She is called the “Lufkin Licker” and could face both state and federal charges. The woman posted a video of herself opening a container of Blue Bell ice cream at a Walmart store and licked the top . . . then put the top back on and returned the ice cream. according to Fort Worth’s KTXA-TV. the disgusting act led police to scour stores for security tapes and they have now zeroed in on this woman from a security tape in Lufkin, Texas.The company had to remove all of the containers of its Tin Roof-flavor ice cream as a precaution. As a result, the costs of this crime are considerable.
I cannot imagine what would possess someone to do such a disgusting act and take joy from the thought of a stranger eating from the tampered container. Not only did she find this obviously funny but wanted others to see her do it.
Police are promising charges against the woman. This could be charged as either a state or federal offense. Under federal law, it is a crime to tamper with food products. 18 U.S. 1365 states in part:
“(a)Whoever, with reckless disregard for the risk that another person will be placed in danger of death or bodily injury and under circumstances manifesting extreme indifference to such risk, tampers with any consumer product that affects interstate or foreign commerce, or the labeling of, or container for, any such product, or attempts to do so, shall—
What is interesting is that the Texas law stipulates that the tampering must be capable of causing probable serious bodily injury. That seems curiously narrow since this woman could claim that her saliva does not threaten or contain dangerous pathogens or disease. Moreover, tampering may simply be intended to deter sales by committing disgusting acts without a threat of serious bodily injury. Here is the pertinent language:
(a) In this section:
(1) “Consumer Product” means any product offered for sale to or for consumption by the public and includes “food” and “drugs” as those terms are defined in Section 431.002, Health and Safety Code .
(2) “Tamper” means to alter or add a foreign substance to a consumer product to make it probable that the consumer product will cause serious bodily injury.
(b) A person commits an offense if he knowingly or intentionally tampers with a consumer product knowing that the consumer product will be offered for sale to the public or as a gift to another.
(c) A person commits an offense if he knowingly or intentionally threatens to tamper with a consumer product with the intent to cause fear, to affect the sale of the consumer product, or to cause bodily injury to any person.
(d) An offense under Subsection (b) is a felony of the second degree unless a person suffers serious bodily injury, in which event it is a felony of the first degree. An offense under Subsection (c) is a felony of the third degree.
The damage caused to this company is not necessary the threat of serious bodily injury but a huge drop in sales and the costs of pulling every container of this ice cream. The company can of course sue the woman but something tells me that she is not going to cover the costs.
What do you think would be an appropriate sentence?
After the video hit the Internet on Friday, Blue Bell began investigating Walmart locations in San Antonio, Houston and eventually Lufkin after social media comments suggested the woman was from the San Antonio area.
The company honed in on the Lufkin location after a Blue Bell division manager said “unique merchandising” found on his store’s display shelves matched the background of the video.
Optimus Primal@BlindDensetsu
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“Our biggest concern is consumer safety – in that regard we are glad to see the tainted product off the shelves,” Gerald Williamson, Lufkin’s director of public safety, said on the town’s Police & Fire Facebook page.
Blue Bell reps said the company’s ice cream is packaged upside down in a way that freezes the ice cream to the roof of the container on purpose so that any tampering can be easily spotted by the consumer, according to Dallas–Fort Worth’s FOX 4.
The ice cream manufacturer has faced contamination issues in the past. In 2015, Blue Bell halted production after 10 people were hospitalized across four states from eating ice cream infecting with listeria, CBS News reported. The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced that three people in Kansas died that year from eating the bacteria-tainted ice cream and warned the public against consuming Blue Bell products.
Lufkin, a city of about 36,000 residents, is about 120 miles northeast of Houston.
Blue Bell is nasty ice cream anyways. Always buy the stuff with a seal on it.
This isn’t about race. This is about an irresponsible youth getting their fifteen minutes of fame in a very bad way (if any infection she carried was communicable through spit). She should spend the rest of her adolescence in a place where she can’t contaminate anyone else’s ice cream.
Crazy and disgusting behavior, I agree.
Psychopathic, perhaps.
But is it any more crazy, disgusting, and psychopathic than a nation where something like a third of the voting populace are organized into something called a Republican Party, which doesn’t care whether people are hungry, homeless or get medical care? And opposes most governmental regulation of pollution, and food safety? Cuz it might impinge on their free-dumb? “The Licker” isn’t half as crazy as that.
