Finger mishap has Wendy's customer fuming
By Dan Reed
Mercury News
Finding a finger in a bowl of Wendy's chili is a surprise. Hiring a lawyer after biting into it is not.
Anna Ayala, the 39-year-old Las Vegas woman who had the culinary misfortune of chomping on the tip of a human finger at a San Jose Wendy's on Tuesday evening, told her newly retained lawyer she's still nauseous, off her feed and sleepless.
And she wants Wendy's to make it right.
``All I can say is she has suffered tremendously,'' Jeffrey Janoff, a San Jose attorney, said Friday. ``People are making jokes about this, but this is a really serious thing. How many people have bitten into human flesh? It's revolting.''
Revolting? Former fans of Wendy's cuisine seem to agree. The chain reports business is off sharply, especially at the Monterey Highway outlet that served the finger-added recipe, but also throughout Northern California, where the story has received intensive media coverage.
``These types of sales drops you don't recover from quickly,'' Wendy's spokesman Denny Lynch said Friday. He declined to provide specifics.
Meanwhile, the hunt for the former owner of the finger -- that would be a person missing about an inch and a half of a digit -- continues. Capt. Bob Dixon of the Santa Clara County coroner's office said Friday the crime lab has completed the first part of attempting to lift a usable fingerprint from it.
The idea, he said, is to run the print through a database and try to match it to its owner.
Then, one would imagine, there would be many, many questions. Such as, did you know we had your finger? Why was Wendy's serving your finger in its chili? Do you want your finger back?
Dixon also said that so far it's impossible to tell whether the finger was cooked along with the main batch of chili or somehow dropped into the serving cup afterward. The lab is going to try to determine if there's some kind of test to figure that out.
No one is suggesting it was a con, such as the old scams like putting a bug in food or a mouse in a soda bottle to try to get money.
For Ayala's part, she was repulsed by the suggestion that anyone would intentionally put the finger in the chili to try to scam the fast-food chain.
``That is very sick, sick, sick,'' she said. "It's disgusting. You're playing with the human race.''
She still flinches at the memory of the cannibalistic mishap, which occurred when she was at the Monterey Highway eatery preparing to drop off her in-laws after a trip to Mexico.
``It's a taste I have never tasted in my whole life,'' she said.
While the county continues to track the ingredients Wendy's used in its chili to find the source of the finger, the fast-food outfit's representatives said they believe it didn't come from them.
``We contacted each one of our suppliers that provide ingredients for chili, and each one of them told us they have had no employee accidents involving the fingers or hand,'' said Denny Lynch.
By Dan Reed
Mercury News
Finding a finger in a bowl of Wendy's chili is a surprise. Hiring a lawyer after biting into it is not.
Anna Ayala, the 39-year-old Las Vegas woman who had the culinary misfortune of chomping on the tip of a human finger at a San Jose Wendy's on Tuesday evening, told her newly retained lawyer she's still nauseous, off her feed and sleepless.
And she wants Wendy's to make it right.
``All I can say is she has suffered tremendously,'' Jeffrey Janoff, a San Jose attorney, said Friday. ``People are making jokes about this, but this is a really serious thing. How many people have bitten into human flesh? It's revolting.''
Revolting? Former fans of Wendy's cuisine seem to agree. The chain reports business is off sharply, especially at the Monterey Highway outlet that served the finger-added recipe, but also throughout Northern California, where the story has received intensive media coverage.
``These types of sales drops you don't recover from quickly,'' Wendy's spokesman Denny Lynch said Friday. He declined to provide specifics.
Meanwhile, the hunt for the former owner of the finger -- that would be a person missing about an inch and a half of a digit -- continues. Capt. Bob Dixon of the Santa Clara County coroner's office said Friday the crime lab has completed the first part of attempting to lift a usable fingerprint from it.
The idea, he said, is to run the print through a database and try to match it to its owner.
Then, one would imagine, there would be many, many questions. Such as, did you know we had your finger? Why was Wendy's serving your finger in its chili? Do you want your finger back?
Dixon also said that so far it's impossible to tell whether the finger was cooked along with the main batch of chili or somehow dropped into the serving cup afterward. The lab is going to try to determine if there's some kind of test to figure that out.
No one is suggesting it was a con, such as the old scams like putting a bug in food or a mouse in a soda bottle to try to get money.
For Ayala's part, she was repulsed by the suggestion that anyone would intentionally put the finger in the chili to try to scam the fast-food chain.
``That is very sick, sick, sick,'' she said. "It's disgusting. You're playing with the human race.''
She still flinches at the memory of the cannibalistic mishap, which occurred when she was at the Monterey Highway eatery preparing to drop off her in-laws after a trip to Mexico.
``It's a taste I have never tasted in my whole life,'' she said.
While the county continues to track the ingredients Wendy's used in its chili to find the source of the finger, the fast-food outfit's representatives said they believe it didn't come from them.
``We contacted each one of our suppliers that provide ingredients for chili, and each one of them told us they have had no employee accidents involving the fingers or hand,'' said Denny Lynch.
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