A 50-year-old pharmacist was arrested Monday night after police say she removed two bottles of orange juice from a bag - which they say were filled with rubbing alcohol - and placed them on the shelf with other refrigerated items at a Starbucks in San Jose, California.

San Jose Police Sgt. Jason Dwyer took Ramineh Behbehanian of San Jose into custody on an attempted murder charge because the orange juice contained what police said were lethal quantities of isopropyl alcohol. She is scheduled to appear in court Thursday.

She has no criminal record in Santa Clara County, according to court records. Late Tuesday, sources confirmed for NBC Bay Area that Behbehanian is a pharmacist working for a company owned by Johnson and Johnson.

Authorities are still not sure why she would have allegedly mixed rubbing alcohol with some orange juice in the afternoon, left the bottles in the refrigerated section alongside some yogurt and milk, and left the Snell Avenue store about 3:30 p.m. local time (6:30 p.m. ET).

"Why would she do such a thing?" Chris Africa said, standing outside the Starbucks on Tuesday morning. "Was she trying to poison us?"

An alert customer standing behind her in line spotted her taking out her own bottles of juice from a green Starbucks bag, and put them in the refrigerator section. He also noticed a toxic smell. He told management. The woman might have felt under suspicion, police said, but a Starbucks employee got her license plate.

"A lot of people out there may have seen something and probably dismissed it," Dwyer said. "But I believe that person saved lives by doing that."

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The San Jose Fire Department responded to the scene, retrieved the bottles and tested the contents with hazardous materials equipment. It turned out, the bottles were filled with orange juice and rubbing alcohol.

On Tuesday morning, customer Brent Breyer said he was a little "apprehensive" about what happened at his usual Starbucks. He said he often brings his young daughter, who routinely grabs for items in the refrigerated section.

Police were able to track her down at her home, though no motive has surfaced.

A Starbucks spokesperson told NBC Bay Area that the company destroyed all the other juices in the Snell Avenue store out of an abundance of caution and had all other stores in Bay Area check their juice seals. 

All checked out OK.

WASHINGTON -- More than 200 businesses on Wednesday urged the U.S. Supreme Court to strike down a federal law that restricts the definition of marriage to heterosexual unions, in one of corporate America's most prominent efforts to support same-sex marriage.

The companies signed on to a friend-of-the-court brief in Windsor v. United States, a high-profile case challenging the 1996 federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). They ranged from technology giants Microsoft Corp and Google Inc to Wall Street financiers such as Citigroup Inc and Goldman Sachs Group Inc to vineyards and yogurt makers in California.

Thomson Reuters Corp, which owns the Reuters news agency, also supported the submission.

The companies want the Supreme Court to void a key provision in the federal law that defines marriage as a union between a man and a woman. They largely stayed away from constitutional arguments attacking the law and instead focused on the business nuisance the law created.

DOMA forces employers to treat employees with same-sex spouses differently from those with opposite-sex partners, the companies said, depriving gay employees of certain healthcare and retirement benefits that may be on offer. The law also creates headaches for human resources officials, they said.

"HR departments would tell you it is a disaster trying to deal with DOMA when you are a large employer, because you have these employees who are legally married, but now you've got to put them in a different box for W-2s, for ERISA (Employee Retirement Income Security Act), for retirement benefits, and it's really vexing," said Sabin Willett in an interview. Willett wrote the brief for his law firm, Bingham McCutchen, which handled the matter pro bono.

Separately, lawyers representing another group of employers, including some of the same companies, said they planned to file a brief on Thursday in a related case that questions a California law, known as Proposition 8, banning gay marriage.

The two cases are to be argued before the Supreme Court on March 26 and 27. A decision is expected by the end of June.

While corporate America has long offered domestic partnership benefits and made efforts to attract gay employees, the filing seemed to represent a new step in an effort to promote the issue.

"It is old news that big business is friendly to lesbian and gay unions," said Yale law professor William Eskridge, who has argued on behalf of gay rights. "But there has never been a business brief quite like this one with so many signatories on such a landmark issue," he said.

A group of prominent Republicans, including former advisers to President George W. Bush, are also expected to file a brief challenging the California law, adding heft to backers of gay rights.

The arguments appeared directed at Justice Anthony Kennedy, as a moderate and potential swing vote, to show the kind of wide support that exists, Eskridge said.

'HURTING BUSINESS'

The brief grew out of a previous effort to represent business interests in another case challenging the DOMA law, according to Willett.

That case brought together some 70 companies that felt courts may not have understood the full business impact of the law.

