Prison Inmate Sues After Finding Fingertip In Meal

[matcom]

<snip>

A Florida food packager that lists "convenience at your fingertips" as one of its top qualities has been sued by a California prison inmate who says that he bit into a real human fingertip when he consumed one of the company's vegetarian meals.

The company, G.A. Food Services, said in a letter to Pelican Bay State Prison that the 3/4-inch fingertip accidentally had been sliced off the right middle finger of one of its workers when the employee was cleaning a filling machine on the frozen entree assembly line on July 14, 2004.

In his lawsuit, prisoner Felipe Rocha distinguishes his case from a seemingly similar one.

"Unlike the recently exposed fraud against Wendy's, the fact of the chunk of human finger in plaintiff's meal is indisputable, since Mr. Rocha is a prisoner ... (and) the prepared meal was served to him in its original packaging in an isolation cell."

That statement refers to a Las Vegas couple who were arrested after the woman allegedly planted a piece of human finger in a bowl of chili at a San Jose Wendy's restaurant in March and claimed that she had found it there.

"This man is in isolation, and he has all his own digits," Mark Merin, Rocha's Sacramento-based attorney, said in an interview.

At the time of the accident at the Florida plant, a department manager mistakenly thought all flesh had been flushed from the machine, the letter said. When workers couldn't find the fingertip, they assumed it had been washed down the drain.

In the March 29 letter, included in the lawsuit, quality assurance director Frank Curto apologized for the "foreign object that was found in one of our frozen entrees" and "any inconveniences that were incurred as a result of this incident."

The apology apparently wasn't good enough for Rocha, 29, of Los Angeles, incarcerated at the maximum security prison on drug, weapon and assault charges. Merin filed the suit Wednesday in federal court in San Francisco.

He is asking for at least $75,000 in damages from the St. Petersburg packager. In addition, Merin said, he wants the prison to stop buying food from G.A. Food Services because it is a non-union shop in a right-to-work state, and he questions its sanitary standards.

John Hale, chief operating officer for G.A. Food Services, said in an interview that his company had never before experienced such a problem.

"We're not denying there was an accident," he said. "But I think as far as the magnitude of whatever the matter was that was found -- that is much in question."

The entree at issue was served March 20 and supposed to be a "special vegetarian, soft diet meal," for Rocha, who practices Buddhism in prison and has dental problems, Merin said. "That was what was unusual to him. As he was eating the cornbread, he chomped into something that appeared to be a cashew nut, tried to chew it, then took it out of his mouth."

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/07/23/BAGCTDSA901.DTL

[bicentennial_baby]

1. 'he has all his own digits'

:rofl:

[GOPisEvil]

2. Meat?! In a vegetarian dish?!!

:o