Interesting that “The Licker” could get 10 or 20 years in prison for a potentially-harmful contamination — while it seems that neither Blue Bell (“corporations are people”, says SCOTUS) nor any of its employees got any significant legal punishment for their 2015 actually-harmful contaminations of their ice cream by listeria during product manufacture, which actually killed three people, and sickened many more.
Just because this woman’s action in 2019 was deliberate and the 2015 manufacturing contamination probably negligence doesn’t excuse the earlier one. In fact, the concept of “negligence” is too often used as rationale to give relatively-minor penalties for actions that actually deserve serious prosecution and punishment because occurrence of serious harm would, consequentially and predictably, be a likely result within foreseable time, even if specific time and place would not be predictable.
If I’m made ill or killed by some corporation’s actions, it’s immaterial whether the actions were deliberate or negligent. I’ll be just as sick or as dead, either way. Whatever happened to the concept of “responsibility” long argued-for by Republicans? Or is that just supposed to apply to individual poor people, not to the rich or the corporations or the nation as an entity?
You say
which is in fact not the law of the US or very many other democracies. You want the ;lex talionis against people you just don’t like, regardless of malice or motive, and the law suspended entirely for others.
Thank God we don’t live in the country you wish we did.
@loupgarous:
The concept of diminished legal responsibility when the harm was not actually deliberate probably started with the best of compassionate intentions and forgiveness — cases involving children, or those with a mental defect, or where causation involved a complex chain of events very difficult for a normal adult to foresee. We may well want to retain that.
But as with many loopholes, it has been exploited. Since it rewards the irresponsible, it has been exploited by both individuals and corporations who should have acted with responsibility, and were capable of doing so, but didn’t.
So from entirely-normal adults we get little concern for thinking-through consequences and acting responsibly. Worse yet, we get criminal gangs sending children to commit murders. And corporations with adequate funds to well-compensate their CEO and/or distribute profits (and therefore well-able to employ the necessary talent) but somehow not able to foresee issues and risks plain to any competent microbiologist, or chemist, or geologist, or civil engineer, or securities analyst (as the case may be), and not taking action to eliminate those risks. Socialize the risk, privatize the profits! And heap blame on welfare mothers for being “irresponsible”, but seldom charge the rich or the corporations with that.
Did she have a licker license?
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/blue-bell-licker-lufkin-texas-police-identify-juvenile-who-licked-ice-cream-tub-in-viral-video-2019-07-05/
She has been identified, and is a juvenile. Based upon the photos, she’s probably 16 or 17. And yet, she was so poorly raised as to have done this.
Wait.
That looks like NUTCHACHA!
Always in search of “free stuff” with a little “reparations” hatnin’ on da side.
___________________________________________________________
“Affirmative Action Privilege” and “Generational Welfare” trump merit every time!”
– Nutchacha
I’m thinkin’ the punishment-that-fits-the-crime would be the required licking of a frozen aluminum ice tray – one for each violated Blue Bell Ice Cream container.
When this woman is tried and found guilty, she should be sentence to 15 years of cleaning bed pans in a veterans hospital. She might learn some respect for others.
“That seems curiously narrow since this woman could claim that her saliva does not threaten or contain dangerous pathogens or disease.” Of course it does. She could have anything from Herpes to Epstein Barr.
If they run an assay on her bodily fluids, she’ll have something.
This was an assault. If she had herpes, then she could have infected children.
All ice cream and other non-produce or raw meat should have a tamper resistant seal on it for this very reason. Sadly, the maniacs out there require that consumers pay a higher price for this tamper resistant packaging.
“Blue Bell reps said the company’s ice cream is packaged upside down in a way that freezes the ice cream to the roof of the container on purpose so that any tampering can be easily spotted by the consumer, according to Dallas–Fort Worth’s FOX 4.” Insufficient. I’m not going to be responsible for getting out a magnifying glass and trying to ascertain if anyone contaminated ice cream with saliva or powder.
The sentence should be commiserate with any kind of assault where bodily fluids were deliberately given to a child, including jail time.
This isn’t a prank. She could have given children herpes or mono.
Upon release from prison, she should be forced to work for the ice cream company, cleaning their toilets, or some other sort of manual labor where she does not come into contact with food.
As a parent, I believe such assaults upon children need to be prosecuted to the furthest extent of the law.
