the story is pretty disgusting..Gross. but i will continue to eat at Wendy's. I might not have the chili anymore, but i'm a sucker for their fries, frosti, and Jr bacon cheeseburgers. Yum! I'll just check my food first before i eat!!
FYI: Snopes.com has an update on the finger-in-the-chili incident. Apparently, police searched the home of the woman who "found" the finger, which indicates that they suspect she might have planted it and there are rumors that the finger is from her dead aunt.
Which is a more sickening idea though... some sort of accident causing the finger to get in the chili, or somehow obtaining a finger and planting it in the chili to make money?
I'm hoping that there will be some resolution to this and that Wendy's will be cleared because it seems to me that they'd have been able to track down the owner of that finger if it were an employee or if it came from somewhere they put the ingredients together. And if she DID plant it, I hope she sincerely pays for it.
Even if it turns out that it is crystal clear that she did plant the finger and Wendy's is completely innocent, the damage has already been done. Some people have formed a Wendy's = Fingered Chili connection in their head, and will avoid the place even though Wendy's is just a victim of a scam artist with unusually low morals even for one of that ilk.
Yes, it's been pretty clear from the outset that there was something fishy about this, since no one in the chain of food preparation had been injured. Yet, even right here on this board, people were lambasting Wendy's and talking about how evil and disgusting they were for "allowing" this to happen. Wendy's business has taken a serious hit because of this. That's a shame, because it's one fast food restaurant that has ALWAYS had fresher food than the others (the meat's not frozen, the chicken is real whole chicken breast and not "chicken parts" etc.), AND they've led the way in offering healthy choices.
Since I live in the area, we've been hearing a LOT about it...
This is actually becoming a rather amusing story (yeah I know...GROSS!) because as the facts come out about this woman's past history, she's having a very, very difficult time keeping her trap shut. She's talked to the San Francisco Chronicle and KGO Channel 7 News - apparently against her attorney's advice.
Anna Ayala, 39, an unemployed janitorial service operator, has drawn the scrutiny of police in the mysterious finger case. San Jose and local police searched her Las Vegas home from top to bottom Wednesday and left with the daughter's red plastic lunch box that doubled as her makeup kit, along with a Wal-Mart shopping bag, according to the Ayala family.
San Jose police won't discuss details of the probe, saying it could compromise the investigation. Police say they're questioning anyone who can shed light on how the 1 1/2-inch fingertip found its way into Ayala's chili at Wendy's, where she was dining with relatives March 22.
"We're just trying to do a thorough investigation and find out what the truth is," said San Jose police Lt. Stan Faulwetter, head of the financial crimes unit.
But Ayala accuses police of conducting a bizarre witch hunt against her family. She said officers burst into her home with guns drawn during the raid, injuring her 13-year-old daughter's shoulder as they forced people to the ground...
Ayala, who said her sister in San Jose has received death threats over the notorious case, considers the treatment by police to be worse than the original Wendy's incident. "That was just the wrong place at the wrong time, but now I have to deal with this torture," she said. "I have been victimized twice."
Ayala denies media rumors that the finger came from a dead aunt, saying that all of her aunts are alive.
Ayala said what happened Wednesday convinced her that she should sue Wendy's. "I'm really going to fight this now because they hurt my baby," Ayala said, referring to her daughter.
Ayala, who has hired an attorney to explore legal action against Wendy's, is no stranger to legal fights, including ones against restaurants.
When the woman's daughter, Genesis Reyes, contracted salmonella poisoning in 2003 after eating at a Las Vegas El Pollo Loco, the family successfully demanded that the restaurant pay for $30,000 in medical bills she racked up during a three-day hospitalization, said Bono and the woman's son, Guadalupe Reyes. An El Pollo Loco official could not confirm the incident late Friday.
In 2000, she sued a San Jose car dealership and Goodyear Tire Corp., saying she was severely injured after a front tire fell off her GMC Sierra sport utility vehicle as she drove on Interstate 880 in San Jose in 1999. She also sued General Motors Corp.
A judge later dismissed the case, but not before Ayala repeatedly changed attorneys. One of her lawyers accused her of threatening him, even though he'd won her a settlement in a prior lawsuit.
"Despite this, you stated that you were going to get me -- whatever that means,'' San Francisco attorney Ira Freydkis wrote Ayala in January 2001. Freydkis suggested he withdraw as her counsel, because she had stated she was "unhappy" with his work, according to the letter filed in court documents.
In 1999, Ayala filed a sexual harassment lawsuit against La Oferta Review, a San Jose Spanish-language newspaper, claiming a man who worked there exposed himself to her the first day she began work as a bilingual receptionist. The newspaper claimed the man, Juan Carlos Brown, was just a tenant in its building, but Ayala reached an out-of-court settlement in 2002.
Ayala and her loved ones reject claims that she concocted the chili-finger incident to bring a lawsuit against Wendy's.
The Texas native, who lived in San Jose for more than a decade, said she's made a good living working at several janitorial firms and ran her own in the South Bay. She moved three years ago to Las Vegas, where she lives with her two children.
Although Ayala has been out of work for a year because of a foot injury, she said she is financially sound and recently refinanced her two-story, four-bedroom home on the southeast outskirts of Las Vegas, which she said is worth $500,000.
Guadalupe Reyes, 18, said his mom is well-off and is not motivated by greed.
"What people are trying to say is that she's a con artist. But that's not true,'' he said. "If she's about lawsuits, why would she pay $20,000 cash for this truck?'' he added, pointing to a new Dodge pickup. "My mom's wealthy.''
Asked about reports that she's litigious, Ayala said: "All these people are saying stuff, but they don't know anything about me. The truth will come out.'' Then she added that her attorney has told her to stop talking to the news media.
IMO she was trying to pull off the old classic restaurant scam - you know the same kind where the diners would bring a couple of live cockroaches in with them and tuck them in the salad, or the classic mouse in the Coke bottle - but I guess she figured that a finger would get her more $$$'s...but it doesn't look like she thought this all the way through - media attention on this type of thing is almost inevitable...I'd guess that the media and law enforcement did a search in the public court records to dig up her litigatious past.
(I must say I got a chuckle out of her son's reasoning that his mom was "wealthy" due to her owning a $20,000 truck... )
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