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A New York woman claims she found a human fingertip in her chicken wrap and has filed a lawsuit against the restaurant that sold it to her. Mary Elizabeth Smith, 43, alleges that she found the fingertip in a chicken wrap she ordered “to go” from Create Astoria in Nov. 2023.
Smith, a realtor who lives in Chelsea, filed the lawsuit in Manhattan Supreme Court is suing Create Astoria, a Mediterranean restaurant in Queens, alleging that its owner, Ditmars Bake LLC, “should have known that its product was dangerous to members of the general public.”
“She ordered a chicken wrap, and when she bit into it, there was a piece of a finger there. Luckily, she didn’t swallow it. But it still traumatized her,” her lawyer Robert Menna told People.
Smith says she had to undergo intense antiretroviral therapy, the treatment for HIV, as a result of the fingertip being in her mouth. She also says it took “really long time to work up the courage to eat chicken again” after the alleged incident.
Teddy Karagiannis, the owner of Create Astoria, called the lawsuit “completely fraudulent” and says he plans to file a countersuit for slander. “It’s just ludicrous,” he said.
This sort of thing has happened before
In 2005, a woman named Anna Ayala visited a Wendy’s in California and claimed that she had bitten into a fingertip that was in her order of chili. She too filed a lawsuit.
“I started eating… then suddenly I eat something hard. Kind of crunchy and spit it out. At first I wasn’t sure what it was. Then we started poking it – other people too – that’s when we found it was something that looks like a nail,” >Ayala claimed.
It turned out that after a forensic investigation, police raided her home and learned that her husband had bought the fingertip for $100 from a colleague who had suffered an industrial accident. He then gave it to Anna who cooked it and took it to Wendy’s.
Wendy’s claimed, according to the Mirror, that the incident cost the company $21 million in revenue and resulted in dozens of employees at its Northern California restaurants being laid off.
Anna Ayala was eventually sentenced to nine years in prison while her husband received a 12-year sentence. Anna was let out of prison five years early for good behavior, but found herself in trouble with the law again in 2013 for filing a false police report claiming that her son had been shot by two unknown people. She received another two-year prison sentence as a result.