4/8/2005: Avoid the chili, part 2
Remember back on March 25 when a Las Vegas woman eating some chili at a San Jose, CA Wendy's bit into a human finger? Yea, of course you do. Not the kind of thing easily forgotten. Bleah.
Now the grisly find is being investigated from a criminal standpoint. And the prime suspect seems to be Anna Ayala, the woman who had the nasty chili. Yesterday officers arrived at her Las Vegas home armed with search warrants. She and her daughter say they were handcuffed with guns pointed at them while their home was ransacked. The daughter, 13, later said maybe she'd had some attitude when the police arrived. But still.
The police investigation is being carried out "with the full cooperation of Wendy's Restaurants". Well, that's hardly surprising. Ayala's sure-to-be-pending lawsuit will likely be for a huge amount, as well it should be.
Apparently authorities think this Vegas mom killed someone, chopped off her finger, cooked it, carried it to California, then calmly dropped it into her Wendy's chili and threw up. And she also would have had to put the rest of the body somewhere else: if a 9-fingered corpse was found at the Ayala household we would have heard about it by now.
Ayala says this is being turned into a witch hunt: "I just heard on the TV news that my son cut off my daughter's finger and I put it in the (chili)! It's just ridiculous." There are also rumors that the finger belonged to her dead aunt, but she says she doesn't have a dead aunt.
Officials say they have lifted a print from the female finger, and that DNA tests are underway. Oddly, they say that chemical analysis is underway "to determine if the finger was preserved or cooked." Huh?? Dr. Martin Fenstersheib, Santa Clara County Health Officer, said back on March 24 "the finger had been cooked at a high enough temperature to kill any viruses, including hepatitis or HIV."
I'm inclined to agree that a witch hunt is indeed going on, likely because they can't figure out whose finger it is/was and how it landed in Wendy's chili. And if the how-and-why is eventually discovered elsewhere, Anna Ayala may have a second lawsuit to file, this time against police who decided force was necessary to search her suburban family home.
Meanwhile, also on Thursday, Wendy's offered a $50,000 reward for information about how the finger found its way into their chili. I'm glad Wendy's founder and kindly adman Dave Thomas didn't live to see all this - he wouldn't have liked it at all.
