watching didn’t know how to react at first. Claire Butler and Harper Crowder, the project partners to Lowell, had opposite reactions when it came to how to handle the situation. “At first, I was like ‘no way, that’s insane, there’s no way you just did that’ and then I went into protective mode. I was like ‘we need to get the Tums, we need to get water, we need to get milk’. I was just hoping they got it all out of their systems,” Crowder said.