Are yew rare where you are? Here in Ireland (and also in Britain), they're traditionally found in churchyards (where grazing livestock cannot get at them) and are well known to be poisonous. (Agatha Christie used yew as a poison in one of her novels.)
I read this and thought; I sure hope so if I’ve made it this far in life not knowing. I believe someone’s rectangle plant-identified this particular one as European Yew (Taxus baccata). None of us had encountered it before and this particular plants arils (thanks drjason) were quite strikingly pink.
Apparently, there are others in North America, but mostly not in the Southwest. I lived in the Pacific Northwest about a decade ago which also has a yew (Taxus brevifolia) but I don’t recall if I ever saw the berries.
That said, most folks I know were raised with a baseline of “don’t eat random berries you don’t recognize.”
They're common in landscaping throughout the US. We had some in our front yard, but us kids knew better than to eat random berries. It's painful for me to think that there are people out there without the common sense not to eat random plants they don't recognize.
Folks visiting the desert and distractedly running straight into octillos is just good entertainment. There's not much on the east coast that prepares you for a random shrub to be so hostile. Poisonous berries though, they're everywhere. I'm surprised your fellows made it to adulthood without basic suburban survival skills.
Except for grass and most trees, suburban foliage is often quite toxic. A lot of your ornamental plants are poisonous. Think lilies, foxglove, Solomon's seal, and all the excitement of morning glories. The basic understanding that you don't eat anything you can't identify as edible is important in the suburbs too.
I don't disagree, but I'd say there's not really a big problem with people or kids trying to eat flowers. Foxglove and solomon's seal are dangerous but they also don't grow where I'm at. Lilies and morning glory do grow here, and they are also not terribly dangerous to humans (without eating a lot of them.)
Where I'm at, particularly in the suburbs, there's a distinct lack of things that are tempting to eat (like a berry) and also poisonous.
The berries (but not the seeds!) are apparently edible, and I have myself eaten one without noticing any ill effect. IIRC it was indeed the berries that were used in the Agatha Christie novel, so apparently a mistake.