That sort of thing was and probably still is common at Jack in The Crack.
He also spit on his wife and family. It was something the divorce attorney understood.
Texas has all manner of problems. First they find out they can’t secede or divide anymore because of a small error made during the Civil War. But Beto Boy has figured away around that and now Texas is set to divide into North and South but use different names.
One remains Texas and the other Tejas. But they can’t decide which one gets stuck with the present capitol and which one has to pay to build a new capitol. Now they get stuck with a Licker problem and decided to use it as a way around the other dilemma. Whichever person did the deed the home of that person would decide who got to pay to build the new capitol. Depending on address.
Two weeks later Caifornia got the bill and a little frosting Beto was introduced as their new Senator.
That’s the humor part but do you know WHY Texas can no longer secede or divide unilaterally???
The original treaty USA and Lone Star Republic did stipulate those two conditions. Texas used it’s secession privilege to do exactlhy that.
But then joined the CSA and sent troops to invade USA.
So all the other seceding States were treated as rebels in violation of the Constitution and and Texas was treated as a conquered acquisition. More to the story including time to get status in Congress again but the good part was
Beto is still trying to convince California he’s their new Senator.
So? Was It Arianna Grande?
Attention seeking behavior has been reinforced since Al Gore gave us the internet, social media and anonymous forums
We deal with such behavior daily in our historic neighborhood sadly located less than 1 mile from housing projects. They drive to our nice areas to blast us with their ghetto music in their thug cars…they get no attention at home so it follows…go where others will pay attention to you
Al Gore also invented the question mark.
Al Gore’s abysmal relationship with Bill Clinton is the best example of hypocrisy of the left: they expect others to swallow their bullchips when they cant even demonstrate filial relationships amongst themselves… like Obama and Hillary
Al Gore represents entitled hypocrisy at its finest. While making millions off of the Global Warming industry, he has one of the highest carbon footprints of any individual on Earth. His mansion in Tennessee is an energy hog, using 21.4 times the energy of an average home. His solar panels produce a mere fraction of that. (https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/aug/2/al-gores-nashville-estate-expends-21-times-more-en/) When shamed by this reporting, he later updated his home to be a LEED certified, relative energy hog.
While making a fortune claiming that Global Warming would wipe out entire cities along the shoreline, imminently, he bought ocean front property in Montecito. He’s at least added a few solar panels to it. (https://www.worldpropertyjournal.com/featured-columnists/celebrity-homes-column-al-gore-tipper-gore-oprah-winfrey-michael-douglas-christopher-lloyd-fred-couples-nicolas-cage-peter-reckell-kelly-moneymaker-2525.php)
An “inconvenient truth”, indeed.
she looks like an illegal immigrant with a ring in her nose. possibly indian from asia or perhaps a central american border jumper who escaped from a cage? or is that my implicit bias revealing itself? ah who cares
Just wanted to taste it to see if she liked it ??!
Congrats to her. She’s got her 15 minutes of infamy. No sane employer in any customer facing service industry will employ her.
After the Tylenol incident several decades ago, I thought products like ice cream were required by Congress to be merchandised in tamper proof packaging. I guess if tamper proof packaging was a voluntary measure taken by some ice cream vendors seeking to give themselves a competitive advantage by demonstrating to consumers they take product safety seriously, it will soon likely become mandated by Congress.
BTW, nice gratuitous dig at Blue Bell in describing a single contamination incident several years ago as “contamination issues” – which has absolutely nothing at all to do with a lunatic getting a perverse thrill out of posing for a video in which she licks ice cream and puts it back on the shelf. Well played.
Once he (Jesse Jackson) told of his days as a waiter at the Jack Tar Hotel in his home town of Greenville, S.C. Just before leaving the kitchen he would spit into the food of white patrons he hated and then smilingly serve it to them. He did this, he said, “because it gave me psychological gratification.” It was something everybody in the audience understood.
hempff,
There have been cases where LEOs food has been tampered with by servers who don’t like cops, or target other customers for the heck of it.
Beyond the “normal” sloppiness or unsanitary of some restaurants, those intentionally tampering with food should face stiff sentences as a deterrent to others tempted to do the same.
Re the Jesse Jackson/ spitting in food incidents, Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver admitted raping white women as “a revolutionary act”.
Neither Jackson’s nor Cleaver’s actions would be especially helpful for race relations, but they weren’t really about building better race relations.