Human Finger Found in Wendy's Chili in San Jose

Maria Alicia Gaura, Alan Gathright and Dave Murphy
Friday, March 25, 2005

The mystery of how a human finger found its way into a bowl of fast-food chili has sparked a series of investigations that hope to trace the finger back from a San Jose restaurant to the hand it was detached from.

Santa Clara County sheriff's officials said Thursday that they planned to lift a fingerprint from the mystery digit, in the hope that the owner's prints might be listed on a database.

The far-flung probes began after a diner at a Wendy's restaurant on Monterey Road bit into the 13/8-inch piece of a finger Tuesday evening while eating chili.

Investigators from Santa Clara County's Department of Environmental Health are tracing the meat, sauce, beans, spices and frozen vegetables used in the tainted chili back to their producers in hopes of linking the finger to an industrial accident.

"We probably are going to go back as far as the grower of the beans," said Ben Gale, the environmental health director, even as a restaurant spokesman expressed confidence that the digit had not originated in the food supply process.

County health officials have said that, although repulsive, the finger fragment was well-cooked and unlikely to cause health problems more serious than emotional trauma.

One fingerprint expert said it will take only seconds for investigators to identify the owner of the lost finger if the individual is among the millions of criminals, immigrants, school and bank employees, and other licensed professionals whose prints are on file in searchable federal, state and local databases.

"If you have an unknown print, you can search the database and boom! Out it pops,'' said Kenneth Moses, a former San Francisco police crime scene investigations supervisor who does forensic identification consulting.

Failing that, investigators will probably face weeks of tracing delivery invoices and lot numbers on all the ingredients that Wendy's puts in its chili.

The chili served at Wendy's includes canned chili base sauce, chili seasoning mix, cans of pre-cooked beans, chopped frozen celery, onions and green peppers, and ground hamburger meat. The chili is assembled and cooked on site for four to six hours before being served, Gale said.

"The finger had the potential of coming in on a number of those products," Gale said.

Wendy's spokesman Denny Lynch said the company checked out all the employees who worked at the San Jose restaurant two days ago. He would not name the company's suppliers of such products as tomatoes, beans and meat, but said Wendy's has checked with all that could have provided food to the restaurant.

"None of them had any hand or finger injuries," Lynch said. "We are confident that the supply chain did not produce the source."

Companies are required to immediately report industrial accidents involving a fatality or more than two injuries to the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration. But although businesses are supposed to keep on-site records of all other industrial injuries or illnesses for OSHA to review, firms do flout the regulation.

"Record-keeping violations are common,'' said an OSHA spokesman, adding that firms can be fined from $100 for each "serious" health and safety violation up to $70,000 for each "willful" violation.

Employee dismemberment isn't rare, either.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that 1,702 food industry workers lost limbs or other body parts in 2002, according to the most recent annual business survey.

Some 13 California food service firms have had at least three incidents where workers lost fingers between 1987 and early 2004, according to OSHA records. One Los Angeles meat processor, Clougherty Packing Co., had 15 cases of lost digits during that time.

Given gaps in the reporting system and the lack of a central database for all industrial accidents, experts say even serious injuries can fall through the cracks.

"It would not be shocking to me that at the end, after all this effort, we end up with our pockets turned inside out," Gale said. "We could end up with nothing."

Lynch said that all the information Wendy's has gathered is being turned over to the investigating agencies and that he is waiting for a more in-depth medical examination of the finger.

"They'll be able to tell if it was a cadaver, for example," Lynch said.

Moses, the former police crime scene supervisor, said that the mysterious chili finger could have been planted by a disgruntled employee or prankster who obtained the digit from a medical school cadaver or mortuary employee.

"It's not that hard to get anatomical parts,'' Moses said.

Lynch said that all the foods involved, with the possible exception of a few spices, were manufactured in the United States.

A spokeswoman with the state Department of Health Services said her agency's food and drug branch will be tracking where the ingredients came from, working with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration because some of the food came from other states.

The answers more than likely will not come quickly, Gale said. "It's probably going to be measured in weeks. It's a grunt work kind of process."