"When people talk about DOMA, they usually, and rightly so, focus on its impact upon human beings ... but people may not realize, and courts may not realize, this thing is hurting business, too," Willett said.

In the brief filed on Wednesday, the companies argued that DOMA "requires that employers treat one employee differently from another, when each is married, and each marriage is equally lawful."

DOMA does not create any uniformity nationwide, they said, because 12 states either authorize same-sex marriage or recognize marriages that have been performed in other states.

That creates a burden for employers, particularly those who do business nationally, they added.

The law also forces companies to discriminate, sometimes in contravention of their own internal policies and local laws, when dealing with healthcare plans and other benefits, the companies said.

In briefs already filed in support of restricting marriage to heterosexual unions, business interests have not been represented. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has not taken a stand on the issue.

Twitter.com

Thousands of tweets flooded Twitter lamenting a Starbucks-less Wednesday.

Updated at 11:35 a.m. ET Thursday: Bleary-eyed customers who stumble into their local Starbucks every morning did so literally Wednesday. That's because hundreds of the coffee chain's stores were closed.

The forced decaffeination of America's morning commuters was due to overnight maintenance work at stores across the country that wasn't finished on time for the morning rush, Maggie Jantzen, a spokeswoman for Starbucks, told NBC station WCMH of Columbus, Ohio. 

Jantzen said she didn't know how many stores were affected, but she said about 10 percent to 20 percent of the stores that were due for the work were unable to open on time. 

The company said the work was routine maintenance on a standardized water filtration system and that no safety issues were involved.

But because of it, stores were closed across the country — as many as 1,500, mainly in the eastern half of the U.S., a quick tabulation of local news reports and hundreds of tweets by msnbc.com indicated. (A spokesman for Starbucks told msnbc.com on Thursday that the number of stores was in the "low to mid hundreds.")

Coffee drinkers were left dripless from South Dakota to Florida, New York to Texas.

"I like to start my day with Starbucks, so I don't really know what to do," Kelly Furnet told NBC station WJXT as she stood outside a shuttered shop in Jacksonville, Fla.

"It's a huge problem because, in my office, people go there multiple times in a day for their coffee fix," Rebecca Stockdale, who works near one of the closed Starbucks in Columbus, told WCMH. "You can't have them coming to work without their caffeine!"

(This story has been updated to reflect that Starbucks later said the number of stores involved was in the "low to mid hundreds.")

The National Gun Victims Action Council began a boycott of Starbucks Monday over the coffee giant's policy of allowing customers to bring guns into their shops in states with "open carry" laws. CNBC's Melissa Lee discusses the protest with the head of the NGAC.

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A San Diego jury awarded a man and his wife nearly $7.5 million Friday in their civil suit against Starbucks after the man fell inside a North County business in 2008.

The case, which was filed in 2009, centered on Anthony Zaccaglin, who reportedly sustained a concussion after falling inside a Starbucks located on Melrose in Vista. Zaccaglin slipped and hit his head on a cash register as he was walking from the cashier to the pickup counter, according to Zaccaglin's attorneys, who added that witnesses at the scene said a manager had just mopped the area where Zaccaglin slipped and also said that that employee later apologized for not "dry mopping."

Read the original story on NBCSanDiego.com

Zaccaglin alleged that he suffered complications stemming from the fall and was unable to return to work as a chiropractor.

Starbucks initially offered a $100,000 settlement to Zaccaglin; he declined to accept that proposal, however, said Zaccaglin's attorney John Gomez.

After two and a half weeks in court, a jury returned a verdict against Starbucks on Friday, awarding $6,456,230.50 to Zaccaglin. His wife was awarded $1 million for loss of consortium, or the loss of her husband’s love, companionship, comfort and care.

The total amount could grow to as much as $8.5 million, including added costs, Gomez said.

Starbucks spokesman Jim Oslo said the company was disappointed with the size of verdict:

Providing a safe environment for our customers is always a top priority for us at Starbucks. We are sorry that Mr. Zaccaglin was injured at our Vista, Calif., store. However, we are disappointed with the size of the verdict as we made every effort to reach a mutually agreeable and reasonable settlement with Mr. Zaccaglin. We are reviewing the decision to determine what, if any, steps we may take in response.

If Starbucks appeals, it could take up to two more years for the case to be settled, according to Gomez.

"For a national chain, Starbuck's safety policies were shockingly inadequate and inconsistently applied," Gomez said. "The family hopes that today's verdict will cause Starbucks to take safety as seriously as it does sales."

Gomez added that he and Zaccaglin were hoping to work it out with Starbucks to avoid an appeal.

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